Mohammed Adamu
For the PDP, barely then a two-tern ruling party which was now provocatively attired in rose-tinted glasses and had in fact started romanticizing the idea of a 65-year hegemony, nothing could’ve been more reassuring than that it did also realize the need to concretize -in its constitution- a power-sharing philosophy. And what better policy could there have been, to carry along the nation’s mutually-distrusting geo-ethnic and ethno-religious divides especially of the north and the south.
It was the sudden death of President Yar’Adua barely two years into his first term in office that would soon throw a spanner in the works of that power-sharing provision of the PDP constitution. By the way the North, many observed, had virtually no issue with a bereaved South-south Vice President Goodluck Jonathan constitutionally assuming office as president to complete Yar’Aduua’s first term’s unexpired residue of two years. Nor would the North have had any issue with Jonathan probably also proceeding to contest the 2011 Presidential election in lieu, again, of what would’ve been the North’s presumptive second term –had Yar’Aduua not died at the time that he did.
For all that the North would’ve cared, this virtual force majeure distorting the power-sharing arrangement, could have been converted into a post-dated debt of sort, owed the North by the South, to be redeemed amicably sometime, somewhere and somehow in the political future. Jonathan truly was a child of good fortune. But how miserably, you’ll wonder, did he and the party bungle this waiting gratuity by the carelessly callous manner in which they both had handled the late Yar’Adua’s terminal indisposition.
What had provoked especially northern elements of the PDP in 2011 to insist that the party respected its zoning principle and deny Jonathan platform for contest soon after he had just completed his late principal’s first term, was not necessarily for the heck of the due diligence of respecting the party constitution. Rather it was informed by the need to pay both party and Jonathan in their own coins for the denigrating treatment meted to the North’s terminally-ill Yar’Adua whose only offence was that he had to be ambulanced, under sudden emergency condition, to a Saudi Arabian hospital without having to ‘transmit’ a letter to the NASS –a constitutionally requirement necessary to make Vice President Good Luck Jonathan ‘Acting President’. President Yar’Adua had gone to his grave with the albatross of that collective angst even though he was prepared to sign that letter on his sick bed but for the medical and administrative exigencies of the Saudi Hospital that we were told had censored all physical contact with the ailing Yar’Adua including by his wife Turai.
And this was in spite of the fact that going by the clear wordings of Section 143 of the constitution, the tone for the requirement of such letter was with the conditional adverb ‘whenever the president transmits…’ rather than with the obligatory verb, ‘the president shall transmit’. Meaning that, that presidential duty of remitting a letter to the legislature whenever the president was away, was essentially ‘discretionary’ and not (as many had argued), ‘mandatory’. But Jonathan had insisted that without being formally proclaimed ‘Acting President’ he did not think that he had the constitutional powers merely as vice president, to assume and to discharge the functions of a president. Many had rightly observed that this was merely a ploy to use Yar’Adua’s indisposition to create a constitutional crisis. And it did –or almost.
In retrospect, quite a number of eminent lawyers had said that what Jonathan needed to have done even in his capacity as vice president was to assume those powers outright by ignoring the anarchic naysayers who were insisting that unless he was made ‘Acting President’ it would be ultra vires his office to exercise the powers of the President and Commander-In-Chief. Had he done so, Jonathan would then have been pushing the onus on those who would think that he was over-capacitating himself with to be the ones to go to court to challenge his assumption of those powers. They said that Jonathan should not have played into the schemes of geo-ethnic champions whose sole objective was to plunge the nation into a needless constitutional crisis.
Eventually Femi Falana it was who had gone to court praying for an order to cause a bed-ridden Yar’Adua to remit a letter to the National Assembly, NASS or in the alternative to order the National Assembly to invoke the ‘doctrine of necessity’ and make Jonathan ‘Acting President’. And even after Justice Abutu of the Federal High Court had dismissed Falana’s suit after ruling that Jonathan in his capacity as vice president did not lack any powers to give presidential directives, Jonathan had still been prevailed upon especially by us the media to remain intransigent. He had continued to play the victim of a power mongering North unwilling to surrender power even in such presumably transient period that it should take for the recuperation the president. This had done incalculable harm to the North, worsening an already poor public perception of a ‘born-to-rule’ mentality that is still said to be typically northern.
Ironically Jonathan’s refusal to swear in some permanent secretaries was not long after he had previously moved the army to Jos to quell some ethno-religious crisis there –probably because not doing so then would’ve cast aspersion on his sense of discretion under such terribly bloodletting emergency. In fact it was this that had given Jonathan away as one acting a script designed to falsely give the impression that the ship of state was rudderless and on auto-pilot because a bed-ridden northern president would not obey the constitution.
And even when the time came to swear in Justice Katsina-Alu as the new Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, after Justice Legbo Kutigi, Jonathan was still on this high horse insisting that unless he was made ‘Acting President’ he would not perform the function of a president. Justice Kutigi in fact had to bury himself in the archives to unearth and dust off an old ‘Oath Act’ in which he claimed he had found some residual powers sufficient for an outgoing CJN to swear in his successor. And which was exactly what Kutigi had done -to avoid departing and leaving a vacuum that could’ve caused a constitutional crisis. No one had sued to challenge this novelty perhaps because it would further have betrayed the motive of the Jonathan agent provocateurs to cause a constitutional crisis with the goal of getting rid of a what they claimed was a ‘bodily infirm’ Yar’Adua.
And maybe it was the reason that side by side with seeking a proactive judicial interpretation of Section 143 of the constitution on transmission of letter to NASS for the elevation of Jonathan to acting president, Falana’s suit had also sought the judicial invocation of Section 144 of the constitution on the president’s alleged permanent incapacity –the objective being to get the court to order the Federal Executive Council to kick-start the constitutional process of declaring Yar’Adua permanently incapacitated and thus to get Jonathan seamlessly ascend the throne.
- To be continued
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