Tag: wilderness

Finally, the first governor under the auspices of the Jonathan-led civilian administration has been impeached. The elephants who won are celebrating; the elephants who lost are quiet, while the familiar grass, never in the picture whenever the evil plot is hatched, remains in the backyard of the country, staring bleakly in abject and institutionalised solitude. One must start by saying that democracy as a system of government is not new to Nigeria, save that in the last 50 years, those who have managed the country have not learned any meaningful lesson, those who are currently in charge have stubbornly refused to learn any lesson, and the people who should challenge this microscopic few and either force them to learn those hard lessons or be thrown out of power, have been maniacally robbed of their capacity to do so by long years of systematic and careful politically programmed agenda promoting mass illiteracy, poverty, nepotism, ethnicity and in the extreme case, blind greed.

From the time the British colonialists surreptitiously abandoned the government and the people of Nigeria in the hands of their cronies in the then fading colonial enterprise, the Nigerian Project has continued along a familiar line of history. Thus, while the helpless and apparently orphaned nation did continue to change hands, with each change having about the same set of characters reshuffling themselves under different guise, each of this set of ruthless beneficiaries of the British imposed confusion, made sure they left the country worse than they met it, and each made sure the same familiar history their unkind parents told them of how the country was run aground, was successfully retold by them.

To start with, it is familiar history that after the then Northern People’s Congress (NPC) came to power in December 1959, on the wings of its clandestine deal with the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC), the final question to determine the political future of the infant Nigerian State, was whether the then federal powers in Lagos, would be ready to tolerate any major opposition in the next General elections. It became evident very early that the then ruling government, was in no mood for such and this it evidenced by immediately setting to work to discredit and destroy the opposition. To achieve this, it found willing hands by which it immediately engineered serious crisis in the then Western region via the Western House of Assembly. The crisis was yet to simmer when the elephants who supposedly won that fight coasted home to victory in the 1964 General Elections. As it is said, those who sow the wind are condemned to reaping the whirlwind. Thus, was it that before the winning elephants could settle down to savour the supposed gains of their stolen victory, they were unceremoniously thrown out of power, through the barrels of the gun. And so the First Republic ended in wanton disgrace. Ordinarily, anyone would have thought this would be enough lessons for any right-thinking society, but like it is said, when a people fail to learn from history, they are bound to repeat it.

In a familiar move, as the announcement of General Elections was made in 1978 as a prelude to the Second Republic, the disgraced men of 1966 quickly regrouped under different banners. Again, like a cat with nine lives, the NPC-NCNC marriage of 1959 resurfaced under a new brand called the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). With no clearly significant or manifestly prosperous manifesto, the NPN grabbed powers on a self-styled misrepresentation of 12 two-thirds votes of the people, who apparently may not even have been able to understand the then big grammar of the constitution. As it was the case in the 60 to 66 episode, these political gangsters looted the country to the bone, pilfered the treasury to ruins, and turned their fatherland to a beggarly nation.

The NPN took off from where the NPC-NCNC hung its boots of intolerance in 1966, and sought to destroy the opposition. Again, a massive crisis was engineered in the Western region, through willing hands in the then Ondo-State and at the end, 1966 was simply rehearsed and repeated, as the elephants that claimed to have won in a landslide, were thereafter again thrown out of power in a gun-slide.

Then came 1999. The remaining NPN unspent warlords, not minding the disgrace of the Buhari-Babangida-Abacha trio, who made sure they were reduced to the status of errand boys, only fit to lick the boots of the military all the way from 84 to 98,  still emerged as the overnight moneybags, who stood as potential bidders for the May 29 electoral process. Thus, again Nigeria’s electoral fortune was effectively nipped in the bud, while the country was safely put in the pockets of the old gang. Where some had been forced into retirement, they simple replaced themselves with their foreign-trained sons and daughters, who go about huffy and puffy in their American accent talking, not forgetting to tag their father’s name to their maiden name. The old political cargo and their new found friends in ex-generals quickly arranged themselves in different spheres of power, each quietly grabbing whatever he can, with the other looking the other way. As long as the cake is enough to go round, no quarrel is sure to be heard. A few instances, where disgruntled faction made to open the can of worms, it was quickly treated as a family affair and a deal brokered.

To secure this treasure chest, which ceaselessly flows from dirty oil money unaccounted for, history is consistently overlooked, commonsense habitually cast into the bin, and federal power is deployed to destroy whatever opposition may try to rear its head to challenge the status quo. Crisis of different fashion is plotted and seed of confusion is sowed consistently. After all, as the rulers reason when confusion is everywhere, name-calling become easy and it effectively in favour he who has the largest machinery to succeed better in name-calling. He has all the control of the Military, the Police, appoints nearly all Heads of anything that matter and controls the largest chunk of the available wealth, can easily cause confusion and claim that the weaker party is trying to make the country ungovernable.  And since the people are hardly that well-educated, once a lie is repeated to their hearing over and over again via federal power propaganda; it sooner than later becomes the truth to them. They defend it as Transformation Ambassadors or pay for paid adverts as Protectors of Nigeria’s democracy and sometimes they claim that claim that those who are for them are far more than those who are against them.

For anyone, who is right-thinking, the Nyako impeachment did not come as a surprise. Verily too, whatever plot may be in the works against Al Makura is not going to end up as something new. Such events only represent a familiar chain of transaction when ruthless politicians seize the soul of a nation. It doesn’t matter what Nyako did or did not do, that counts for nothing when federal power decides that grabbing power in your state is a matter of do or die.  Those who sponsored Nyako’s removal are not unknown, just the same way those who sponsored the removal of Adegbenro in 1962, were not unknown. They are in the seat of power in Abuja. After all if Nyako had remained in PDP, giving strength to the PDP number, no matter what his offence may be, it would simply have been treated as a family affair.

But that is Nigeria’s familiar story, a story of history ignored, history repeated. A story of the worst governing the best.

If the same grounds that were used to impeach Nyako, were to be taken as valid, should those who sponsored Nyako’s impeachment not have been removed a long time ago? It is settled in Law, that the greatest impeachable offence any President can commit is to grossly violate the Constitution he so swore to uphold and protect. Yet, this has been a celebrated and recurring decimal under the current administration, with not as much as a whimper. Not only has the current administration violated the constitution so manifestly, it has nonchalantly corrupted itself with arrogated power that it does not have, consistently making the country a laughing stock in the international community. Yet, these acts remain permanently under the carpet, in a high-powered desperate political conspiracy to actualise 2015 at all cost. This is what happens when desperate politicians have learnt no lessons and do not have the capacity to learn any. They care less about the number of evil plots they can commission to remain in power, as long as they can take flight once the ship capsizes.

• Adegbite, Esq. is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.