The six-year single term gambit

EBORA Owu, Olusegun Mathew Aremu Okikiola Obasanjo, messed up Nigeria’s golden opportunity to rethink and retool her democratic credentials in 2006 with the morbid decision to play along with Ibrahim Mantu and his Senate gangsters, on the third-term fiasco as the “hidden charges” in the almost-achieved constitutional amendments that should have altered the tenure issue in Nigeria. That dark page of history will accommodate all the Third Termers, while not leaving out the Ken Nnamani gang too, masquerading as anti-tenure elongation, but playing the anti-Obasanjo joker with political elements outside of the National Assembly, which led to the complete ditching of the entire reconfiguration exercise, after spending billions of naira and raising the hope of the nation that we were about turning the corner for good.

Since then, every touch on the tenure question, torches the sabre rattling sensibilities and emotions of the public, with little or no grilling of the issues involved, allowed. Yet, except we are a bunch of jokers, the tenure question must be interrogated, answered one way or the other and settled in the interest of the people, before we can talk of any serious attempt at facing the national crisis we grapple with today.

Irrevocably, I’m for a single term for all elected leaders, at all levels of governance. It was a simple choice for me, helped by two fundamentals; the people we have come to become and the rapacious political class which has left the nation with no functional governance institutions. From where we copied participatory democracy, second term was designed as a referendum on the performance of executive incumbents and the legislature was made free-of-tenure, because the people over there do not only have a say in the voting methodology (particularly the direct primary elections) which makes fumbling lawmakers very vulnerable at election cycles, but also have a voice, which they use at will, including openly interrupting campaign speeches of unloved incumbents, a situation that doesn’t preclude the president.

Except we have deliberately chosen to be of warped reasoning, everything points to our democracy, if we have anything so-called, being a simple caricature of the one we went copying in the first place. Those 49 “wise” guys who went fully copy-acting while on national assignment with grave consequences, should take the first stick for two reasons; one, disingenuous plagiarism; two, for lacking in both retrospective and projective capacities. And to think the supposed greatest lawyer Nigeria ever produced, led this foresight-less team! Let’s even say the drafters of our presidential system were convinced that our identity had been forever lost to colonialism, why American system when colonised by Britain which also incidentally colonised America until 1776. If we were deemed taken, it means something closer to British system, should work for our colonised mind.

So, looking backward, the drafters failed, forward looking, woeful. How could supposed enlightened minds work a presidential system into such a unitary arrangement, considering the country’s tragic leadership experiences even with parliamentary and military governances, before the decision to switch to presidential and executive system.

It is that ‘executiveness’ in the mix that is our bane today and if we were bad people in the early days of presidential governance, we are ‘badder’ today. Maybe, if more of God had been sought working the future out then, possibly in His kindness, there would have been visions concerning today that should tip those “men” of yesterday of the tragedy of epic proportion being witnessed under what is supposed to be participatory governance today. But no, men would always want to show they have brain; that they have been tutored at Harvard et al. Is it not even better for someone to be tutored at Anfield today under Jurgen Klopp’s artistry and soccer scholarship, than listening to boring assumptions in the name of policy formulation at Cambridge?

After OBJ/Mantu/Nnamani’s mess, it is normal for countless Nigerians to see every tenure question as elongation agenda and refuse to engage its re-emergence with clearer eyes and head. But it is a lizard size we either barbecue and squirm to swallow now or leave to become an alligator that would require orisirisi obe (all manner of knives to dissect). After the on-going ‘waka-pass’ experience and experimentation, I bet Nigeria won’t have a “normal” presidential leadership again, because the last baboon in Idanre now eats jollof like one Oshoko.

Of all the plagues ravaging our presidential system, second term pretty sits atop. Losing re-election is considered the height of humiliation and since politicians with church-mind like Goodluck Jonathan are a rarity here, a time would come that our blood will not even be enough for their ambitions. Non-existent institutions of checks and balances, money-politics, ravaging poverty of the mind and body, almost-disappearing democratic ethos and the gross misuse of executiveness of presidential and gubernatorial powers, as witnessed in the past and being currently experienced at the Next Level, should simply resolve the tenure question in favour of a single term, except we want to wager that more Godly men would take offices going forward.

I personally don’t care about the length of term, though six years, sounds reasonable. You ask if a single term would stop the killing spree now governing our elections and I say, at least they won’t kill twice, while reminding them of killing by sword, dying by sword divine principle. You burn people in a Kogi village, your own would be burnt in a London fire. You ask about corruption and I say, don’t they usually come into offices with anticipatory stealing, declaring assets they plan to roguishly acquire? It simply means they won’t have the opportunity of stealing twice, if restricted to single term. I guess Nigerians are rising in arms against single term tenure, because politicians can’t be trusted usually float the agenda. Can the civil societies do a special roundtable and come up with an all-covering single term proposal, behind which the generality of Nigerians, can be mobilised?

Tribune wins it

Within days, Tribune staged two world class events to commemorate her platinum age, both in Lagos and Ibadan. While the Lagos event could pass for the jinjinjin (an extravaganza), Ibadan’s, on the other hand, was reported in, as more sombre and reflective, yet classy all over. I stand the risk of what Yoruba usually describe as tani esinsin iba gbe…(taking the side of your own), either writing on the Tribune I have come to know in decades, or describing the rare feats, pulled off, in the course of the making of the 70th anniversary, which everyone now knows, include the sky-scrapping Tribune House at Iseri. But it is worthy of note that in the year that the Nigerian media had little to celebrate, the Unseen Hand keeps moving things the Tribune way, which means we earned and flashed no bragging right. We are simply here today, brandishing our testimonials, with mouthful testimony of God’s faithfulness