Those who love Onnoghen or who claim to love him are up in arms that the President has committed a moral wrong. But that is not what they are calling it in private. They offload more damning epithets that promise apocalyptic effects. Couching it in polite opprobrium, I would say they are claiming that he has committed an ethnic wrong. He has bested a southerner and nudged him off his high judicial chair because he is a south-south.
He cannot stand a southerner on the throne. They claim in private that he and his ilk are doing this because Onnoghen is not their man. By that they also mean he is not the sort that should sit on the throne this season of political convulsion when a justice can make the difference between an Atiku president and a Buhari re-election.
In other words, they say the Buhari administration is not interested whether or not Onnoghen “forgot” about his over N1 billion Naira in filling his assets declaration form. They are simply happy that the man forgot. His mnemonic slip has conferred a boon. He is a naïve prey, an antelope that slouched over the lion’s piss into the cat’s private lair. So, he had only to bleat and cry while the lion’s fierce eyes and retractile claws secured a twilight feast.
So, the Buhari men were cynical. They did not care whether he was guilty in the beginning. They only took advantage of the man’s lack of tact and self-regard. They knew about his sins when he was going through the Senate confirmation hearings, but the security operatives kept mum and awaited his fatal hour.
So, barely a month to the polls, the hammer fell and the man is squeaking. And the lawyers, for reasons yet to be in the public domain, are also howling. They say, it was all timed, and opportunistic.
They say his sins also in hush tones: that Onnoghen is in cahoots with the PDP and the Atiku vortex to swing a supreme verdict for the PDP. None of these has evidence in the open, but beneath this legalistic and apparent moral outrage lies the corrosive gossip about the Buhari calculations of malice and self-interest.
If that were so, it bears much to provoke public lament. Part of this is predicated on the obvious ethnic one-sidedness of his appointments, including his security team, that swaddle Buhari’s kinsmen. That is as reprehensible as any we have had in our history, a certain insensitivity in a nation of variegated people. Yet those who flay him now were in this country when Dr. Okonjo-Iweala said only her southeast folks deserved public appointments because they passed all the tests, although she did not convey who recruited the candidates and who graded them. Or when under Jonathan still, parastatal after parastatal was sacking heads and replacing them with men and women from the southeast. The records bear me out. Both Buhari’s lopsided hauteur and Jonathan’s quiet irredentism should draw blame and show how bad we have gone as people. No saints, no heroes, a nation feigns love of brothers.
So, if Buhari suspended Onnoghen because of those allegations, he is wrong. But we cannot prove this because Onnoghen has erred in law and in goodness. Onnoghen admitted he did wrong, and he still wants to remain as the chief judicial officer in the land. No pastor worth his anointing or Imam worth his Quran or babalawo worthy of his beads can defend that. They want to sacrifice integrity on the altar of tribal fidelity.
If he admitted to wrongdoing, what is he still doing there? He is forever a tainted umpire. It is like asking an Arsenal fan to judge a match against Manchester United. Onnoghen said he forgot about the over N1 billion, and knows that he did wrong. He did not follow the path of nobility by remaining there. The Code of Conduct Tribunal wants to hear the matter, but lawyers are cagy and want him to go to the NJC of which he is chairman. Even if he recuses himself, he knows the verdict of his colleagues that he appointed cannot be expected to be above board. That is one of the unexpected crises of the constitution: asking a CJN to chair the NJC and appoint the members.
The only path open was for him to spare us what some theologians call Jesuitical parsing. That is what our senior lawyers are displaying. He should have resigned. Perhaps the CCT expected that. Failing that, though, they ordered the president to suspend. Onnoghen, in my mind, was taken out of his misery.
Those howling at the president for following court order should carp at the CCT that gave the order and not the president who obeyed. This is the same Buhari, who has defiantly flouted court orders in cases of El- Zakzaki and Dasuki that this column has condemned. Now that he has obeyed a court order, the same critics are warring over adherence to the rule of law. They are angry against an ex parte motion whereas they have filed their own. They are saying ‘my ex parte is more expert than yours.’ Even if Buhari is pharisaic for following this court order, at least this Pharisee is right. Give this Pharisee his due.
Those imputing motives are also hypocrites because in one breath to latch on to the rule of law and, when convenient, they invoke ethnic and hegemonic ideas.
All those who say this was a tendentious move by Buhari to do in a southerner should ask their fellow southerners whether it is right in any southern culture to hide your money or forget N1 billion. The irony about elite corruption in Nigeria is that it seems the big men are corrupt on behalf of the poor of their tribe or faith. They can wed their kids in Dubai on tax payers’ money while the little guy cannot even buy a wedding dress for her daughter. The little guy applauds the thief all the same. He is their kinsman and he enjoys the loot vicariously in his lightless, bedraggled hovel.
This is a political season, and we should know that right can never be wrong. Rather than sling shots at Buhari, I would want the senior lawyers to question the CCT for giving Buhari the order. If they can’t or don’t, they have admitted, like Onnoghen, that they have lost the argument. It is the misery of the advocate like Don Williams’ song.
Like OBJ, like Onnoghen
This is a familiar season for OBJ. In the last season, his ego was filled to bursting when some loyalists visited his Ota farm residence, and he tore his PDP card in a flourish. This is a season like no other he is familiar with, though. He loves his pen, and loves to be called a man of letters. But in the true definition of the term, OBJ is no man of letters. Those who understand its import call him so to laugh him to scorn. He is probably like Shakespeare Malvolio, who glories in a borrowed robe.
In his letter epistolary incarnation, he has pelted Buhari with a number of wrongdoings. But what stood out for me are his charges against Amina Zakari, Abacha and rigging for self-succession. Is it not, as they say, a case of a hypocrite hiding his sins in the public square? The Zakari case recalls his closeness with Ayoka, whom he appointed to preside over a rerun election in Ekiti. Did he think we have forgotten like Onnoghen?
Was he not the Third term fellow? He probably like Onnoghen forgot that when he said Buhari wanted to succeed himself. Have we forgotten that? Of course not. He has no evidence, though. His letter, in tone and content, lacked the lofty register of a former president. Rather it leaked malice and frustration.
It is how not to write a presidential letter.