Even for a country always full of surprises, last week in Nigeria must have truly been a breath taker. First was the forced resignation, midweek, of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party after a long and very unedifying brawl between himself and just about every other top shot in the party.
Then President Jonathan defied his popular, but mistaken, image as a meek lamb and fired all his armed forces service chiefs, including the seemingly untouchable army boss, Lt-Gen Azubuike Ihejirika, on January 16, a day after this year’s Armed Forces Remembrance Day, apparently without the men having the slightest hint.
Finally, as if to confirm that Media Trust Limited couldn’t have been more spot-on in its choice of the danger of incumbency and impunity to our fledgling democracy as the theme of this year’s Daily Trust Annual Dialogue which took place on January 16, the week ended on Sunday with a brazen invasion of a state sponsored rally of Save Rivers Movement in Bori, Khana Local Government Area of Rivers State, by masked hoodlums who wielded guns and other dangerous weapons, destroying government and other vehicles and maiming many of those at the rally, including some senior government officials. (There’s no prize for guessing who and who were behind the brash hoodlums).
As Ms Ayo Obe, one of the three lead speakers at the dialogue and herself a leading human rights activist, said, Nigeria’s problem is not so much incumbency as the impunity with which not only incumbents but their officials and even relations and friends as well behave as if there will never be a day of reckoning. Most Nigerians would agree with Ms Obe, given the in-your-face breach of the laws of this country by the rich and powerful and the well-connected.
As an example of such impunity, the Bori invasion was typical of how those in authority at all levels of government have abused the powers they have, and worse, all too often usurped even those they do not have. In his comment on the invasion, the spokesman of the state’s police command, Ahmed Mohammed, said the rally was unauthorised. “Nobody,” he said “notified the police that there would be a rally in Bori.”
The Bori attack came exactly a week after the police itself dispersed another state sponsored rally in Port Harcourt during which a senior government official, Senator Magnus Abe, was reportedly shot with rubber bullets near his groin. Again the excuse was that it was unauthorised. That this was a ruse was obvious from the fact that a similar “unauthorised” rally by the opposition Grassroots Development Initiative whose patron is Mr Nyesom Wike, the Minister of Education and the local blue-eyed boy of President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience, was given police protection.
The claim by the police that one needs police permit to hold rallies or other forms of congregations is a clear usurpation of the old Public Order Act, which itself has been rendered null and void and of no effect by the 1999 Constitution and the long standing Court of Appeal ruling that the police has no powers to deny anyone his inalienable right to congregate and associate.
That act, to the extent that it existed, vested the power to give such permit or delegate it to any police officer of whatever rank not on the Inspector General of Police but on the governor of a state as its chief security officer. It is incongruous that Governor Rotimi Amaechi would ever have sent the police to disperse his own rally or that he would have looked the other way as hoodlums attacked a rally he sponsored.
The long drawn saga of the demise, last week, of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chair of PDP offers lessons about the ultimate futility of the impunity going on in Rivers – or any type of impunity for that matter; no matter how long it takes the chickens will always come home to roost. The emergence of Alhaji Adamu Muazu, two-term former governor of Bauchi State with a corruption case pending at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, as Alhaji Bamanga’s replacement, shows clearly that the lessons have not been learnt.
Speaking to some sheikhs who went to commiserate with him and pray for him following his forced resignation, Alhaji Tukur said he did his best to “reform the party by promoting the principle of election instead of selection and the idea of consensus instead of imposition.” Clearly the irony that he himself as a child of selection and imposition back in March 2012, could not have promoted virtues he never possessed, was completely lost on him.
In case the old man has forgotten, he needs to be reminded that he became chair of his party in spite of losing a preliminary shortlist by the North-East caucus of his party and because delegates at the mini-convention of dubious legality which followed were corralled by the authorities, kicking and screaming, into voting for him.
From such an inauspicious start everything he did to turn his party into a garrison of zombies whose only role was to do the biddings of those who selected and imposed him on the party – from quarrelling with anyone who disagreed with his ways through setting up a disciplinary committee not known to his party’s constitution to defying court orders for re-instating “rebellious” party officials – was predictable.
Equally predictable was his disgraceful “resignation”. Nothing underscores how disgraceful his forced departure was more than his own principal’s endorsement last Monday of Alhaji Adamu as his replacement, unwitting as those remarks seemed. The new chair, said President Jonathan, was the man the party needed now. “Somebody,” he said, “who can build the party, make friends and reach out.” PDP, he added, was now in need of people who would build bridges, not those who would only “fight, fight, fight.”
Coming from the president, the obvious insinuation in these words that Alhaji Tukur was too quarrelsome in his ways to have been an effective chair was not only unkind. It was also grossly unfair to the man whose unspoken but obvious brief was to deliver his party’s presidential ticket and the country to his principal in 2015. It all looked like the man, as was the case with all the past seven chairmen of the party going back to the late Chief Solomon Lar in 1999, was merely used and dumped. He may shortly be compensated with appointment as the next defence minister, as is being speculated, but no compensation coming at the twilight of his life as a near-Septuagenarian can ever make up for the fact that he is ending what should have been a glorious close to a long political career as a carpetbagger of someone young enough to be his son, age wise and politically.
Not surprisingly Alhaji Tukur has been blaming everyone but himself for his sad and tragic demise. In particular he has been blaming the media, the favourite whipping boy of everyone with lots of skeletons rattling away in their cupboards, for his failure. His enemies, he said, succeeded in the end in using the institution to bring him down. “Some members,” he told his visiting malams, “got so desperate that they turned to the media and funded all negative reports against me… They even attempted to use the media to get me in confrontation to with Mr. President.”
As a reporter, I will be the last to say that the media in Nigeria, as elsewhere, do not often fabricate news. They do. However, in Alhaji Tukur’s case those skeletons in his cupboard whose exposure by the media finally ended his attempt to run the affairs of his party with impunity were not the inventions of reporters and editors. Rather, they were the manifestations of his actions that, as with your typical politician, all too often belied what he preached.
In replacing Alhaji Tukur with someone with a question mark over his integrity it is obvious that the lesson that honesty of purpose is a higher value and is more likely to get results than mere loyalty has not been learnt by any of the parties in the long drawn saga of Tukur’s downfall.
PDP, it seems, is yet to get out of the woods into which the ambitions of a few men and the greed of their willing tools had dragged it long before Dr Jonathan became president.
