PRESIDENT of the Senate, David Mark, surprised the public last week when he launched into a caustic attack on those who were party to the 2009 agreement between the federal government and university teachers. Both sides, he said trenchantly, were ignorant and mischievous. But his blistering attack suggested something much more insidious. In a subtle way, it indicated his underlying impatience with the unresolved Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike, and it also reflected his worldview, one inextricably connected with or subordinated to the futile worldview of Nigerian leaders in the past three decades or so. That worldview, however, transcends party affiliation, and is driven more by his innate desire to cooperate with the country’s leadership than by his desire to promote good governance and stability.
After considering the issue of the university strike last week, the Senate mandated its president to mediate between the striking teachers and the federal government in order to resolve the dispute. But it is not clear to what extent his unguarded remarks about the university teachers, whom he described as opportunistic, and the federal government team whom he called outright ignoramuses, had weakened his own hand as a mediator and diminished the respect the teachers should have for him had he been more temperate and magisterial.
Hear Senator Mark at his fulsome worst: “Listening to the agreement that was signed by the Federal Government, as Comrade Uche Chukwumerije read it out, I was really wondering whether this was signed or it was just a proposal. But when he concluded, he said it was signed. It only shows the level of people the executive sent to go and negotiate on their behalf because ab initio, people must be told the truth what can be accomplished and what cannot be accomplished. If a leader says I am going to accomplish this, he is morally duty bound to honour it. But even if you decided immediately after that you could not accomplish it, I think it is only proper for you to go back and start renegotiating…On the other hand, I think ASUU simply took advantage of the ignorance of those who were sent and simply just allowed this agreement to go on because it is obvious that this is going to be very difficult piece of paper to implement. They found that those who were sent there simply didn’t know their right from their left and they just went ahead.”
Put simply, Senator Mark does not believe the 2009 agreement between the government and ASUU can be implemented, nor will he get the Senate to help the process. In addition, he thinks nothing of the quality of minds on both sides of the negotiating table that produced the 2009 deal. It is instructive that the president is of the same opinion, though he was as vice president an indirect party to the deal. And to underscore the paralysis that has made the Jonathan cabinet detached from reality, most members of the cabinet think the same way too, not the least vociferous among whom is the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. However, Senator Mark’s tirade is more significant for what it does not say than what it says. His remarks go far beyond his opinion on the ASUU strike, or his unsavoury view on the teams that negotiated the 2009 agreement, whether they were competent or not. I’ll prove this assertion amply.
I concede that for the more than six years Senator Mark has been president of the Senate, he has brought stability and order to the upper chamber of the National Assembly. His temperament, perhaps also his military training, and his ability to transform status quo into a dignified thing, are not altogether unsuited to the role of leading and guiding the legislature, whether at the lower level or at the upper level. Indeed, they help him check the adventurousness of senators, some of whom have a fondness for whimsically baying for blood. Elected to head the Senate in 2007, some say with the help of the (then) just departed President Olusegun Obasanjo, Senator Mark, I must acknowledge, seems both able and eager to continue in that position for a few more years, even beyond the 2015 polls. He has mastered the art of doing nothing significant regally.
Indeed, there are many people who would want Senator Mark to continue presiding over the affairs of the Senate ad infinitum. President Goodluck Jonathan is one. So, too, would both Chief Obasanjo and the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, had they continued in office. To these three presidents, Senator Mark represents the archetypal Senate leadership upon which they would have felt comfortable and even enthusiastic to build their hopes, their programmes, no matter how ephemeral, and their unadulterated conservatism. The basic elements of Senator Mark’s political worldview are unrepentantly opposed to any form of surprise or radicalism. Had he been president of the Senate in the burdensome but insular days of the Obasanjo presidency, it is almost certain the former president would have had little desire to instigate the kind of leadership changes that convulsed the upper chamber and whittled down its prestige.
As this column suggested last week, Nigeria is battling with the twin evils of leadership incompetence and creeping fascism, with the latter promoted and rendered lethal by the former. Though the Jonathan presidency has not given the impression it fully understands the weight of the problems afflicting Nigeria, and so cannot proffer the appropriate panaceas, few Nigerians doubt how perilously close the country is to the precipice. There is the unending Boko Haram revolt in the Northeast, sundry crimes such as kidnapping and armed robbery in the Southeast and South-South made worse by the most sustained piece of grand thievery of oil resources amounting to close to a billion dollars monthly, a host of socio-economic and political crises that are robbing every part of Nigeria of a great future, and a series of disaggregated but potent malfeasances enacted by ministers, commissioners, police and other security chiefs. The stark truth is that Nigeria has not had it so bad, no, not even in the larcenous days of the hedonist, Sani Abacha.
It is precisely at this time of an underperforming presidency sustained by lies, propaganda and a grievous assault on the constitution in Rivers and other states, that the country requires the services of a wise, patriotic, visionary and courageous legislature. Sadly, it is at this time that the Senate is led by a pro-establishment, if not entirely reactionary, leadership, whose full-grown conservatism makes the moderating and restraining efforts of the House of Representatives look like sophomoric radicalism. Recall that the House of Representatives had to risk its credibility to restrain the Jonathan presidency from declaring a vicious and autocratic form of state of emergency in the Northeast, after the Senate had virtually given the president a carte blanche to do as he pleased. And now, the Senate under Senator Mark, is angry that ASUU sticks to its guns. How deep in ignominy will the Senate plumb before it reaches the bottom?
It is time Senator Mark recognised that posterity is calling on him to build a legacy. But that legacy will not be built on the foundation and altar of a cosy relationship that has made the Senate under him indistinguishable from the executive. Even if he comes back to the Senate for a record fifth time, Senator Mark must realise he is unlikely to return as Senate President, no matter which archconservative takes Aso Villa and promotes his candidature. He should reflect on his tenure and those of his predecessors, recognise that a vibrant and knowledgeable Senate could have checked the misdeeds of the Obasanjo presidency, especially the former president’s mindlessly raucous and retrogressive privatisation policy (which stand in sharp contrast to his crazy nationalisation policy of the late 1970s), and that it is time the Senate was made to form an ironclad partnership with the House of Representatives to protect the constitution, checkmate fascism and destroy any appetite Dr Jonathan might have to undermine the veneer of federalism still sustaining the country’s unity.
Senator Mark’s antecedents do not give hope that he can manage the needed transition, for apart from being thoroughly elitist, as his military days showed, he is not even a natural or artificial democrat, as his time in the Senate is showing effusively in all its unedifying colours. But I hesitate to write him off. Perhaps, he will view this admonition as the honest, plaintive cry of someone who cares about what legacy he would leave behind, and not the writing of one whom Dr Jonathan and his aides habitually denigrate as a destructive critic.
