You Cannot Swear-In A President Twice

 By Obi Nwakanma

“If you do not know where to put your hand, rest it on the knee” – Igbo proverb.

The inauguration of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria into office is a pretty serious constitutional event. It transfers power definitively to an individual who is then expected to embody the moral, philosophical, visionary, and constitutional ideals of the nation, and direct the executive function of state. The Constitution establishes the power of Nigeria in three institutions of state: the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, and the President. The National Assembly makes the laws.

The Supreme Court interprets those laws, including the permanent laws established by the Constitution. The President, as the Head of the executive branch of the three arms, executes the laws. These three powers together make up the Federal Government. They operate separately, and each is granted the power to oversee the other in order to create a balance of power, and prevent the misuse of authority. For instance, the National Assembly, which is actually the most powerful institution of state in a democratic republic, controls the Treasury of Nigeria, by law. Not the President.

The President can only spend money legitimately approbated annually by the Act of the National Assembly following the budget session. It is the National Assembly that authorizes the Treasury – the Accountant General of the Federation – to release money to the President. Without such vires money cannot be released or spent by the executive branch, which is, largely speaking, the institutional organization of state led by a permanent bureaucracy – the Civil Service. The President is required by law to manage the Civil Service, by whom his policies are designed and executed, and render an annual account to the nation through the National Assembly about how he has judiciously and legally spent the money he asks for from Parliament.

A joint session of the National Assembly must, following receipt of the AuditorGeneral’s annual report which is sent to it, demand an account of the performance of the budget as established in the annual Financial Act. Misuse of the powers of the office of President leads to an investigation of the President, or any head of the executive branch, and possibly to sanctions, including impeachment and imprisonment of a President. The President of Nigeria is the highest trustee of state and swears an oath of allegiance to Nigeria. But a President can quite clearly become a secret agent and weapon of a foreign power, a religious movement, an international criminal mafia, or a drug cartel, which could use blackmail, physical threats, shared faith or ideology, or deadly financial self-interest as bait to force him to subvert the strategic interests of the nation he leads.

For instance, no one knows to what extent the current President has been compromised, or corrupted, or forced to undermine Nigeria’s economic and political security, using the presidential office as cover. Yet, he is a classic case for investigation: he has all the makings of a President who may have been compromised. For one, he has spent sixtyfive percent of his time as President in foreign hospitals and under the blade of foreign doctors outside the control of Nigeria’s national security apparatus. Who knows what shadowy international interests for whom these doctors work?

It may just as well be all covered, but I am playing the devil’s advocate. It is just that serious nations do not permit their Presidents to be so vulnerable to another power with this matter of life and death. Under Buhari the national security vote tripled; Nigeria spent far more money on arms purchase than on education or agriculture; Nigeria’s foreign policy, particularly with regards to the defense of the Sahel, was, radically, quietly dismantled. Bandits could come in and out of places like Zamfara, for instance, to steal gold. The power of the Nigerian state was dismantled.

Nigeria could no longer intervene vigorously in defending Africa’s strategic interests and standing. The Nigeria that could muster that fierce fighting force -ECOMOG – for regional and continental defense seems to be gone. Yet the National Assembly played possum. Of course, we have been electing mostly ‘Yahoo Boys’ to our Assemblies. They have never held the executive branch to account. Many of these legislators are poorly educated, and have no ideas about constitutional government, and about their roles, beyond being rubber stamps to any administration in power.

For instance, the Presidents in the last twenty five years have been operating sham budgets, committing all kinds of financial and administrative atrocities, and withholding vital information, including the operations of the oil profits, and other national security information from the National Assembly without consequence. It ought to be that the Senate President, the Speaker of the House, and the Chair and members of the National Assembly Security and Intelligence Committee ought by law to receive the same daily security briefing as the President every morning on Nigeria’s national security estimates.

The Judicial Committee of the National Assembly must also receive its daily briefings from the Attorney General’s office, who is the lawyer of the government, and not Attorney to the President. They have always never understood their strategic roles in the security and well-being of Nigeria. But there is the other fact too, that the President of Nigeria is a very powerful position. He has under him control of all the coercive forces which could be deployed, as Buhari did in his tenure, to harass and intimidate the other arms of government. That is why as an individual, the President embodies the definitive power of state.

Once sworn-in and installed, unless by death or impeachment, the Constitution makes this clear, the President cannot be removed. The very ritual of swearing-in, when the individual swears the oath of allegiance and oath of the office of President, to defend the Constitution, and the state, constitutes the fundamental basis of power and control, and is, therefore, not conducted lightly. Once such an individual has been sworn-in, you cannot swear in another on the basis of the same mandate. It is unconstitutional to swear-in a President twice. Two fundamental principles are at play in this regard: one is the question of legitimacy, and the other is the question of standing.

That is why it is imperative to stop this illegal move to swear in the man Bola Ahmed Tinubu unless the constitutional and legal issues arising from his declaration as ‘president-elect’ by INEC are resolved. I had made this point in the last ‘Orbit’ and it bears repeating and further elaboration, because it is an urgent issue. It is a national security issue. He has been declared ‘president-elect’ by INEC, but before he is sworn-in and declared President of Nigeria, the tribunal must settle the weighty questions raised about whether Bola Tinubu has, in fact, been duly and properly elected; whether his alleged dual citizenship qualifies him in the first place to contest; whether the results as announced by INEC are accurate and verifiable; whether he is an ex-convict from being part of an international drug trade. 

These are weighty allegations. The Chief Justice cannot swear-in a man whose case he is likely to adjudicate on the Supreme Court. That would further jeopardize the integrity of the court. This republic is about to spin into a death dance if the unresolved questions are left hanging, and this APC administration recklessly, and in utter disregard of the Constitution, and the wishes of Nigerians, chooses the convenient partisan path, over the national security question, and the legitimate, constitutional, and institutional idea that preserves the sanctity of the republic. The first casualty will be the Constitution.

The second will be the legitimacy and standing of the office of the President. So, let us say the tribunal, and following it the Supreme Court, affirms Tinubu’s election, in a clear, untrammeled, judicial decision, no problem. But let us also imagine that the courts find Obi or Atiku’s challenges worthy, and grant their plea, and either is found to be the duly elected President of Nigeria, what then becomes Tinubu? Would he be ex-president having been sworn-in to office? Worse still, could he trigger the coercive powers which he would already have amassed, having been sworn-in, to shut down the legal challenge, or its outcome? This is pretty serious, and Nigerians must rise to stop this charade investiture.

*Nwakanma is a poet, scholar and public intellectual