2023: That ABN moment

In large part because the 1999 Constitution was crafted by soldiers, the Nigerian president is constitutionally one of the world’s most powerful leaders.  And that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Yet one of the things that President Muhammadu Buhari did shortly after he assumed office in 2015 was to request for more powers.  His economic team, he said, had gauged the mood of the polity and decided that unless certain steps were taken which some of the extant laws would not permit, the recession in which the country had been plunged would last longer than necessary. The proposal was vehemently opposed by civil society partly because of the danger of importing India-style legislative presidency into Nigeria, but more importantly because of Buhari’s history with power. That was in 2016.  Imagine one’s consternation then when only recently, no less a personality than elder statesman, Chief Robert Clarke (SAN), called for the extension of Buhari’s tenure, ostensibly to fight insecurity!

According to the senior lawyer, the months preceding the 2023 elections are not sufficient to put an end to the insecurity ravaging the country, making the conduct of election impossible. His words: “The constitution provides that the president can stay longer than eight years. I’ve always said it. If the situation in which we’re in now continues and it is impossible to vote in the 2023 election, the constitution says if a situation persists, the president will write INEC in view of all insurgencies, in view of kidnappings, in view of Boko Haram: ‘I don’t think in these different areas of Nigeria, we can have a good election.’ ” In this imagined Clarkian scenario, the president would stay put for six months and in the first instance. Clark then added the clincher:  “Now, I don’t see any green light. I don’t see how what is happening today can be stopped within a period of six months from today or before February next year when the elections will be held.”

Of the many interventions following Clarke’s declaration, the one by respected Yoruba leader and man of the news, Chief Yemi Farounbi, stands out in cutting quickly to the chase. Invoking Parkinson’s Law, Farounbi reminds us that with the lorry load of persons applying for Nigeria’s top job, it is either they don’t know what the job means or there is a puppeteer steering them towards a predetermined goal. He says: “The puppeteer has programmed the process to end in a confusion or crisis that will lead to extension of PMB’s regime or installation of an interim regime led by the puppeteer or his nominee. The shadowy puppeteer is there. And the doctrine of necessity will be invoked for filling the vacuum this way. It reminds of 1992. Everyone that visited the incumbent president to inform him of his interest was taken round the Villa, encouraged to contest, and sometimes financially supported in an exercise programmed to fail.”

Anyone may fail to learn from history: what they cannot do is fail to prove its lessons. I agree that without stability or security, Nigeria is going nowhere, although I see no reason to invoke divinity like the learned SAN did.  But words are eggs which cannot be put together once broken, and here’s where the advocate fell short regardless of the purity of his motives. The 1999 Constitution is already doing damage to Nigeria’s psyche: invoking its worst proclivities to truncate democratic expectations is not just impolitic but dangerous. As the Yoruba say, it is precisely because today may not necessarily cohere with tomorrow that a babalawo does his divination every five days. What Clarke’s oracle is offering the nation as a fait accompli is a poisoned chalice, and it’s instructive that even the expected beneficiary of his oracular prognosis has beat a tactical retreat, saying that he will hand over power as the laws of the land demand. The nation must hold him to that promise. Buhari is a separatist par excellence and cannot be trusted with power beyond his constitutional remit. No one should.

It is indeed alarming that a possible Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) moment seized the nation just as Arthur Nzeribe, the brain behind that infamous movement which helped in large part to truncate the June 12, 1993 elections via judicial adventurism, was being committed to mother earth. The nation had elected Basorun MKO Abiola in a free and fair exercise but Nzeribe’s demons would not let him rest. He used the judiciary to do the IBB administration’s bidding and Nigeria lost the opportunity of a life time. Part of the corollaries of that misadventure was the return of bloodthirsty military men to power. The essence of politics, Nzeribe told TELL magazine in those heady days, is the pursuit of power. Nzeribe was not concerned with the fundamental question of what was to be done with that power.  Was this week’s 1993 moment truly a set up for 2023?

All of this actually boils down, willy-nilly, to the Buhari government’s attitude to its immediate predecessor upon assuming office. The nation was told that the Goodluck Jonathan administration did nothing to tackle terrorists, that it frittered away weapon’s money on a deranged ambition.  However, while many of the charges made against that administration were indeed right, it was an act of political rascality not to have recognized the administration’s last minute campaign in the North-East through which it wrestled vast swathes of Nigerian territory from terrorists, enabling elections to take place in states like Zamfara, Yobe and Borno. Correspondents who accompanied the military on its onslaughts in those days, including an ex-US soldier who documented the campaign for posterity, a documentary available on Youtube, gave graphic details of how the Nigerian military retook town after town in those days, propelled by the possibly self-serving late revival of the commander-in-chief close to the election. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the administration must be adjudged guilty as charged on corruption but it definitely procured military weapons.

If the claim that terrorists were not dislodged from the war-torn states was right, then it meant that the election figures churned out by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in respect of those states were concocted, because there is no way Boko Haram would have failed to seize the ample opportunity provided by election crowds to do maximal damage. Giving jack his jacket, even if Jack is jaundiced, is an hallmark of integrity. If Robert Clarke (SAN) is not seeing any silver lining on the counter-terrorism horizon, it is precisely because Buhari has failed to borrow a leaf from his predecessor in the aspect I’ve just itemized. This is, by the way, no endorsement of Goodluck Jonathan’s 2023 ambition, an ambition I consider to be insane, but the truth remains the truth no matter how encumbered by politics.

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