Everybody knows that the suspended CJN, Onnoghen, was axed because Buhari and the APC do not want him presiding over the Supreme Court when appeals for review of “victories” from the forthcoming elections finally reach that highest level of our judicial order. But the APC is saying that that is not the case, that Onnoghen was suspended because of his corruption, because millions of dollars had been found unaccountably lodged in his bank accounts over the years. The point I wish to make in this essay is that while both of these reasons for Onnoghen’s suspension are true, Buhari and the APC are saying one reason is a fact while the other reason is mere factitiousness. In other words, to the APC, Onnoghen’s corruption is a fact while the allegation that he was suspended because of the ruling party’s fear and anxiety over the havoc that Onnoghen could do to the party after the elections is factitiousness. But as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so is one man’s fact another man’s factitiousness. This is the first of the two major points that I wish to explore in this article.
The British, the Americans and the EU, together with many Nigerian opposition parties and electoral monitors, all apparently think that Buhari and APC’s post-election fears and anxiety is the fact while Onnoghen’s sleaze is a mere ploy, a phony and factitious excuse. And Onnoghen himself, in the depth of his shame and degradation, has jumped at this “lifeline”. To his relief, which we can only hope will be temporary, he has been tremendously buoyed by the support of the main opposition party, the PPD, together with his lionization by many activists and militants from his region of the country. Why? To a very large demographic and electoral constituency in this country, the fact of Onnoghen’s corruption has become mere factitiousness while his “victimization” has become the essential fact of the matter. For this reason, unless the crisis is resolved now, before the elections, we will definitely hear more of claim and counterclaim between fact and factitiousness in the weeks ahead during and after the elections. And what we will hear will be very dangerous to the health, the being of our national community.
While we await what will be after the elections, I suggest that it is important for us now to reflect on the point that while claims and counterclaims about fact and factitiousness pervade the whole of social life, it is around corruption that it is at its most potentially damaging or even destructive. Let me explain. As long as no one is hurt and no undeserved benefit is derived from any claim that something is not what is claimed about it but is another thing entirely, no harm is done, no damage is caused. The following example of this might be unpalatable to many readers of this piece, but please know that I invoke it without any religious prejudice. Thus, I know of many neighbours, friends and relatives who place great value on “holy water” and the miraculous powers associated with it. To the thousands or perhaps even millions to whom it is like an elixir, the intertwined mix of fact and factitiousness in “holy water” can never be unraveled but who cares as long as it does not cause any bodily or psychical harm or damage? But think of the hundreds or thousands of adulterated drugs and medications that slip through the fastidious inspection regimes of NAFDAC, with their inextricable mix of fact and factitiousness. Think of the harm that these drugs and medications cause and you get a sense of how corruption is the dreaded and hellish abode of fact and fakery, truth and falsehood in our country. And then think, compatriots, think about corruption in both the APC and the PDP as the kingpins of fact and factitiousness in our country.
When corruption reared its head and bared its fangs close to Buhari in the presidency and his political party, what did he do? Nothing, absolutely nothing! His former SGF, Babachir David Lawal, stole a humungous amount of money meant for the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of persons displaced by the of Boko Haram insurgency. Buhari removed Lawal from office only after months and months of public outcry and it is only now, more than two years later, that that he is being arraigned for trial. Also, the former Chairman and the entire National Executive of the President’s party, the APC, stole more than two billion naira from party coffers; but they were never handed over to the anti-corruption agencies; they were never arraigned and prosecuted; they were simply allowed to walk away with the loot for enjoyment for the rest of their lives.
The notorious case of Maina was even worse: with help from the Ministry of Justice and the Presidency itself, Maina came back from exile as an internationally hunted felon who had stolen billions of naira from national pension funds; he was given a job in Buhari’s administration and when another public outcry arose, he was not arrested but was helped to escape again. Additionally, most Nigerians don’t know this, but in the legal profession, it is a well-known and much talked about fact that the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation personally presides over the activities of a group that he formed and that has no basis in law. Again and again and again, this group withdraws cases of corruption being investigated or already being tried under extremely dubious pretexts. In other words, this group more or less operates like a racketeering cabal within the Ministry of Justice. Its operations and practices have been brought to the attention of the president and the presidency, but nothing has been done about it. Indeed, someday, when the history of the epic struggle against corruption in this country is written, Abubakar Malami, the AGF, together with this group within his Ministry, will feature prominently as a high point in the mix of fact and factitiousness on the same scale as the current crisis precipitated by the Onnoghen suspension.
But, but, what of the sixteen years of the PDP in power? With regard to the unprecedented scale in the rise of mammoth corruption in the period, didn’t we discover that it is completely futile to try to shame people that are incapable of feeling shame? Things got so bad, so unconscionable, that Obasanjo and Atiku, as President and Vice President respectively, dragged themselves into the mud with accusations and counteraccusations of corruption that threw up revelations of the venality of both men that ought to have led to their impeachment. Didn’t Obasanjo, as a matter of both fact and factitiousness, deny that he ever sought a third term in office and that what we all saw and heard about “third term” was a figment of our imaginations? Senators that had collected 50 million each from Obasanjo stepped forward to testify that Obasanjo had paid the money to them to buy their support for his third term bid; yet Baba Iyabo asserted that it didn’t happen! And Goodluck Jonathan, wasn’t it this PDP last of the Mohicans in power that infamously declared that stealing is not corruption? He never succeeded in explaining what he meant by this absurd distinction between stealing and corruption but that is precisely because he saw the difference in terms of one being fact and the other being factitiousness. In the sixteen years when the PDP was in power, just as it was difficult to separate fact from factitiousness when it came to corruption, so was it difficult to explain why some looters were caught – the minority among looters – while some, the majority, were never caught, never made to return the loot they had stolen. Three years into the time of the APC’s rule, the same pattern has been established and it is behind the Onnoghen suspension. This observation brings me to the second major issue that I am exploring in this essay. What is this issue? This question requires some elaboration to make it clear.
To both the APC and the PDP, Onnoghen’s venality, his sleaze, is not the real issue; the real issue is his post as the Chief Justice of Nigeria who happens to hold that post at a moment of national elections that everyone predicts will be close and is therefore being bitterly fought. In other words, like Dasuki, like Ibori, like Obasanjo and Atiku, like Ibrahim Maina and Babachir David Lawal and like the former National Executives of the APC all of whom, under the rule of both the PDP and the APC, got away with stealing billions from our national coffers, Onnoghen would have gotten away with the millions of unaccountable dollars found in his bank accounts if he wasn’t the CJN at this point in time. In other words, the APC is crucifying him while the PDP is beatifying him for the same reason: not for his corruption but for being unlucky or being “blessed” to be caught at this very moment just before the elections. This in effect means that corruption is not the point – most if not all in both the APC and the PDP practice it and benefit from it. The point is corruption as the condition of possibility for the continued perpetuation of
the severe predatoriness of our “democracy”.
I confess: I am making this issue the ultimate foundation of my reflections on the crisis caused by the Onnoghen suspension because it is the point about which, as a Nigerian, I am most bitter, most angry, most irreconcilably opposed. But there is also this: too many Nigerians, men and women, old and young, Southerner and Northerner, have been pushed to take one side or the other in the division among the polity that the Onnoghen suspension has precipitated. A grave error! Please, compatriots, do not fall into their traps. Buhari, APC, Atiku, PDP, Onnoghen himself – all of them do not care one jot about the suspended CJN’s corruption; what they care about is the political and electoral capital that they can lose or, conversely, harvest, from the hapless CJN’s suspension. If they can cut a deal, Onnoghen will never spend a day in jail and he will walk away with the three trillion naira unaccountably found in his bank accounts. But if they cannot cut a deal, they will, both of them, plunge the nation into a terminal crisis if things are taken to their absolute logical and existential limits, the heavens help us!
In the title of this piece, I raise the specter of the coming elections as perhaps the last predators’ electoral warfare in our country. This may seem inflated, but I have my reasons for using the terms that conjure up the specter for our consideration. There were four electoral cycles in the sixteen years of the rule of the PDP. In every successive one of those four cycles, the scale of rigging and electoral malpractice by the PDP kept rising. Indeed, let me remind you, compatriots, that throughout the period of the reign of the PDP, the American State Department and their national security chiefs kept predicting the imminent end of Nigeria. The elections that will start next week will begin only the second cycle of national elections in the reign of the APC. But close to three-quarters of APC is former PDP. Thus, if three-quarters of APC is PDP, it means that a whopping six out of every eight of the chieftains of our ruling class political parties are really PDP. And if you say that Buhari himself was never in PDP before dissolving his CPC into the APC, remember that he was once in the most warlike, anti-democratic party of all, the military autocratic party of ambitious and corrupt generals that held our nation in thrall for the longest stretches of our postcolonial political history. Thus, Buhari, Atiku, Onnoghen: they are all ready for war. How many “last” electoral wars can a nation survive?
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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