PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Real Enemies of Democracy

kudugana@yahoo.com

After what the authorities did last Monday to thwart the much publicized mass rally against President Obasanjo’s government for massively rigging the last general elections and for dashing peoples’ expectations about the dividends of democracy which the president himself raised five years ago, anyone who had entertained any illusions about the president’s commitment to democracy, must have had those illusions shattered.

Actually there was no excuse for entertaining those illusions, to begin with. The president, as his late Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Bola Ige, once said, was a knee-jerk dictator. As Nigerians have painfully experienced, the president has, in his five years as president, done more than enough to prove Ige right. What happened last Monday was only one more episode that showed the leopard will never really change its spots.

So what happen last Monday? For weeks the opposition parties, led by Alhaji Balarabe Musa, the chairman of the Peoples Redemption Party and scourge of the Establishment, had signaled their intention to organise mass rallies across the country in protest against what they saw as the worst rigging in the history of the country’s elections during last year’s general elections. They also said they were protesting the worst misrule the country has suffered since independence, something which has resulted in the highest level of insecurity, poverty and unemployment in the country so far.

As soon as the opposition parties declared their intention to organise the mass rally, the authorities bared their fangs. First, Mrs. Remi Oyo, the spokesperson for the president, declared the mass rally “enemy action”, or words to that effect. Second, the Inspector-General of Police, Alhaji Tafa Balogun, ever loyal to his boss, declared the rally as illegal. The police, he said, would never give permit for such a rally.

A little after that, one of his subordinates, the Commissioner of Police for the Federal Capital Territory, Mr. Emmanuel Adebayo, underlined the IGP’s objection to the rally. “There is no way” he reportedly told the News Agency of Nigeria, “I can guarantee the security of two million people, in addition to the population of the FCT. I have so many things to do with my men” (see Daily Trust, April 29, 2004). The Public Order Act, he reminded the parties, forbade rallies without police permits and anyone who broke the law would be doing so at his own peril.

Well, retorted the opposition leadership, we are supposed to be running a democracy and, police permit or not, we will go on with our mass rally. And so they tried to get people out in their large numbers in Abuja last Monday, but they more than met their match in the police who, first of all, sealed Eagle Square, Abuja, as the main venue of the rally, and then, reminiscent of the fascism of the Abacha era, surrounded Agura Hotel from where the opposition leadership, including Alhaji Balarabe, Major-General Muhammad Buhari, the presidential candidate of ANPP and Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, the leader of APGA, had intended to start off the mass rally.

One has hard of house detention before, but not even during the nadir of Abacha’s fascism did any one imagine that Nigerians would one day hear of hotel detention. But, to repeat what I’ve just said, this was precisely what happened to the opposition leadership at Agura Hotel,  in Abuja on Monday. And as if all this was not enough, when the police eventually let them out, they teared gassed them as they and their supporters gathered round out of the major roundabouts in Abuja, to begin their procession.

However, incredible as this may seem, it is altogether not surprising. The reader, will, I am sure, recall that only last month a serving governor, Chief Bola Tinubu of Lagos State with two of his former colleagues, Chief Niyi Adebayo and Chief Segun Osoba, former governors of Ekiti and Ogun states respectively, were put under house arrest at the residence of General Adebayo, Niyi’s father, by heavily armed soldiers and mobile police, for no better reason than the ridiculous allegation that Tinubu and Company had imported well-armed thugs to rig local government elections and disrupt the peace in Ekiti State. The authorities in Abuja apparently made no attempt to investigate these allegations before they deployed the soldiers and the police to intimidate and humiliate these prominent Nigerians.

Since Abuja could keep governors under house arrest with impunity, it is hardly surprising that they would do worse to the hapless and defenceless opposition leadership.

Clearly what we are dealing with here, to quote Paul Krugman, a leading economic columnist in the New York Times (NYT) whose latest book, The Great Unravelling, I have been reading lately, is “world-class mendacity.” In a preface to his book which is about how President George Bush lied his way into power and is lying his way through it at great cost to the ordinary American and the rest of the world, Krugman described his book as not a happy one. It is, he said, “mainly about economic disappointment, bad leadership and the lies of the powerful.” Krugman might just as well have been talking about Nigeria.

Just as the columnist wondered whether Bush and his gang believe that legitimacy flows from the democratic process, one can also express the same skepticism about our president’s commitment to democracy. Bush, Krugman quotes one of Bush’s friend as saying, believes that he was called by God to lead the nation. “Perhaps,” says Krugman, “this explains why the disputed election of 2000 didn’t seem to inspire any caution or humility on the part of the victors.”

What Krugman says of Bush seems only too true of our own president. Obasanjo unlike Bush, may not have originally lied his way into power, but he too like Bush believes he was called by God to rule. Hence the total lack of caution and humility in a president who seem totally blind to the near universal condemnation of the last general elections, as a big sham. Thus we now have a president who in his victory speech last year told the world that “the reports of observers, both domestic and international, are unanimous that this year’s election has been substantially devoid of rigging!” Talk about the ostrich burying its head in the sand!

As a government which has behaved with so much mendacity and impunity, it is hardly surprising that it has been living in fear of its own shadow. Obviously this is why it is afraid to allow any serious expression of freedom of action. The fact is that all its talk about law and order is a ruse. Otherwise how come the same police which says it cannot guarantee the security and safety of people at the Abuja mass rally, guaranteed the security and safety of the massive rally the OPC held in Lagos in support of President Obasanjo at the height of the impeachment threat against him last year? If the police would allow OPC, which the president himself had declared an illegal and criminal outfit and which the Americans that the president is so much beholden to, have described as a terrorist group, to hold a rally, why is it wrong and illegal for respectable people, including a former Head of State, to do the same?

However, if this government appears to get away with all its mendacity and impunity, the rest of us are partly to blame. On Tuesday morning I listened to presidential spokesperson, Mrs. Remi Oyo, on the BBC trying to defend the indefensible police heavy-handed suppression of the Monday mass rally. Oyo is normally a very articulate person. Anyone listening to her last Tuesday could see that she was totally out of her elements trying to do her job.

However, she needed not to have bothered, for the simple reason that long before she spoke to the BBC, the opposition leadership seemed to have split on the need for the mass rally. For example Chief Gani Fawehinmi had said his National Conscience Party was opting out of the rally, because his party was not allowed to make an imput into its organisation and also because the ANPP and AD, as the two leading opposition parties were no different from the rating party in rigging the last local government elections in states where they were in power. Fawehinmi may be right about the character of ANPP and AD, but surely he knew this all the time that he was in an alliance with them in opposition to the ruling party.

If Fawehinmi’s change of heart had some merit, the same can hardly be said of the governor of Sokoto, Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa’s opposition to the rally. In a paid advert in some of the national papers including Thisday of May 1, the governor said he was opposed to the rally because (1) our democracy is too fragile to withstand mass action (“This could be possible in a more mature democracies but not the toddler type that we have in Nigeria”), and (2) Obasanjo “is gradually shedding the dictatorial toga.”

Instead of a mass rally, said Bafarawa in effect, the opposition should be content with being arm-chair critic of the administration. “We should sit on a round table and assess the performance of the Obasanjo-led administration in concrete and tangible terms and to map out strategies as to how best our assessment could reach the Federal Government for immediate corrections.”

A more submissive option than this is hard to imagine. Punditocracy, as some of us have been engaged in all our lives, has its uses, but not even the most influential pundit can argue, as Bafarawa has done, that words speak louder than deeds. As for the argument that a democracy has to mature before it should allow for expression of mass opposition, that was the kind of patronizing argument colonialists made about the maturity of their subjects for self-determination. And when Bafarawa says our president is finally shedding his dictatorial toga, perhaps he never heard of the president’s decision to stop the statutory allocations to the states that have created new local governments, including his own. Perhaps the governor hasn’t heard of the new bill the president has sent to the National Assembly seeking the power to withhold the statutory allocation to any local government which has not accounted for its previous allocation to the satisfaction of the Accountant General of the Federation who is a presidential appointee.

No, there was really no credible reason for the forceful stoppage of last Monday’s mass rally as an expression of the thorough disenchantment of the people with a government that has shown scant respect for the people’s views and has done a lot to deepen and widen their misery in the last five years. Therefore it is not the organizers of the mass rally that are the enemies of our fragile democracy. Rather it is those in power who are so mendacious and act with so much impunity that they feel threatened even by their own shadows.