IF Senate President Bukola Saraki is secretly thrilled by all the raucous attention he has been getting in the past few weeks, chiefly from his opponents and mainly in politics, his inscrutable face does not betray it. Perhaps he is quaking below the surface, complete with many aftershocks; or perhaps considering how many battles he has fought and won, hardly losing any, he is supremely confident that he would either triumph this time again or reach some accommodation with his enemies. It is to his enormous benefit, it seems, that even the inexplicable invasion of the National Assembly (NASS) by the Department of State Service (DSS) has been framed around his person and politics. Moreover, it can only be to his enormous satisfaction that the frenetic chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the glib and abrasive Adams Oshiomhole, has continued to obsess over the political fortunes of the Kwara senator.
Last Tuesday, the DSS orchestrated a blockade of the NASS gates with hooded operatives. Since the secret service was too detached from the people and reality to have appoint a spokesman for its many public relations needs, including its constitution-defying actions, mystified Nigerians and a puzzled world were left to speculate about what prompted the blockade. And much more than speculations, everyone was apparently too appalled by the siege, the second in four years by Nigeria’s law enforcement agencies, to even care what the rationale was. Stunned by the invasion, for an invasion was what it looked like, Acting President Yemi Osinbajo swiftly sacked the service’s director-general, Lawal Daura, and ordered his detention. Before it had chance to catch its breath, the ruling party itself, which was locked in mortal combat with Sen Saraki over the leadership of the senate, had issued a disclaimer against the siege and denounced the inglorious attempt to undermine or weaken the parliament.
Barely two days later, the media was awash with stories of the many sins committed by Mr Daura, a man described as impudent, haughty, corrupt and naturally rebellious to the president and his superiors in the intelligence community, and more crucially to the constitution. In one fell swoop, probably the most powerful man in the country had been dethroned and shuttled between detention centres, from police interrogation rooms to DSS sequestration, his magisterial opinions reduced to mere guesswork among uppity media professionals and giddy social media denizens. It seemed wholly implausible, but he was accused by his detractors of, among other things, defying the courts and keeping former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, a retired colonel, and Shiite leader, Ibrahim el-Zakzakky, in interminable detention.
The country may never know what the presidency really thinks about those many sins. But it is sufficient to the public that there are enough contradictions in the about a dozen grave offences alleged against the chief spook to cast doubt on the bona fides of the government and its vaunted altruism. What the rise and fall of Mr Daura showed in clear colours is that President Muhammdu Buhari was never in charge, regardless of the fact that the buck stops with him. That buck was often hijacked, depending on the circumstances, by a slew of cabals, two of which are fairly well known. But hijacked or not, and cabals or not, Mr Daura’s excesses indicated either complicity by the president or a lack of understanding of presidentialism and democracy. If the chief spook could defy the constitution so openly, not once, and not twice, what was the president looking at?
But much more than incompetence, available facts actually indicate that the president was complicit in the serial defiance of Mr Daura. It was evident to most Nigerians that the chief spook did not run the agency professionally and competently, what with his unenviable and sullied antecedents. If the president did not know, then something much more worrisome must be amiss. In addition, Mr Daura was widely known to defy authority, regardless of his genuflections before the president. Surely the reports of his errancy must have come to the president. What was the president waiting for? Then, most disturbingly, the so-called constitution-defying detentions, chief among which were the Dasuki and el-Zakzakky affairs, were actions eagerly embraced and sold by the president at various local and global fora. Was the president misled?
President Buhari once angrily denounced Sheikh el-Zakzakky as running a state within a state, and unfazed by the man’s sufferings, virtually hinted that the sect leader was being hoisted with his own petard. Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai took his cue from the president’s dismissive characterisation of the Shiite leader and inspired unlawful actions and enactments in Kaduna against the sect. Under their watch, hundreds of Shiite members were killed and buried in mass graves. They said nothing but breathe more threats against the sect they suggested was already morphing into a Boko Haram-like organisation. Col Dasuki (retd.) was admitted to bail five times, and ECOWAS Court ruled that his detention was unlawful; surely the president could not suggest under any guise that he was not embarrassed enough to dismiss the chief spook or even order him to obey the courts. The presidency, not just Mr Daura, justified and rhapsodised the unlawful detentions. So, too, did Justice minister Abubakar Malami and Itse Sagay, a professor of Law. The blame cannot go anywhere else, for the Buhari presidency has never really been enamoured of the rule of law, a concept it relates to warily and sometimes contemptuously.
There are questions whether a malfeasant Mr Daura could have been dismissed if President Buhari was not on vacation. The country may never know, just as it may also never know whether Mr Daura would have taken that unprecedented leap into the chasm had the vice president, whom he held in contempt, not acted as president. Presidential spokesman Femi Adesina suggested that the president sanctioned the sacking of the Mr Daura, but the country may never know whether Prof Osinbajo did not in fact present the president with a fait accompli, and whether the president will not secretly resent been boxed into a corner over such a momentous decision. Indeed, what no one has yet suggested is that the president ordered a diffident Prof Osinbajo to dismiss and detain Mr Daura. The country can, therefore, go on speculating. Mr Daura is history, but he has carried out fewer constitution-defying actions than even the police boss, Ibrahim Idris, asked to arrest and briefly detain him. Furthermore, the practice of subordinating one security service to another, despite the timeliness and even efficacy of such actions, are bound to affect service morale, discipline and cohesion in the medium to long run.
There are also far more puzzling questions about the APC’s role in the invasion saga. Afraid that it might be dragged into what is indisputably a sordid anti-democratic plot, the ruling party quickly but perhaps unconvincingly dissociated itself from the invasion and proclaimed its adherence to the rule of law and passion for democracy. It managed in the same breath, however, to needlessly restate its opposition to the senate president. But a day later, it retracted the statement and launched into a tirade over what it then described as a PDP plot gone very awry. The whole shenanigan, wailed the party and its often hysterical chairman, was masterminded by Sen Saraki and the party to which he just defected to make President Buhari and the APC look bad in the eyes of the public. The party ignored the 2014 precedent which showed similar desperation by the then ruling party, the PDP, and the invasion a few months ago of the senate by mace-snatching vagrants in cahoots with the same secret service. The second APC statement, said to be corroborated by the interim police report on the saga, inadvertently showed the ruling party as desperate and unprincipled. It should have stuck with the first statement, which covered everything, and let investigations unearth the other grisly details.
The DSS invasion, whoever inspired it, was a clear threat to democracy. Rather than muddy the waters with speculations of conspiracies yet to be fathomed, the country should rise in unison to condemn the siege and pressure the government to call its masterminds to account in a fair, just and non-partisan manner. Sen Saraki may be Machiavellian, unprincipled and possibly inadequate for a modern parliament, but the manner the APC has pursued the goal of dethroning him has unwittingly exposed the ruling party itself as obsessed, unprincipled and, despite claiming to love democracy, quite unable to grasp the fundamental fact that the country will survive the APC and the PDP as well as the main political actors of today. If Mr Daura, who thought himself to be invincible and untouchable, could be dethroned and arrested and detained by the police, and even faced the spectre of being detained near Col Dasuki (retd.), his and the president’s old nemesis, perhaps in the same DSS facility, it must be a humbling epiphany about the transience of power, if not of life itself.