One of the more colourful politicians thrown up by military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme was a tall, solidly built young man who had about him an air of refinement that was accentuated by his exquisite tailoring. His trademark dog-eared cap,a sentimental archaism then but now a la mode, bespoke a cultured sensibility.
But what he inspired most was fear – primal fear.
I cannot vouch that he ever knocked one of his commissioners into unconscious during a cabinet meeting to consider the state’s appropriations,or that he ever lifted any of his permanent secretaries by the ears and slammed him onto the wall some 30 feet away.
But tales of his predilection for that kind of behaviour was the stuff of political gossip, and had led to his being called – behind his back, of course, and clearly out of his hearing range – Serubawon, literally, the one who scares them witless.
Even if the tales were apocryphal, they put associates and adversaries alike on notice that to trifle with His Excellency Serubawon was to court danger.
But somehow, the governor’s reputation for getting things done without fuss and without challenge seemed not to have registered on the State Assembly, in which his party, the one that was a Little to the Left, held practically all the seats.
Where he sought to move at a furious gallop, the legislators seemed to love nothing better than hearing their own voices proposing, amending and raising points of order.
One cold, dusty morning in December, 1992, as the legislators were settling down for business in the State Assembly just across from the central market in Osogbo, they espied a motley crowd armed with shovels, pick-axes, machetes and all manner of cudgels. Before they could figure what it was all about, the Assembly was under siege.
Shouting foul imprecations and bellowing blood-curdling threats, the invaders smashed their way into the chamber and set upon the legislators with maniacal fury.
Casting off their ornately embroidered agbada with practised ease and displaying the comprehensive agility of the decathlete, many of them escaped through windows no wider than a computer monitor.
Some hid for hours in stuffy broom cupboards and in the very toilets that had drawn their withering censure only the previous week during a debate on the physical plant.
It was a focused, results-oriented Assembly that reconvened two weeks later, a real partner in progress with the state’s chief executive, Isiaka Adeleke.
Fast forward to 1999, when Nigeria embarked on a fresh attempt at plebiscitary democracy. Almost from the moment he took office as governor, Abia State was in ferment. The air was saturated with talk of impeachment, with assassination plots, cabinet shuffles and threats of cabinet shuffles thrown in as comic relief.
Matters took an alarmingly violent turn on June 26, 2,000, when hundreds of youths reportedly incensed by rumours that the legislature was plotting to impeach Governor Orji Kalu, descended upon the State Assembly in busloads. They smashed up the place, battered those legislators they regarded as Kalu’s opponents and helped themselves to whatever they could haul away.
Mission accomplished, the mob headed to the Abia White House on a solidarity visit to Kalu, who, in keeping with his open-door policy, welcomed them. He listened attentively to their report on the sacking of the State Assembly and other measures they had taken to “sanitise” the undutiful legislative branch.
Kalu rose magnificently to the occasion. Their intervention, he told his visitors, accorded perfectly with the finest traditions of democracy and freedom of expression.
I was led to these reminiscences by recent developments in Ekiti, where Governor-elect Ayodele Fayose instigated or personally led a phalanx of okada operators and motor-park touts and thugs-for-hire to storm the courts hearing petitions against his election, beat up judges and other officers of the court, in one instance renting a judge’s garment and shredding court documents.
Even in Nigeria, there is no precedent for such barbarous conduct.
It is the contention of the petitioners that Fayose had perjured himself in the election papers he filed with INEC, and that his candidature was incurably flawed. As if to confirm the charge, Fayose says the proceedings were designed to forestall his being sworn in on October 16 and that the judges had been compromised.
The petition may lack merit, but why not allow the judicial process to run its course?
Fayose’s tenure as governor ended in scandal on a scale almost beyond belief, impeachment and disgrace. He has been charged with serious fraud and accused of complicity in the murder of two political opponents. His election last June to the same office remains one of the greatest comebacks in the annals of politics.
It was widely expected that he would use this second chance to redeem himself; that he would eschew the sophomoric stunts and the predilection for violence that had marked his earlier tenure, and that he would conduct himself and the affairs of Ekiti State with the decorum that the high office of governor demands.
But Fayose, being Fayose, loosed mayhem on the state capital even before taking office, leaving no doubt as to what he would do on taking charge.
There was a time, not long ago, when I could have wagered that they will not find a judge in Ekiti to swear him in after his execrable conduct. Not anymore; some judges in the state’s judiciary may well be falling over themselves already for the privilege of administering the oath of office on October 16. Cry, oh cry, Land of Honour.
No less execrable than Fayose’s conduct is the funereal silence in Abuja, a silence heard around the world. Not a word of admonition, much less condemnation, has come from President Goodluck Jonathan, who is in full reelection campaign mode, even serving notice in Benin City right before Governor Adams Oshiomhole that the PDP was set to “capture” Edo State and Rivers State where the APC currently holds power.
Nothing, not even a brazen assault on the judiciary, can deflect him for a moment from his consuming quest for a second term, especially when the assault is perpetrated by his associates.
What will it take to make Dr Jonathan learn that, over and above being leader of the PDP, he is president of Nigeria, enjoined to faithfully uphold the Constitution and to serve the entire citizenry, not just supporters of his party?
Nor has any word come from the nation’s chief law officer, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Bello Adoke (SAN). Hallowed precincts of justice are desecrated and high officers of the judiciary violently assaulted in the course of duty, but it is of no concern to Adoke. This is a shameful dereliction of duty.
If Fayose gets away with this criminal assault, he will most likely take a chapter from Isiaka Adeleke’s Osun and Orji Kalu’s Abia to pummel into acquiescence members of the Ekiti State Assembly, virtually all of whom belong in the APC.
They face a clear and present danger, but cannot expect any protection from the Federal Government, nor from the police. The one is an agent of the PDP, and the other is an instrument of the Federal Government .
I do not envy the lawmakers in the least.
