Can the president of the Federal Republic levy war against a state and get away with it? From the conduct of President Goodluck Jonathan’s henchmen and women in the Rivers contrived crisis, that appears the case.
It is nothing short of criminalising the presidency. But how much of this impunity can the civil order bear before something terrible gives?
The especial tragedy of the Jonathan Presidency is, with reckless regularity, it repeats history as farce.
But neither the first Nigerian president to boast a PhD, nor his hyper-educated aides, seems fazed by this roller-coaster cascade into infamy. Such is their total gobble of the sweet poison of naked power – powers they don’t even have, had they not chosen to criminalise the presidency, if they ever bothered to read between the lines of the 1999 Constitution, warts and all!
Take the latest trigger in the contrived crisis: the Rivers House of Assembly mayhem of July 9. Now, between the Goodluck Jonathan and Rotimi Amaechi battling camps, there is enough villainy to gift a multitude, with some left-over.
How can an immaculate, fiery and all-conquering mace-battler, with the moral ardour of some bathetic Christ clearing his father’s house of worship of a den of thieves, morph into a sanctimonious victim, nestling in a hospital bed; and peeping at millions of sympathisers, from the vantage point of the lead photo, on the front page of a national newspaper?
But before you condemn that battler, meet his victim: an apparent constitutional criminal, one of the G-5 renegades who, backed by some subversive federal power, felt they could impeach the Rivers Assembly Speaker and, like some tragic-comic pantomime with voice-over, were already on the subversive ritual, seconding motions, suspending imaginary legislators, voting, getting “elected” and giving “acceptance speeches”!
Must Nigerians be assaulted by such power lunacy?
To apologists or self-proclaimed purists, who insist “constitutional criminal” is jumping the legal gun, since no one has been tried and found guilty, this riposte: if the courts had serially voided such legislative banditry in Oyo, Plateau and Anambra states, during the Obasanjo-era presidential anarchy, can it be less culpable now because Jonathan-era legislative lunatics are repeating the farce?
And here really lies the crux: if Obasanjo could grandstand that Nuhu Ribadu was undermining the Constitution to get rid of allegedly thieving politicians, what noble cause can the current rascals attach to their own subversive activism?
Those who nail Governor Amaechi for “invading” the Rivers legislature to clear the mess miss the point. Yes, a governor should be a gentleman. But with a president that tweaks rules for illicit gains, that could be fatal.
If you doubt, ask Rashidi Ladoja, the bitter-sweet former governor of Oyo State. He shunned President Obasanjo’s diktat that he surrender his gubernatorial authority to Lamidi Adedibu, Obasanjo’s beloved Ibadan garrison commander, only to holler in the cold for no less than 10 months, victim of an illegal impeachment.
To those who still want to play the ostrich, pushing “law” without factoring in the lawless temper of its operators, the odyssey of Justice Isa Ayo Salami, under this same Jonathan Presidency, is instructive. Salami did his duty by law. But to the lawless in government, that was near-capital crime, for which the no-nonsense president of the Court of Appeal is paying.
Yes, the Judiciary saved Ladoja; and voided the allied legislative rascality in Plateau and Anambra states. But with the Salami experience, it is doubtful if that judiciary had not melted into Heraclitus’s state of flux, no thanks to a hostile Jonathan Presidency.
Amaechi certainly was not pretty, “storming” the legislature to nip in the bud the putative coup against his office. But he did the needful to preserve his position in an emerging presidential anarchy. For all you know, if the coup against him had succeeded, he would now be shrieking, Ladoja-like, from the wilderness, while his traducers would be mouthing “due process”! No society thrives under such cynical manipulation.
But it is instructive how this Jonathan-era rascality empties into the Obasanjo-era mother river, even if Jonathan’s bumbling, to use Malthus-speak of basic economics, is “geometrical” while Obasanjo’s “original sins” now appear “arithmetical”.
Talking about “original sin”, the dramatis personae of the current crisis appear to have cleanly forgotten the first outrage of 10 July 2003 (the Rivers outrage followed almost 10 years after, 9 July 2013!), when some Abuja-backed criminals tried to unseat controversial Governor Chris Ngige. It was the classic malevolent godfather’s challenge, before the plague of illicit impeachments based on “simple minorities”, which the latest Rivers jokers essayed with devastating consequences.
What happened to the ring leaders back then: AIG Raphael Ige, the apparent Abuja viceroy in the crime, Tafa Balogun, then sitting IG, and even Obasanjo himself, the sitting president who, throughout the crisis, pushed the theory of plausible deniability?
AIG Ige, the apparent fall guy, suffered abrupt retirement (even if his retirement time was close) and later, sudden death. Mr. Balogun suffered eventual humiliation, though his role, beyond being the Police IG was unclear; and his comeuppance was not directly linked to the Ngige saga. Even Obasanjo has continued to suffer progressive devaluation, to the point of irrelevance, since his presidential glory days.
Do all these speak to Mbu Joseph Mbu, the commissioner of Police deep in the Rivers crisis, given his inappropriate conduct and reckless utterances? There are always spiritual consequences for political rascality that hurt the silent and innocent majority.
Festus Eriye, editor of The Nation on Sunday, in his penetrating piece of July 14, described President Jonathan as Pontius Pilate, in a piece he headlined “Pontius Pilate strikes again”. That was a brilliant metaphor because before Jonathan, there was Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, and Pontius Pilate I of Nigeria’s troubled political horizon.
Sir Abubakar launched political insurrection at the Western Region, with his suspect proclamation of state of emergency, after a contrived crisis in the Western House of Assembly, just to cripple Obafemi Awolowo.
Jonathan, Pontius Pilate II, is doing the same, in what would have been the old Eastern Region, although this time, against a party mate; but with no less partisan bile, despite his aides’ comical denial. Jonathan court historians should check their history books and tell their principal how the Balewa gambit ended.
Which brings us to the Jonathan denial ensemble: two “doctors”, Reuben Abati, Doyin Okupe and a Gulak, who obviously thinks everybody’s thinking faculty is, as his own, locked in Jonathan’s gulag!
Ahmed Gulak, sounding every inch a power brat, told Prof. Wole Soyinka to be “responsible” (a counsel his principal ironically needs more than anyone!), because of Soyinka’s stance on the contrived Rivers crisis.
Well, Gulak should check his history books. When Balewa was being led astray or even Obasanjo, Jonathan’s political creator, was leading himself astray, Soyinka was there, an ever consistent voice of reason, which nevertheless is the proverbial harsh hunter’s whistle, to the hearing of a doomed dog.
Those who engage in double-speak, let them. But true friends of Goodluck Jonathan must tell him to withdraw from his Rivers misadventure.
It is a wide and merry way that leads to infamy.
