Owasanoye’s tough luck

BY divine construct, I was the last journalist to extensively engage Ekpo Nta, immediate past ICPC chairman, before his five-year tenure ended last Tuesday. That night in Abuja, a few weeks back, we had a long recorded chat and longer off-the-record exchange. The former had been published by Saturday Tribune penultimate weekend, and the latter, preserved in comradeship museum. Boy, policing smart crooks (dunces don’t loot) isn’t a barbing session, when you just loll in a comfy swivel chair and keep checking if your mustache is trimmed to taste. Listening to tales of inner workings, internal sabotage and external fires, from the man in the middle of it all for five years (his tenure ends in October but took three-month disengagement leave), I can safely conclude that the trend of anti-corruption czars as one-term champions, will endure, possibly until institutional supremacy dethrones the current strong-man leadership culture, where a president handpicks nearly all heads of major institutions that run the government machinery.

Nta is a different kind of administrator and corruption-fighter. He is more of a mind and institutional reformer. He believes a thief should be understood before punished. A nation in war mood would hardly have time to “understand” and get to the root of corruption. God help your generations if by any stretch of ill-luck, you are tagged a looter by the reckless gang in the anti-corruption war. There are some grave comments on social media right now about some unfortunate Nigerians, dubbed looters without any conviction, that will haunt their generations when the history of this mob-era is being collated.

Are all dubbed looters undeserving of the inglorious epaulette? Far from it. Some should have had their stoning day long before now. But this is supposed to be a decent society and a decent gentleman Nta says he won’t call anybody a looter until all judicial authorities say so. He was consigned to the unpopular corner. He didn’t mind being there doing what he was convinced, was analogous to civility and constitutionality. Osinbajo rightly thought his meticulous ways and “scientific” anti-corruption style would suit fixing and controlling salaries. He shooed him there.

If noise-making has served any advocacy and public-enlightenment purpose in Buhari’s anti-corruption war, the diadem is incontestable PACAC’s. Though without any law backing it up, Osinbajo as VP, cobbled together a professorial band as advisors and side-stepping the psychedelic way of the learned, the three professors have done a hell of a job, helping Team Buhari rumble in the jungle with assumed looters everywhere, including in their own backyard. When they recently went mercilessly after the Chief Anti-Corruptionist Abubakar Malami SAN, the justice minister, everybody realised these Profs. strut without borders.

An impressed Osinbajo has now thrown one of them, Bolaji Owasanoye, the executive secretary of the PACAC group, like a dancing dice into the fantasy of ICPC’s untapped reef, supposed for a diamond haul.

PACAC and ICPC may have some abbreviative rhyme, but the fire under the kettle, glows differently and the fish boils at different temperature.

After taking practically everybody on publicly, except PACAC’s sweetheart, Ibrahim Magu of EFCC, the new chair, will be falling the hand of his corner, as the street lingo usually captures a big disappointment, if he sustained the silent, scientific and systematic way of Ekpo. Owasanoye’s anti-corruption orientation is the loud, shout and shoot type, with all similitude to Magu’s “akoda” (incorrigible) style. It is the same orientation that gets a fresher from police college who spent more time, sourcing water from Ikeja-across, to threaten a suspect at the point of arrest with the “wa pe lewon” cliche, (you will rot in jail) even when the officer has no foggiest idea what the law says about the complaints against the suspect, even ahead of the usual line on “silence rights”.

In fact, the professor of law, will be committing class sacrilege not dumping all Nta’s style and in the process, dump vital but disagreeable provisions of the Act setting up the commission, especially the constitutional gag on public disclosure of investigation activities until cases get to court.

I’m against the bar though I guess it was built in, to check the kind of banal scurrility being witnessed with EFCC, but it remains an operational Code until amended. Owasanoye, I bet, will freely run foul of this code and for the sake of getting his person fitted into the job, he should be allowed to illegally feed the public of salacious looters’ dirty closets.

Attempts to come with a bang, may however end up blowing everything in his face. Events have proved that spectators are always better strategists than those in the thick of action. While Owasanoye isn’t a complete side-liner in the anti-corruption project, he should not mistake criticism erudition for insured success as a their-catcher. I suspect, Osinbajo also fell for same un-matchable scenarios. It is easier to be culinary legend mouthing the mix. The kitchen experience is always different.

If Nta, an early-life botanist and later-life political scientist and lawyer could decide for due process and less adulation when the route to cheaper public salutation waited gaping, Owasanoye will be dashing out his glittering records in International Economic Law; Human Development and Social Justice Activism, to the pigs, by trying to be mob-compliant, doing the policeman’s shameless “naming and shaming” without investigation and prosecution as demanded by acceptable global standard.

Owasanoye is too decorated as a legal luminary, despite his 54 years of age, to try impressing in illegal ways. As a recipient of the prestigious Taslim Elias Distinguished Professor of Law, he has a burden of handling the expected hysterical turn-around which at the initial stage, is mainly going to be media accentuation of his immediate predecessor’s packaged cherry.

Despite his 15 years at the apex legal academic institution in Nigeria, The Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS) as Research Director, the new chair will end up “shining” in controversy and illegality, if PACAC doctrine, would be his main manual for cracking corruption bones in ICPC. He had constant interaction with the commission as PACAC “engine room” before now. He should know the commission’s wiring, was deliberately insulated from EFCC’s kind of destructive sparks.

The three substantive chairmen and equally number of acting chairmen before him, can’t all be “docile” in approach, if not by institutional design. Imagine a fiery jurist like Mustapha Akanbi running a quiet five years.

While the expected media “shaking” by his handlers, may even ramp up early high rating for the professor, his biggest battle will be the carry-over of the war stoked at PACAC against Malami. I’m certain he won’t drop his alliance with other anti-Malami’s professors at his last duty-post. So, expect a maelstrom. Owasanoye is now constitutionally under the unwanted AGF and unlike when he owed the minister no ordinary courtesies as a Buhari’s direct surrogate, he must now be answerable to Malami, or be ready for Magu’s kind of meltdown with the AGF and trending accusation of insubordination.

Men of plenty “boko” like Owasanoye get into subconscious disdain for superiors with perceived inferior knowledge. Without doubt, there is a world of difference between a professor of Law and a SAN of just nine years. But by divine providence, the lesser-read is boss to too-much knowledge. Yoruba will say, boti wu Oluwa lo nse ola (God in unquestionable). Instead of starting his first day in office, with media scoop on Paris refund probe which he didn’t conduct, he should literally preen the hung portraits on the walls and take a deep breath.