By Mohammed Adamu
Democracy, like some kind of a systemic crop plant, thrives only on a dung-field of several fecundating attributes such as:
(1) a body of laws and a system of ‘rule of law’ before which all persons and authorities equally subjugate;
(2) freedom and liberty guaranteed to individuals by which wilfully to attain their lawful aspirations in life;
(3), an independent legislature to make good laws, amend defective statutes or abrogate bad ones;
(4), an independent judiciary for the administration of justice through the determination of rights, obligations and the remediation of wrongs;
(5), a system of separation of powers between and among the arms of government with clearly defined borders around which the all-important task of checks and balances may operate;
(6), a system of ‘due process’ by which all other processes (namely the democratic process, the electoral process, the legislative process, the judicial process, the executive process, etc.) operate;
(7), a multi-party system with an internal level-playing field by which candidates are thrown up for elective offices;
(8), the popular suffrage by which the people regularly elect, re-elect or remove their governments out of office and last but not the least,
(9), a free press to call those elected or appointed into public trust to account.
But nowhere are we told that democracy can only thrive primarily on a ‘secure and peaceful society’ other than we are to apprehend that in the naïve presumption that it is in the necessary interplay of all the aforementioned attributes of democracy that a ‘secure and safe society’ is inevitably to be arrived at.
It has always been taken for granted that a ‘truly democratic’ society will naturally grow the desirable ‘secure and peaceful’ society as the first fruit of a libertarian system of government.
But it has not always proved that the democratic character of a society is necessarily a coefficient of the desirable socio-economic good that accrues to it.
Societies are not necessarily any better because the attributes of democracy are firmly enrooted in their organic body, nor are they any less so merely because those attributes have not firmly taken root in the body polity.
And so the question is asked: to what avail is a democracy –no matter how diligently it has acquitted itself as a ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’- if it is incapable of guaranteeing for the people, a ‘secure and peaceful’ society in which to live?
In truth a ‘secure and peaceful’ society, even if it is not a democratic one, should be the first kingdom that a wise people naturally should seek, even before they anticipate that all other things may someday be added to it.
I am for the people securing themselves – whether in the North or in the South- if the laws and the institutions established to secure them fail or neglect to do so.
It is to that extent that I see nothing wrong with the Southwest’s ‘Amotekun’ initiative as a regional, no-arms-carrying security outfit conceived to complement a wobbly federal police that is obviously incapable of securing all.
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Nonetheless I believe also that the Southwest novelty may have to be re-packaged in a manner that makes it reasonably amenable to the constitution. Let’s face it; it is the inability of the federal police to secure the ‘whole’ that has made the component parts on their own to begin to rise in self-defence through numerous types of vigilantes such as Kano’s Hisbah. I do not see anything wrong with that –provided the due legislative process is followed.
By the way, I do not believe that concerning the obligation to secure society the vagaries of law and the constitution can be in the way. I once said, two years ago when I wrote ‘ODE TO US –A LAMENTATION’, (01/25/18), that: “People affrighted by wrong doers are bound (and will be in order) to take the law into their hands when the law that should affright all, will not secure them”.
And I said that “When a nation makes a ‘scarecrow’ of its law, letting it stay mute in statute when it should be brute in action, the birds of prey that the dummy should scare, will soon make it their perch and not their terror”. Because I said, “When evil deeds have their permissive pass and not their strict punishment, to everyone then will be his own statute”.
It was in the same piece also that I urged the president to: “Be sure not to spare the instruments of chastisement; lest (his) powers, like to a fangless lion, is disdained and disregarded”. I advised that he should not “Allow our dreadful laws so loosely to be slighted or the dignity of our state so wantonly profaned”.
But that is exactly what outlaws and men of the underworld have been allowed to do –namely get away with murder, arson and plunder.
They have been allowed to brazenly slight our laws and to wantonly profane the dignity of our state –which was why I said ”When evil deeds have their permissive pass and not their strict punishment, to everyone then will be his own statute”.
When Shakespeare said “If the law will do no right, let it be lawful that the law bars no wrong”, he meant that if the law is unable or neglects to do that which laws do –namely secure the peace, property and pleasure of the society- it is not therefore inconsistent with the intention of the law that the people themselves, either in breach, neglect or in disdain of the law, do whatever they can to achieve that which the law itself has failed or neglected to do.
This is not a principle of ‘positive law’ which sees law in the dimension of ‘what is’ and not what ‘ought to be. Disdaining the law and rising in self-defence belongs to the realm of ‘natural law’ –and in fact, it is should be the duty of ‘positive law’ to seek to amend itself to meet the spontaneous exigency that ‘natural law’ permits, and not that ‘natural law’ should amend itself to be amenable to the strictures of ‘positive law’.
The instinct for self-defence availeth only ‘the vigilant’ and not ‘the indolent’ –apologies to one of the maxims of equity. And it is consistent with the jurisprudence of law –namely the philosophical raison d’être for the existence of law- that the safety, security, peace and pleasure of the society transcends the letters and spirit of the law.
In a three-part series which I once wrote titled ‘Ain’t the Rule of Law a Bitch?’ (09/20/18), I quoted the words of a British Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli who said ”Protection is not a principle, (as the ‘rule of law’ is) but an expedient”.
The right of the people to defend themselves is in advance of, and transcends the vagaries of law. It is a natural right born of an instinct that pre-existed the law and therefore cannot be regulated or abolished by law.
And maybe it is the reason that even the realm of Criminal Law, in its attempt to make itself amenable to natural law, has learnt to concede to those accused of criminal offense, the right to the ‘defence of self-defence’. It is the reason some of us have always said that ‘national security’ is superior to ‘rule of law’.
I do not believe that security, like B.E Hutchinson would say, “is the priceless product of freedom”. It is the secure and peaceful society that gives birth to a ‘free society’ and not the other way round.
I am for self-defence where the law fails or neglects to secure society. As I have always been for ‘national security’ transcending the ‘rule of law’. Which is not to suggest that Amotekun should not be repackaged to make itself a partner and not a rival of ‘rule of law’ -if that is what it will take to avert a breakdown of law and order in the polity.
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