Just to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t missing something, I inspected President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation – or is it Transformative?—Agenda before writing this piece.
The Agenda, I can report with the highest confidence, does not include turning Nigeria into a police state.
Yet, that is what has been happening lately, sometimes brazenly and sometimes insidiously.
With each passing day, Nigeria bears a closer resemblance to a state in which the activities of the people are strictly controlled with the help of a police force, in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of government based on publicly known legal procedure.
That is the definition of a police state.
This ominous process probably has an earlier origin, but I would date it from the time relations between Dr Jonathan and Rivers State Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi turned sour and Dr Jonathan sought to bring Amaechi to heel and to impose on the Nigeria Governors’ Forum a chairman who would be more complaisant than Amaechi and help clear the path to a second presidential term.
To attain the first objective, he could not have found a better instrument than the Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Mbu Joseph Mbu, who owes his appointment to and takes his orders from Abuja. At every opportunity, Mbu countermanded the elected governor of the state, enforced Abuja’s will, and carried on as he was for all practical purposes the leader of the opposition.
For the second objective, Dr Jonathan found a willing tool Akwa Ibom Governor Godswill Akpabio to engineer a split in the Governors’ Forum, in the hope that a majority fraction beholden to him would emerge. In the showdown election, Akpabio failed to deliver the majority he had promised. Undaunted, the minority crowned itself the new National Governors Forum, with the pathetic and utterly deluded Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang as chairman.
Then came the rupture at the PDP mini convention. Seven governors elected on the party’s platform , as well as some senior party officials, broke ranks. A faction calling itself the New PDP, having no illusions about the petulance of its parent, had to confect a lie to secure a place to hold a meeting. It declared that the hall was to be used for a wedding reception. If the police had so much as suspected that the meeting was being held to elect officials of the breakaway faction of the PDP, the police would have moved swiftly to block it.
That much was clear from the swiftness with which the police blockaded the headquarters building the new PDP rigged up. For good measure, the authorities of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory suddenly discovered that the house had been constructed in violation of the building code and would have to be pulled down. If and when the FCT gives the order, the police will be on hand to supervise the demolition.
As for the seven dissident PDP governors – the so-called G7 — rarely have they been able to hold a meeting even in private premises without the rude intrusion of the police. The most recent of such intrusions, in Abuja, drew nation-wide condemnation. The Inspector-General of the Police, Mohammed Abubakar, told a committee of the House of Representatives that it had been carried out without his instructions.
If this is true – and there is no reason to believe that he had perjured himself –it raises the alarming prospect that the Nigeria Police has indeed become the armed wing of the PDP, as the opposition APC has charged.
Last Tuesday the police, kitted as for battle, sealed off the conference room of the Nicon Luxury Hotel in Abuja where the Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project had planned to discuss Nigeria’s freedom of information law, with scheduled speakers from Europe, the United States and Nigeria.
With Dino Melaye, a former federal legislator turned anti-corruption crusader among the organisers, there was no doubt that the participants would discuss the scandal that the Federal Government desperately wants suppressed: the illegal purchase of two armoured limousines worth $1.4 million by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria for the use, and most likely at the behest of, Princess Oduah.
As was the case with the intrusion on the G7 meeting, also in Abuja, senior spokespersons for the police have been quoted as saying that the authorities had “no knowledge” of the operation. This only goes to support the thesis that Nigeria is being transformed into a police state. In whatever case, the political calculations behind the intrusion point unmistakably to the self-styled “biggest party” in Africa.
The PDP is even more deeply implicated in turning Nigeria into a police state than the foregoing suggests. Last week, the courts ordered the re-instatement of former Osun State Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola as PDP national secretary, finding that his purported removal from that office was ultra vires.
No sooner had Oyinlola served notice that he was set to resume work at the PDP’s Wadata Plaza national headquarters in Abuja than he was suspended afresh and the place was surrounded by battle tanks and police armed for combat. It was almost as if Boko Haram’s elusive high command had served notice that its forces had landed in the neightbourhood.
There, you have fresh intimations of the making of a police state. I will not be surprised if the police authorities were to declare again that they had played no part in sealing off the PDP’s headquarters.
To be sure, the court order was going to create all kinds of problems. Oyinlola was not merely one of the founders of the New PDP; he is its national secretary. To which faction would he answer if he resumed work at Wadata Plaza, which had vowed to treat him and other deserters as “criminals?”
The brusqueness with which the PDP brushed aside the court order reinstating Oyinlola is of a piece with the impunity with which it suborns the police to do its dirty work. It is all the more disquieting that the PDP is the ruling party and its national leader is President Jonathan, who took an oath to uphold and defend the law and the Constitution.
Only a few days ago, in the run-up to the incurably flawed gubernatorial election in Anambra, the police command in Imo State announced with breathless excitement the arrest of 180 “thugs” and “hoodlums” and “bandits” from Osun on their way to Anambra for the purpose — what else – of rigging the election.
It claimed to have recovered from them voter ID cards and other election documents, not forgetting “other dangerous weapons”. A far more credible source insists that the 180 were accredited election monitors belonging to the Justice and Equity Organisation.
If there was any merit at all to the arrest of the group from Osun, there was none whatsoever to the confinement of Nasir El-Rufai, to his hotel room in the Anambra State capital, Awka, by agents of the secret police. The APC chieftain was in town to monitor the poll. This shabby recourse to false imprisonment is yet another manifestation of the drift toward a police state.
We can now understand why, against the express provisions of the Constitution, retired Inspector-General of Police and a failed senatorial candidate in the person of Mike Okiro was appointed chairman of the Police Service Commission. It was certainly not on account of his stellar performance. For, as IGP, he showed a brazen disregard for conflict of interest and, as we now know, connived in hounding Nuhu Ribadu out of the EFCC and the Police Force.
By act or omission, Okiro contributed to the dysfunction in which the police force is mired today. They did not appoint him Police Service Commission chairman to lead a determined effort to chart a path out of that dysfunction. And he knows it.
