Since his “original sin”, of opportunistic suspension against Justice Isa Ayo Salami, retired president of the Court of Appeal, President Goodluck Jonathan appears continuously drawn to the fatal attraction of essaying constitutional impunity; and see if it would stick.
It stuck with Justice Salami, though since the jurist retired with his honour intact, the president should have known his victory was pyrrhic.
This is because perpetrators of injustice almost always fall victims of their own machinations. Take the president’s collapsing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Time was, when PDP would actively lure sitting governors and legislators from other parties, and declare the illicit lure the height of patriotism and political nobility, since the “biggest party in Africa” was the law, and the law was the “biggest party in Africa”.
But the same PDP is now whining like caned dogs, after being forced to swallow its own specially brewed impunity!
Or take the president’s estranged godfather, former President Olusegun Obasanjo. At the height of his presidential impunity, PDP was Obasanjo and Obasanjo was PDP.
After the collapse of the third term gambit; and after the imposition, willy-nilly, of the health-challenged Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the czar got his party to purposely amend its constitution to make the chair of the PDP Board of Trustees the exclusive preserve of former presidents from the party — a euphemism for Obasanjo himself!
But see how the old lion has now turned prolific public letter writer, just to retain a toehold on the party! Verily, verily I say unto you, to parody that famous Biblical phrasing, impunity all too soon consumes its own children!
Still, neither PDP’s plight nor Obasanjo’s would appear to have weighed much on the president’s mind, in his tango with Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.
This Day reported President Jonathan phoning Mallam Sanusi; and literarily barked that he resigned his office forthwith, for allegedly leaking, to the former president, the letter alleging US$ 49.8 billion “missing” from the Federation Account.
An apparently miffed Sanusi reportedly called the president’s bluff; adding that only a presidential request, backed by two-thirds majority of the Senate, could abridge his fixed five-year term.
Again, the president had blundered into the myth that the Nigerian president was the globe’s most formidable Leviathan. He could well be. But anytime he strays outside the law, he becomes a Samson shorn of his divine locks!
If the President-CBN Governor face-off is a short-and-sharp defeat of impunity, the recurring Rivers crisis is a chain of defeats, but with impunity, fired by “federal might”, always bouncing back.
Is it then a case of the proverbial tortoise in the Yoruba folklore, that swore never to return from a journey until he was disgraced?
Ironically, the Jonathan Presidency’s apparent fixation with the Rivers crises bears uncanny resemblance to Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s fatal attraction to the Western Region crisis in the First Republic.
By precipitating anomie in Rivers, maybe to politically profit from the ensuing anarchy, might the Jonathan presidency be working towards imposing a state of emergency to get rid of Governor Chibuike Amaechi, just as the Balewa government contrived one out of nothing to politically liquidate Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the rump of his Action Group (AG)? And after emergency, what?
Of course, President Jonathan denies everything. Even his spouse, Dame Patience Jonathan, denies all. But incontrovertible facts point to presidential complicity, by commission or by omission, in the sordid affair.
For starters, how come Mbu Joseph Mbu, the commissioner of Police (CP) whose tenure the Rivers looming anarchy birthed with, appears untouchable? Neither the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) nor the president is willing or able to touch him, despite his politicising the police, and baiting anarchy in the state he is paid to secure.
Then, Evans Bipi and his claim as “Speaker” — a claim so comical, if it were not so tragic! But then if in the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) election, the president of the Federal Republic could declare 16 greater than 19, what stops Bipi from declaring six greater than 26?
And to think the so-called “Speaker” was product of a failed legislative coup which main victim, the battered Michael Okechukwu Chinda, is still probably abroad on medical tourism! Where is Bipi getting his Dutch courage from?
And then, the Rivers chief presidential storm trooper, Nyesom Wike, Jonathan’s minister, with his Grassroots Development Initiative (GDI), fighting for every inch of the political space, with a colluding police behind him. All three, Mbu, Bipi and Wike, are unfazed Jonathan sympathisers and votaries of his wife.
Incidentally, Mbu just claimed his latest scalp in Senator Magnus Abe, a Save Rivers Movement (SRM) kingpin, sitting senator and Amaechi sympathiser, shot by Mbu’s police on January 12 and flown abroad for treatment. Hear Mbu crow on the senator’s felling: “If we used live bullets,” The Nation quoted him, “you know the implication. If a live bullet hits your hand, it will shatter the hand and if it hits the neck, the person is gone.”
Abe and co should learn the grim lesson: while Wike’s GDI has an unfettered charter to prowl, SRM, in Mbu’s police state, would do so at fatal risk! And for starry-eyed Amaechi supporters, it could be worse next time round — when rubber bullets become real ones!
That goes back to the Balewa-Jonathan parallel: how the one misused, and the other is misusing, state coercion for partisan ends.
In Sir Abubakar’s case, the late prime minister had ethno-political motives to run Awo and his AG out of town, though the famed “golden voice” was himself regarded a gentleman. But all that nobility vanished with his Northern People’s Congress (NPC) agenda to crush Awo and his AG. But the principal federal players back then got buried under their own impunity.
In Jonathan’s case, it would appear some strange spousal fealty, that seems to have dimmed presidential faculty on how far the impunity can go.
Still, spousal folly has buried many. The fearsome Samson became a Philistine jelly because he ensnared himself with Delilah. The wise Solomon, in uxoriousness, ploughed the ultimate in folly. The Roman Mark Anthony, for Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, forfeited his life and share of the Roman Empire.
And in 1936, British King Edward VIII abdicated his throne for the warm bosoms of American Wallis Simpson, a serial divorcee. He enjoyed that warmth for 35 years. But the stiff price was his and his descendants’ renunciation of the British throne.
To be sure, the Jonathan camp are no devils any more than the Amaechi camp are saints. But to unleash state organs as political vendetta, especially on a state government constituted by law in a federation, is tantamount to treason.
Dr. Jonathan is a learned man; a logical adult who knows the consequences of his choice. Still, the easy attraction of impunity in Rivers is dangerous. It might yet turn fatal!
On Rivers then, Jonathan has the First Republic Western Region misadventure to profit from. He can learn from history — or be consumed by it!
