Osun: EFCC and the war this week

MIDNIGHT was just shyly unfolding its grim loneliness over the Coal City. I nudged the nose of my blue Peugeot 504 Saloon out of my apartment’s driveway opposite the Fire Service Office. I then turned into the dark, quiet embrace of the main road at Otigba Junction. Otigba is a vital transportation hub located on Ogui Road in Enugu and known for its bustling activity, connecting various parts of the beautiful city.

On this day, Enugu’s head seemed bowed in apprehension. It was about then just shedding the tired garment of the day, trying on the stillness of early morning. Just minutes earlier, my phone had shattered the silence of my bedroom. It was the Governor’s ADC. The policeman later rose to perform same role for Mrs. Patience Jonathan and eventually became a Commissioner of Police.

“The Lion is waiting for you,” the ADC said curtly. “Proceed immediately to interrogate the Lion.” The Lion is the security moniker of the governor of Enugu State and Lion Building, the seat of government. The ADC’s voice grated like ice cubes landing coldly inside a glass cup.

No sentiment. No laughter. No feeling. It had become the unwritten norm that whenever the Lion is gripped by existential melancholy, even the grasses of the Lion Building partake of the agony.

Since 2003 when Governor Chimaroke Nnamani appointed me as his media aide, such sudden familial disruptions had become my home’s daily bread. On a daily basis, l was summoned “to interrogate the Lion” not less than five times. The ADC’s call had yanked me brutally out of sleep. As I threw on clothes in the dark, I caught a glimpse of my few-months-old son, Chiagozie, sleeping peacefully as if he hadn’t a single care in the world. Beside him, my wife suffered the same rude awakening, a ritual my young family had grown accustomed to since we crossed several rivers from our Ibadan comfort zone to share space with men of power in Enugu. An Ofe manu (Igbo descriptive moniker for Yoruba whose soup, they say, brims with palm oil) like me suddenly became strategic to Enugu’s inner power calculus, upsetting opposition’s gang-up against the Lion of Agbani. At some point, the opposition was so annoyed with me that it grumpily asked if I could “disrespect” Abraham Adesanya as my stinging releases did statesman C. C. Onoh who was a major enemy of my Lion.

By the time I walked into the Governor’s private living room, he was already pacing restlessly.

Chimaroke was reputedly a tough hombre, an igneous, hard nut to crack for Enugu opposition. But, merely looking at him that night, you knew his heart had suffered a heavy rupture. His face was punctuated by an intense, dark grimace. Moments later, the Commissioner for Information walked in, looking equally pale and suffocated by apprehension.

Then the Governor laid out the source of his apprehension: his sources had confirmed that operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had just landed in Enugu. The operational blueprint was simple and lethal: intimidate the House of Assembly, force an impeachment of the Speaker, and then move in for the Governor’s head.

A heavy, suffocating melancholy settled over the room. It felt as though the world itself was about to expire. What were we to do? We spoke in hushed, mechanical tones before the two of us walked languidly back out into the unsmiling morning.

In spite of allegations of presidential poke-noses into its operations, the EFCC under the Obasanjo government was one of the Owu General’s most-enduring legacies. Men in power, who before Ribadu spoke and hurtled about in imperial arrogance, suddenly spoke in hushed, nervous tones. The catalyst of their anxiety wasn’t an invading army or an uprising in the streets. It was four letters whispered like a curse: E-F-C-C.

Back then, Nuhu Ribadu’s commission operated with the terrifying efficiency of a wedger. The fear was palpable, real, and consuming. Those who dreaded Nuhu had every reason to. They had an example in the Almighty Tafa Balogun. “Tafa, you are a big thief! Ole!” Obasanjo had bellowed on his Inspector General of Police inside Aso Rock.

Ribadu then went ahead to drag him, literally, on the tarmac of power, then charged him to court. I am sure the IGP died because his badly pummeled heart could no longer withstand the shame.

The backstory to that midnight Lion summons was as treacherous as it was illuminating. Enugu political space was not a place where you spoke above a whisper. The political atmosphere was heavy, thick with the lacerating dread that usually precedes a storm. Since 1999 when he became governor, Nnamani held power jealously like the fist of a big cat. It was obvious to the commune of his opposition within his party that, unless they unscrambled him, he would always hold the ace. In spite of the gang-ups of this teeming opposition who couldn’t stand his politics, the fact remained that, unless they significantly upset him, they could not have access to the Lion Building. How was Nnamani to know that they would have access anyhow, through a Judas in the apparel of a friend?

A few weeks prior, the ever-active Government House bush telegraph had delivered a piece of dangerous Intel. During a private meeting with the National Assembly caucus regarding president Olusegun Obasanjo’s whispered Third Term ambition, the Governor had reportedly lost his temper.

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Incensed by the mere mention of the gambit, he allegedly used some uncomplimentary words for the President. Unknown to him, a subterranean recording had been made by someone who was supposed to be a friend.

The tape landed directly on the President’s desk in Abuja. Days later, Nuhu Ribadu’s operatives appeared in the Coal City. The assignment was a mission to extract a pound of flesh on behalf of an aggrieved President from an erstwhile beloved political son who had dared to step out of line.

But, amidst the sweat and silent panic about Ribadu, an uncomfortable truth began to crystallize: the anti-graft agency wasn’t just chasing an Emmanuel Nwude Odinigwe, notorious for defrauding a Brazilian bank of US$242 million to build a fictitious airport; nor governors who were worse than armed robbers, it was a nail being rammed into an aimed point. Ribadu wasn’t just an untouchable beacon of justice; he was an iron fist wrapped around the political interests of the day. As EFCC flexed muscles by the day, it struck down enemies of the president at night and shielded allies with comforting duvet.

Over two decades after EFCC’s establishment, as the puppets change and the puppeteers rotate, the tragedy is that nothing has truly changed.

Until those allegations became the commission’s operations, as Prof Chinua Achebe wrote in the Foreword of A Paradise for Maggots: The Story Of An Anti-Graft Czar (2010) authored by Prof Wale Adebanwi, Nuhu Ribadu, its Chairman, had become Nigeria’s own Eliot Ness.

Ness was the leader of the world-famous prohibition era group of law enforcement agents called ’The Untouchables. Ness and his colleagues were soon celebrated as enviable American icons.

Since Ribadu’s memorable stint with the commission, the EFCC has suffered huge somersault in the estimation of the Nigerian public. Today, that once glorious institution reminds one of the three concepts of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Montesquieu’s separation of powers in his The Spirit of the Laws. These concepts are foundational milestones in political philosophy and constitutional law. They chart the historical evolution of the state, tracing the shift from raw, centralized autocratic power to structured legal frameworks and institutional checks and balances designed to protect human freedom.

Thomas Hobbes, Machiavelli and Montesquieu got woken up last Wednesday.

The fever of the Osun State election, in which, it would seem, political survival is the only currency that matters, gripped the whole country. Barely ten days to the election, the statutory machinery of anti-graft law enforcement moved with an unusually dramatic, precision timing. Citing suspicious transfers from a government account, the EFCC slammed a Post No Debit lock on the said account. Governor Adeleke roared; civil servants, who it is a known fact sees him as their God-sent, panicked and governance froze in its tracks.

Within a twinkle of an eye, it was obvious that the ebbing remainder of the Federal Government’s regards in national and international circles had totally evaporated The sympathy of all and sundry immediately accumulated for Ademola Adeleke. A few hours after, apparently overwhelmed by the uncomplimentary volley of attacks against him, President Bola Tinubu ordered the EFCC to vacate a court order freezing the said bank account.

When the president claimed he was not aware of the action of the EFCC in Osun, many people didn’t believe him. Peradventure it is true, it is a signpost of one troubling thing: that he runs a lax Villa where everyone else had the powers to do what they liked. If the EFCC could decide on its own to freeze the account of a sub-national government, with the social, political and security implications of that action, without recourse to the AGF or the National Security Adviser, it is a malaise deeper than what we can see.

Again, Tinubu’s intervention came as a grand denouement. From the high altar of the Villa, the president’s statement connoted so many things to the people. And none of them was complimentary. In it, the president expressed “embarrassment” and declared the timing “inauspicious”. The King had spoken; the scribes scrambled; the freeze was thawed To the casual observer, this was a display of presidential magnanimity, a statesman-like veto to prevent political chaos and protect the integrity of an upcoming ballot. While in the presidency’s intervention could be a desire to avoid state-level paralysis, that episode highlights a recurring structural dilemma in Nigerian governance.

What the president did with that personally signed statement of his and a purported call to Governor Adeleke, reminds me of a Yoruba proverb which says that one does not recognize the king and still bow to the wooden post – A kì í mọ oba tán, kí á tún mọ ópó. Nigerians have since lampooned both the president and the EFCC for their obvious partisanship and attempt to respectively play the role of the Leviathan, a mythical, very large and powerful sea monster from ancient folklore.

By their actions in the short-lived power and muscle-flexing opera, they reduced the concept, becoming a mere wooden post who consequently lost their regards. That action of the president can be likened to what the Yoruba again descriptively mean when they refer to an overbearing father who, while beating a child with a rod, also drives away the flies landing on the child. His statement satirizes the paradox of the Villa using law enforcement to flex muscle, then playing the paternalistic protector who steps in to “save” the “victim” from the very machine it commands. To this, the Yoruba say, “O nse mi, o ngba mi; bawo ni a se ndupe lowo eni ti nse ni ti o tun ngba’ni? (You are both my tormentor and my rescuer; how does one show gratitude to the one who kills and saves at the same time? If you are looking for the meaning of throwing a subordinate under the bus, ask Olukayode of the EFCC what the president has just done to him.

Before you know it, we are chorusing “Kaabiyesi o!” at the approach of the president.

In traditional Yoruba cosmology, the Oba does not merely wield the staff of authority (opa ase); he is Alase Ekeji Orisa – the custodian of command, second only to the gods. When the Kabiyesi, who cannot be questioned, speaks, the decree (ase) that comes out of his mouth does not debate the law; it instantly morphs into the law. But even in the ancient, intricate constitutionalism of Old Oyo which is a critical example of this magisterial usage of power by the monarchy, the design was not for the Alaafin to be a law unto himself. His actions were undergirded by the unwritten tablets of institutional memory. He was also constantly kept in check by the ominous presence of the Oyo Mesi and the sacred calabash that he could be caused to open which would herald an expiry of a mis-usage of power. So, why is Nigerian power calculus of today subservient to the person of the president?

The perception of that act of the president’s is akin to a cutlass which does not have a say over the hand that holds it. Yet the world knows that the master is the one who wields the blade of the cutlass. It goes further to illustrate the absolute lack of institutional autonomy in Nigerian agencies like the EFCC when Villa executive power calls the shots.

One of the frames that come out of that presidential intervention is that, the Osun account freeze and even the president’s paternalistic intervention are not isolated administrative blunders, but symptoms of Nigeria’s deep-seated constitutional crisis of centralized executive power.