The macabre dance in Akwa Ibom

LATELY, political gladiators in Akwa Ibom State have been treating the nation to a generous dose of absurdity. The show of absurdity centres on 2019 elections and the combatants are exhibiting lawlessness and impudence. Members of the state House of Assembly split along Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) lines are locked in combat, with the Akwa Ibom State Police Command caught in the web of partisanship.

According to reports, the speaker of the assembly, Onofiok Luke, had declared the seat of five members who defected from the ruling PDP to the APC vacant, following the judgment of the Federal High Court, Uyo Division, which rejected the plea by Nse Ntuen, one of the suspended lawmakers, to stop him (the speaker) from doing so. But the five aggrieved members led by Ntuen, who had earlier elected a ‘speaker’ at a parallel sitting, besieged the assembly complex to sit in plenary by 8.30 a.m. with a new mace. They had the protection of heavily armed policemen. Suspected political thugs also- chased out workers at the assembly. With Ntuen presiding, the aggrieved members dissolved the standing committees of the house and suspended 11 other lawmakers, including the de facto speaker. Tension around the premises heightened following sporadic gunshots when the state governor, Mr. Emmanuel Udom, in his capacity as the Chief Security Officer of the state, arrived at the scene to avert anarchy.

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Since that incident, the state has been in perpetual flux with the governor and the speaker of the assembly alleging a conspiracy to undermine its peace and stability. Consequently, both the governor and the speaker have expressed loss of confidence in the police, accusing them of complicity and bias in the simmering crisis. On their part, APC stalwarts claimed that the governor precipitated the crisis by undermining the principle of separation of powers, just as they accused the speaker of refusing to honour a subsisting court injunction against the declaration of the seats of the aggrieved five lawmakers vacant.

It is clear that the authorities at the federal level have learnt nothing from Nigeria’s turbulent history. Similar chicanery since civil rule was restored to the country in 1999, especially in Oyo and Plateau states, should serve as a veritable lesson. All the procedural issues concerning the removal of governors from office have been exhaustively addressed by the Supreme Court and the kind of constitutional infractions perpetrated by the errant lawmakers in Akwa Ibom decisively put down. Simply put, the five suspended lawmakers are in breach of the law. They had no business trying to take over the state assembly and remove the state governor from office. And the fact that they had police protection for their planned illegality will remain one of the sore points in the country’s democratic experience.

Indeed, ordinarily, the state governor should not have visited the assembly with his security staff. But if he had not done that, the five embattled lawmakers would have ‘impeached’ him. Certainly most worrisome is the brigandage witnessed at the premises of the assembly, with grave implications for the governor while at the scene of the fracas. Chasing away assembly staff from their duty posts amounted to an attempt to truncate democracy in the state and all the constitutional avenues for redress must be explored in this case.

Laws are made to be respected in order to avoid anarchy. But when the institutions required to be the symbol of those laws begin to undermine them, the society would have murdered sleep. Despite the claim by the state police command that the deployment of its personnel to the scene was “a proactive step,” it fell short of its statutory duty of neutrality in the political crisis in the state. It is wrong for police personnel to desecrate state institutions for political purposes. All arms of government should enjoy unfettered freedom as enshrined in the constitution and as obtained in international statutes and the advanced democracies.

The frequent change of the leadership of the state police command smacks of an anti-democratic plot and leaves much to be desired, especially at the threshold of a general election. Whoever the masterminds of the current crisis are should realise that peace is sine qua non for economic growth and development in any society and Akwa Ibom cannot be an exception. To be on the right side of history, the Federal Government and its security agencies must act based on the collective interest of the citizens of the state. They must not lend credence to the allegations of a calculated effort to muzzle the opposition and overrun its base.