Minister of Police Affairs, Jelili Adesiyan, is a very powerful man. He has at his beck and call hundreds of thousands of men enlisted in the Nigeria Police. An indeterminate number of officers belonging to the shadowy Department of State Security (DSS) are equally available to do his bidding at the snap of a finger.
In a country where the authorities over the years have not been squeamish about deploying armed agents of state to disconcert the opposition and claim ‘victory’ at the polls, the concentration of such power in the hands a brazen partisan is potentially disastrous for our young democracy.
When he proudly announced at a book launch last week that he had given orders to the Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba and the DSS to arrest anyone who makes ‘inflammatory statements’ ahead of the 2015 elections, the gravity and implications of his utterances were clearly lost on him.
At the same event he made the incendiary claim that All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari and former President Olusegun Obasanjo were working to foist an interim government on Nigeria.
Explaining his order for a crackdown, Adesiyan said: “Many of those in the APC are disgruntled PDP members who are no longer relevant and because they could not have their way, they have started to heat up the polity. They have said they will form a parallel government if they lose.”
This same statement had riled President Goodluck Jonathan who at one of his campaign stops at an Abuja church wondered how a politician, and a Christian to boot, would dare utter such a statement.
Everyone knows that the ‘Christian’ politician being referred to by Jonathan is his bête noire and Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi. I have no doubt that but for his constitutional restraint of immunity, the Aso Villa would have moved against the outspoken governor.
Amaechi, never one to sidestep a controversy, infuriated his foes afresh with his remarks insisting that soldiers recently court-martialed and convicted for mutiny had the right to protest being asked to fight Boko Haram insurgents without being adequately armed. Since those comments were made all heel has broken loose with the army and DSS piling in the governor for saying things they consider an invitation for soldiers to be mutinous.
It might help to remind readers here that the same comments the governor made have been repeated by the likes of Major General Ishola Williams (retd) who went on to state that soldiers protesting suicidal orders was not unheard off. The remarks of the former Chief of Defence Operations, Planning and Training, at Defence Headquarters have been largely ignored, but Ameachi’s have triggered near ballistic reactions given his political profile.
In the light of what Adesiyan has revealed the response of the DSS is a follow-up to instructions from above. But beyond that it is especially sinister.
The organisations’s Deputy Director of Public Relations, Marilyn Ogar, warned political office holders not to ‘hide under the privileges of their offices to perpetrate and encourage the commission of acts inimical to the general interest of this nation.” This, she said pregnantly, was the “final warning.”
I am struck by the finality of Ogar’s threat. Assuming Amaechi or some other public officer protected by law from prosecution were to say something which the agencies consider inciting, would they violate that individual’s constitutional immunity?
In today’s Nigeria nothing is impossible. If a squadron of policemen could seal off the National Assembly and humiliate its members by teargassing their chambers without consequences, then there is no low our security forces will not plumb in their desire to please whoever holds power at a given time.
I am all for peace and security. But democracy is also about free speech and freedom to choose who will lead a country or community. It is about exercising such freedoms without some non-judicial arbiter standing as a middle man to determine what constitutes appropriate or inflammatory comment, or determining what is constitutional or not.
It was that sort of effrontery that prompted the Inspector-General of Police to declare that Aminu Tambuwal was no longer Speaker of the House of Representatives because he decamped from APC to PDP. In an outrageous power grab that remains as yet unpunished, he assumed the role of the courts to add to his powers as an enforcer.
Since that event, legislators have been crossing the carpet at the National and state assembly levels at a dizzying rate. Embarrassingly, the great enforcer of the Nigerian constitution has suddenly gone absent without leave.
Whatever section of Nigeria’s statutes the security services are depending on to clamp down on people for their comments, they would find that such provisions don’t define what constitutes ‘inflammatory comment.’
When does a comment become inciting? What is the empirical gauge for judging its flammability other than the jaundiced assessment of the likes of Adesiyan and Abba?
With barely six weeks to go before the general elections, I dare say any strong criticism of the incumbent and his embattled administration would rank as ‘inflammatory comment’ in the books of the Police Minister and his enforcers.
On the day Adesiyan was making his arrest order public, he was also accusing two former Nigerian Heads of State of planning treasonable acts without providing any shred of evidence. In my book that ranks as a grade one ‘inflammatory comment.’ But who’s going arrest the arresters?
Is all this anxiety over “inflammatory comments” not an indication how fragile the Nigerian federation has become? Instead of looking for vulnerable scapegoats should we not be pointing the finger at failed leadership that has brought us to this pass?
If there’s a grave danger facing our democracy today, it isn’t from the occasionally heated statements made by excitable politicians. It is emanating more from the pedestrian interpretation of what constitutes threat to national interest by Nigeria’s security agencies.
Politics is activity that excites passions and roils emotions. It involves contest: we should expect the temperature to rise during any election cycle. All the lazy and clichéd talk about ‘heating up the polity’ arise from ignorantly trying to turn politics into Sunday Mass: it is not! It is passionate business that generates heat, insults and sometimes, unfortunately, violence. Live with it.
This is the understanding that seems to elude our all-powerful minister and the enforcers that are ever so gung-ho about arresting people for speaking their minds. The police, DSS and others should stop inserting themselves in the middle of the political mudfight. By presenting themselves as interested partisans they erode the integrity of their institutions and lose respect in the eyes of the people.
That is why aside the economy and insurgency, one of the most pressing challenges confronting the national leadership that will emerge this February is reforming our security services to make them relevant to the needs of an emerging democracy in the 21st century. What we have now are services whose mindset is stuck in the military era of the 70s and 80s.
That reform must, however, be National Assembly-led because the abuse of the security agencies has always been a crime perpetrated by the executive branch. If APC wins the Presidency don’t be surprised if next day security agencies start threatening PDP members who make critical comments about the new powers-that-be. The system is that backward and servile.
We need a police and DSS that are truly engaged with protecting the people from violent criminals and insurgents. We don’t need a bunch of armed men and women who are confused about what their roles are and have lapsed into some sort of ‘thought people’ dragooned to screen what we say in the heat of the moment. Don’t turn Nigeria into North Korea please!
But more importantly we need a decentralised police and intelligence agencies structure that does not leave such powerful institutions in the hands of small-minded individuals with anything but a democratic temper and mindset.
