Malam Malami’s mendacity

As is his wont, Malam Abubakar Malami (SAN), Nigeria’s Minister of Justice, berated southern governors this week. An obstructionist par excellence, Malami loathes the very notion of southern governors protecting their people and governing their space in a civilized manner. He took up arms when the governors formed Amotekun to arrest the genocide perpetrated by terrorists masquerading as herders in their domain. He denounced the ban on open grazing, talking down on the governors who are his political superiors. Per Malami, Amotekun was illegal, but the blood-thirsty demons who raped women before their husbands and daughters before their parents were perfectly within their rights! After all, “farmers-herders conflicts” (that is, the genocidal onslaughts on farmers by the chosen tribe) could only be resolved at the negotiation table! By implication, Malami was saying that the devil could be reformed through a lecture. He was still basking in his delusions when Rotimi Akeredolu, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria who is actually a senior advocate and who governs Ondo State, issued a masterpiece exposing his buffoonery. Laws, Akeredolu said, are not made in the AGF’s office, and the law banning open grazing would “be enforced with vigour.” Indeed, how can a Malami and an Akeredolu be SANs in the same country? The difference is so stark as to be criminal!

This time around, Malami’s grouse is that the governors rebuffed the shameful treatment of Lagos State governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, by a middling police officer who loudly proclaimed that it was the AGF and his IGP that sent him and his men on the mission to invade Lagos State and demolish Magodo Estate. Neither Malami nor the officer is a court bailiff, and the Lagos State government, as the lawful authority over the state, was already taking steps to implement, in a measured manner given its ramifications, the Supreme Court judgment that gave Malami the excuse for his present project, but this did not matter to the powers in Abuja: Lagos must be in chaos. Malami, whose government removed a Chief Justice of Nigeria in the most illegal circumstances and holds the national record for defying court orders, is suddenly interested in enforcing a judgment of the Supreme Court!

In his epochal Dunciad, English poet Alexander Pope had little patience for characters who pollute the public space with their utter ignorance: “Furious he dives, precipitately dull/Whirlpools and storms his circling arm invest…/ No crab more active in the dirty dance,/ Downward to climb, and backward to advance.” As Stone Age enthusiasts, these characters cudgel any attempt at modernity, their primitive nature unhidden by suits and ties. After all, as Fela famously informed Nigerians before he died, even animals wear agbada and suits. Among a series of invectives that I choose not to pollute this page with, Malami, speaking through his minion, said: “The Press Release came to us as a surprise. We see it as a vituperation of ulterior motives of some political class who derived pleasure in dragging the name of Malami in the mud to achieve some sinister objectives.”

Ignore the crudity of “vituperation of ulterior motives”. Note “came to us”, the very phrase used by Garba Shehu in his diatribe released after The Punch published an editorial denouncing Buhari’s brutality and after his (Shehu’s) supposed superior, Femi Adesina, had already issued what the nation thought was the presidential reaction to the landmark editorial. The us, in case you missed the point, is the core northern hegemony that desperately wants the South in chaos. Under Malami’s watch, the homes of Supreme Court justices and the National Assembly (leaders) have been invaded time and again by hoodlums, and court orders have been dispensed with at will, yet this bloke has the temerity to deliver a lecture on the rule of law! He is infinitely satisfied with the brazen affront on Governor Sanwo-Olu’s office and person. Every decent Nigerian should feel personally affronted by that dirty incident. When security agents proclaiming his authority commit horrendous crimes, Malami issues statements claiming that he is not aware of the incident. He is never aware of anything.

Before the power-drunk AGF drowns in the sea of federal arrogance let us remind him once again that Southern Nigeria, the very notion of which he hates with pestilential passion, is no conquered territory. As Justice Minister, Malami must rank as the crudest, most arrogant and most mendacious law officer thrust upon Nigerians by the accident of history since 1999. In presentation perverse, in law notoriously analphabetic and in erudition decayed, Malami struts Nigeria’s legal landscape like a Barbarian, a complete embarrassment to the legal profession and the Justice ministry, a ministry that has certainly seen better days. He views every Southerner as a servant of his tribe, and don’t shiver when our deluded Public Mail Bag states that state policing is no option in a supposed federation: that is the way of despots dropping any pretence to patriotism.

This land is reeling under the blood of innocent people cut down at will by Fulani terrorists. These terrorists mendaciously dubbed bandits invade farmlands, rape women and set them on fire. They invade villages killing everyone in sight, but it took excuses after excuses to declare them as terrorists even after the court of law, whose judgment Malami now pretends he wants to enforce in Magodo, had long given the go-ahead. The message is clear: these are a protected people, not the minions who sell spare parts. Malami’s focus on his presidential horse is to crack the whip on the little mortals down below who dare to question his royalty. Of course, in the latest incident, like in previous ones, he has a retinue of palace courtiers to choose from. A lawyer declared, quite unabashedly, that the AGF is superior to governors, and another told whoever cared to listen that the IGP is every governor’s lord. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Richard is visited by the ghosts of his victims in his sleep, each telling him to “despair and die”. Richard is soon history. I summon Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests: proverbs to bones and silence.