The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Most Reverend Mathew Hassan Kukah, is, of course, not the only person to have apparently pooh-poohed President Muhammadu Buhari’s declaration of war on corruption. Chieftains of the erstwhile ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), notably its spokesman, Olisa Metuh, and the Governor of Ekiti State and probably the most unrelenting detractor of Buhari’s person, Ayodele Fayose, have all poured scorn on the president’s declared anti-corruption crusade. None, however, not even Professor Ben Nwabueze’s statement on behalf of a rather nondescript organisation, the Igbo Leaders of Thought, has attracted as much public opprobrium as the bishop’s.
The bishop has been blaming the media for misrepresenting the interview he granted the media at Aso Villa after an audience the president granted members of the National Peace Committee on August 11. The NPC is led by former head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, with the bishop as the coordinator.
Kukah, according to the media, had expressed concern in his interview about the president becoming too obsessed with the fight against alleged corruption by ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration at the expense of governance for which, he said, the president had been elected.
It is unfortunate, the bishop has said in several subsequent media interviews, that his concern has been distorted to mean he was trying to defend the former president from being probed by his successor. Nothing, he has been saying, could be further from the truth.
“We were,” he said in an interview with Sahara TV on August 16, “interested in saying that our role is not to run anybody’s errands. Our role is basically to give encouragement to our politicians on behalf of Nigerians. That we had free and fair elections and Nigerians want to see a new dawn in place.” The earlier version of the story on the bishop’s remarks at Aso Villa, had quoted him as saying his committee had been sent to President Buhari by Jonathan to plead on his behalf.
However, it seems, at least to me, that the bishop’s attempts at clarification have only made matters worse. From all indications it is true, as he has said, that the former president never sent the committee to plead on his behalf. Indeed in all the meetings the committee has had with all the stakeholders before, during and after the last elections – stakeholders like the presidential candidates, the leadership of the political parties and of the National Assembly – there is evidence to prove that the issue of probing the former president was never even raised, never mind being discussed.
Bishop Kukah can therefore have only himself, and not the media, to blame for the widespread impression that his committee was on the former president’s errand, the simple reason being that his negative remarks about Buhari’s war on corruption were simply gratuitous in the circumstance. He was, of course, entitled to express his view that the president’s war looks like the persecution of his predecessor. However, the timing and the venue of his remark, not to talk of the fact that he was the coordinator, indeed creator, of the committee, can only create the impression that their main mission that day was to intercede on the former president’s behalf. To make his remarks even more suspicious, some of the committee members who had attended only few or even none of its previous meetings, notably, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), were all in attendance.
Then, of course, there were some of his rather untoward and unhelpful remarks like “Nigerians must be appreciative of what President Jonathan did…even if he stole all the money in the world” and “This is no longer a military regime and under our existing laws everybody is innocent until proven guilty,” which he made in his Channels TV interview.
As a priest and an intellectual, Bishop Kukah knows that his role is to tell truth to power. It also requires that he tells truth to friends. Both require uncommon courage. Sadly, in recent years his courage to tell truth to power and to friends, a virtue for which he had become justly famous, seems to have largely deserted him, apparently because he has become too close with those in power.
The most glaring evidence of this was nine years ago when, in a lengthy interview with Weekly Trust (July 22, 2006), he defended President Olusegun Obasanjo’s inglorious Third Term agenda by dismissing it as a non-issue.
The third term, he said, was “a useless conversation, a waste of energies and I think it is nothing other than that. And it does not merit the attention.” He then went on to condemn those critical of Obasanjo’s agenda as “political eunuchs who could not do anything when General Abacha was around.” Worse, he even denied that times were hard under Obasanjo.
“People”, he said, “keep saying to me people are dying and things are getting worse. And I say it is not true … Things are getting better and it could get even better than they are.”
If as a Reverend Father, Kukah tried to defend power nine years ago, this time as a bishop he has tried to defend a friend who, though no longer president, remains powerful by virtue alone that he had been in government for the last 16 years. And in both instances, my hunch is that he has tried to defend them essentially because they are fellow Christians, who he sees as battling for their faith.
As in Obasanjo’s case, Jonathan’s case too is simply indefensible. However, Jonathan’s case is far worse, even if only a fraction of the revelations of monumental corruption under his watch the public has been inundated with of recent is true.
Bad as Jonathan’s case is, it is not really surprising that the bishop would try to defend his friend. As Dr Ebenezer Obadare, a Nigerian teaching Sociology at Kansas University, US, pointed out five years ago in an article in The Guardian (May 21, 2010), Kukah tried to canonise the man in an article in the same newspaper (May 13, 2010) and in a lecture earlier on in Calabar. Kukah’s paper was captioned “The Patience of Jonathan,” an apparent play on the president’s name and his wife’s. Obadare countered with “The impatience of Father Kukah.”
In his article, which was less than a month after Jonathan succeeded his predecessor, following his death, Kukah argued that the man’s rise in politics “defied logic and anyone who attempts to explain it is tempting the gods.” In the earlier lecture in Calabar he had said, among other things, that “With the swearing-in of President Goodluck Jonathan, something has happened in Nigeria that may not happen again in the next 200 years.”
Obadare’s article dismissed Kukah as engaging in unhelpful myth-making. This provoked an angry counter-reaction from Kukah in The Guardian of June 2 which, in turn, provoked a counter-reaction from Obadare in the same newspaper on June 7.
Personally, I thought Obadare won the debate on the facts and logic of the issue. But this is besides my point in referring to the sparring between the priest and the academic, which is that five years on it is now crystal clear that Kukah was too impatient to canonise his friend as the best president Nigeria would ever have.
Kukah’s attempt to defend Jonathan is clearly self-imposed probably to defend his position of five years ago. Whatever it is, his defence has seriously dented the image of the NCP which it deservedly earned for the good work it did in helping to bring about this year’s peaceful election.
Penultimate Tuesday, August 18, The PUNCH published a scathing editorial on the NPC which must have resonated well with most Nigerians. The NCP, “which has the likes of Sa’ad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto; Ayo Oritsejafor, President, Christian Association of Nigeria; John Onaiyekan and Nicholas Okoh (both clergymen),” the newspaper said, “has become a distraction, a veritable platform for making excuses for tainted former public office holders.”
As such it urged the committee be disbanded and even wondered why President Buhari had received its members in the first place.
I do not share The PUNCH’s position that it is a useless distraction. However, its use as a camouflage by its coordinator for his personal view, which seems to have been dictated more by religious camaraderie with his friend than by fact and reason, has damaged it badly.
Kukah, as priest and an intellectual, knows all too well that corruption, like all vices, knows no tribe or religion. Hopefully, the anger in the land from men and women of all faiths about his defence of the former president has taught him a lesson that it is wrong to use one’s reputation to defend what is patently indefensible.
Next week, God willing, I’ll take up Professor Nwabueze’s case and publish the reactions I received over last week’s piece.
