By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Delivering a lecture titled “Prospects for Democratic
Consolidation in Africa: Nigeria’s Transition”, on Thursday, February 16, 2015,
at the Chatham House, London, the then presidential candidate of the All
Progressives Congress, APC, General Muhammadu Buhari, claimed he was a
“converted democrat”.
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| *President Buhari |
“I have heard and read references to me as a
former dictator in many respected British newspapers, including the well
regarded Economist,” he intoned. “Let me say without sounding defensive that
dictatorship goes with military rule, though some might be less dictatorial
than others. I take responsibility for whatever happened under my watch.”
But he claimed
that was in his earlier incarnation. He has morphed into a new being. “I cannot
change the past. But I can change the present and the future. So, before you is
a former military ruler and a converted democrat who is ready to operate under
democratic norms.”
The applause was thunderous. Buhari claimed, without
providing any proof other than the fragile reed of contesting three
presidential elections, the results of which he repudiated because he lost,
that global watersheds such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the collapse of communism and the end of the
Cold War, convinced him that democracy as a system of government was
unassailable.
The international community was sucked into the fantasy and
vigorously promoted his candidacy. Three years after taking oath of office, the
ululation has quietened and many are scratching their heads for answers, which
is a surprise. Did Nigerians actually believe Buhari’s self-proclaimed
‘Damascene moment?’ Isn’t it said that an old woman is never old when it comes
to the dance she knows — that old habits die hard? Anyone who fell for Buhari’s
‘Damascus Road’
yarn obviously did not reckon with the Igbo adage that says no one learns how
to be left-handed in old age. But there are some people who also argue that it
was good Nigerians believed candidate Buhari’s shaggy-dog story.
If not, he would have most conveniently toppled Chief Obafemi
Awolowo from his perch as best president Nigeria never
had. The president can no longer lay any claim now or in the future to being
the country’s messiah because, to borrow a cliché, the taste of the pudding is
in the eating, and in three years Nigerians have had a mouthful of the
president’s dessert.
What the Buhari presidency is doing is a norm-bursting power
play that is endangering our democracy because it takes more than contesting
elections to be a democrat. When the Presidency whimsically ignores court
orders and dissenting voices are hounded by security agents, it sets a new
democracy low.
Last week, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice,
Abubakar Malami, told the Voice of America that the former National Security
Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, arrested since 2015 and granted bail multiple times by
courts of competent jurisdiction, the latest being on July 2, 2018, cannot be
released because a law that only himself is privy to, dictates that personal
right can be violated on the altar of public good without telling Nigerians how
Dasuki’s freedom of movement infringes on the wellbeing of Nigerians. In his
hackneyed logic, to save Nigeria from
itself, its laws that essentially regulate the conduct of both the government
and the governed, must be violated. But Dasuki’s case is not peculiar.
Despite several court orders that the Shiites leader, Sheik
Ibrahim El-zakzakky, his wife and other members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria,
IMN, be released from detention, government has refused to let go. Buhari is
taking Nigeria down
the path of tyranny. He has no respect for the judiciary and is highly
contemptuous of the legislature. Egged on by duplicitous hangers-on, he holds
the grandiose, but patently erroneous, belief that in a democracy only he
should rule Nigeria.
In flagrant violation of Section 80(2) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended),
which prohibits withdrawal and expenditure of public money except as
appropriated by the National Assembly, the President recently withdrew $1
billion from the public till for the so-called fight against Boko Haram
insurgency and $462 million for the purchase of fighter jets from the U.S.
without National Assembly’s authorisation.
He cannot claim as
George Washington, America’s first president, did in his letter to Catherine
Macaulay Graham on January 9, 1790 that his “station is new” or to be walking
on “untrodden ground,” because as Nigeria’s president in 2015, he is not
re-inventing the wheels of democracy, which was what Washington did, literally.
President Washington had no precedents to fall back on. Buhari has and,
therefore, has no excuse for the pervasive impunity orchestrated by executive
lawlessness.
Matters came to a head on Tuesday when security
operatives, in an apparent bid to abort the mass defection of National Assembly
members from the ruling APC to PDP stormed the Abuja homes of the Senate
President, Bukola Saraki, and Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu in the
early hours. The idea was to ensure that they never left their homes and
possibility to create the enabling environment for the President’s loyalists in
the Senate to effect a regime change. That was bare-knuckle politics. As 2019
approaches, the gloves are off.
While they succeeded in putting Ekweremadu under house
arrest, Saraki, who was to appear before the police same day for further
investigation into his alleged role in the Offa robbery killings in Kwara State,
outsmarted them. Expectedly, both the Presidency and the police have denied any
complicity. In a statement late on Tuesday, the Presidency came out swinging
against what it called relentless allegations of presidential interference in
the affairs of security agencies across the country. “It is odd, strange and
bizarre that while ordinary citizens can be called up to answer questions or be
interrogated, the VIP cannot be questioned without the annoying insinuations of
partisanship, persecution or outright politicisation,” the presidential
spokesman, Garba Shehu, said. “This country cannot achieve development when
important cases are viewed through a political prism and the law is considered
as being applicable to some, and not applicable to others. The law of the land
is intended for all, not for the poor or those at the lowest rungs of the
social ladder.”
The Presidency’s
justification for the manifest impunity that now walks on all fours in the land
barely passes the laugh test.
But even more ridiculous is the statement by the
police claiming that the authorities did not deploy the personnel that besieged
the two homes and suggesting that “the police personnel seen in pictures in the
media were those in the convoy of the Senate President and others attached to
him.” No-matter how anyone may wish to spin it, the events of Tuesday represent
a significant ratcheting up of the attacks on Nigeria’s
democracy.
Repression of fundamental rights being experienced under the
Buhari government diminishes the sacrifices made by ordinary people who
resisted military dictatorship, which he was a primary beneficiary. But one
thing is certain. When roused, Nigerians don’t roll over. And President Buhari
ought to know that. After all, he was there with General Sani Abacha when the
late maximum ruler roused Nigerians with the same malevolent tendencies. How it
all ended is still recent history.
