Decriminalising Nigeria’s Democratic Estate

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

A lot has been agitating my mind in recent times on the state of our union and why evil seems to continually thrive over good. Why is it that the things which disqualify people in other climes from holding public office are exactly what is needed by an average Nigerian politician to be considered astute?

In other climes, hardly will a certificate forger make a successful career in politics. In Nigeria the reverse is the case. Many of those in public office in Nigeria today forged their academic qualifications even when the bar is so ridiculously low that all you need to be president is the West African School Certification Examination, WASCE. You don’t even need to pass.

Chapter VI, Part I, Section 131 of the 1999 Constitution clearly states that a person may be qualified for election to the office of the president if: They are a citizen of Nigeria by birth; They have attained the age of 35 years (40 before 2018); They are a member of a political party and are sponsored by that political party; They have been educated up to at least School Certificate level or its equivalent.

To be a successful politician in Nigeria, your integrity quotient must be very low or you have the backing of an unscrupulous godfather who has the capacity to break bones and whip naysayers into line.

Sometime in 2005, Senator Nuhu Aliyu, a retired Deputy Inspector-General of Police, DIG, was surprised that some of his colleagues in the Red Chamber with the appellation, ‘Distinguished’, prefixing their names and the swagger of making laws for the good governance of the country, were people he had arrested, questioned and detained as the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, CID, of the Nigeria Police Force, Alagbon, Lagos.

In any other country, such a bombshell would have been enough to trigger a commensurate reaction from the system and the people. Not in Nigeria. There was no outrage, not even from the decent members of the Senate whose reputations were being tarnished by association. Instead, Aliyu’s charge withered under intense pressure from colleagues.

Last year, Senator Adamu Bulkachuwa confessed on the floor of the Senate that his wife, Zainab, used her position as a judge to favour his colleagues in the Red Chamber.

Zainab Bulkachuwa, a former president of the Court of Appeal – the first female to hold the position – presided over some landmark election cases with rulings that defied logic, the same way the incumbent Chief Justice of Nigeria’s judgement on January 14, 2020 sacking Imo State Governor Emeka Ihedioha and declaring Hope Uzodimma winner of the March 9, 2019 governorship election didn’t make any legal sense. Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun read the unanimous judgement of the seven-member panel.

Speaking at the Senate valedictory session, Bulkachuwa said he often influenced his wife’s decisions while she was in office.

“Particularly, my wife, whose freedom and independence I encroached upon while she was in office,” the All Progressives Congress, APC, lawmaker said. “And she has been very tolerant and accepted my encroachment and extended her help to my colleagues.”

So alarmed was the then Senate President Ahmad Lawan at what in other climes would have been the biggest scandal of the Fourth Republic, that he interjected before Bulkachuwa spoke any further. “Distinguished, I don’t think this is a good idea going this direction.”

But Lawan needed not worry. Nigerians knew, as a matter of fact that most, if not all judgements in such matters are procured. Even Lawan knew because as at the time he was interjecting he had just procured a fraudulent mandate from the judiciary in an election he was not even a candidate going by the provisions of the Electoral Act.

In her seminal autobiography, Bold Leap, Chris Anyanwu, an ace broadcaster, sublime journalist and media entrepreneur, who ventured into the murky waters of Nigerian politics and succeeded as a two-term senator labelled what she saw “political voodooism.”

Lifting the veil on the intricacies of election chicanery and subterfuge in Nigeria, Senator Anyanwu wrote: “Everything is bought. You buy votes to be nominated. You buy votes to be elected to office. And then you must pay to defend yourself from frivolous court cases and bad judgments. It is an all-round corrupting, wearying and spirit-crushing experience.”

On the disgrace that Nigerian courts have become, she pulled no punches. “Unfortunately, the Nigerian judiciary seems to have been infected with the national malaise of corruption so that there is never a guarantee that anyone who comes for justice can get it without financial inducement.”

Senator Anyanwu said the rot starts long before the general elections are held. “Congress is the fountainhead of Nigeria’s election mess,” she wrote. “The system is set up for failure from the foundation. The evolution process is flawed, rigged by manipulation, warped by corruption and the good people undermined and alienated by the fraud, occultism, crookedness, violence and psychological terror.”

This explains why Nigeria is not making any progress despite the so-called 25 years of democracy and will not make any progress unless something drastic is done to halt the ominous drift into the unsavoury chasm of criminality.

Nigeria will not make progress in the circumstance because no one steals political power and uses it for public good. Nigeria’s democracy has essentially become a criminal enterprise and that felonious and immoral substructure must be effectively dismantled before any kind of progress can be made.

Now, decriminalising the country’s political space will be no mean feat. And we cannot pray ourselves out of the quagmire because those who control the levers of power did not get there by accident. They have used 25 years to perfect their trickery and consolidate their hold on power. The heist is almost complete.

Today, we have an Inspector General of Police, who, statutorily, is no longer in service and therefore ineligible to remain in office. But he has been “illegally awarded” four more years because he is considered a safe hand. The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, is brazenly being populated with card-carrying members of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, contrary to the dictates of laws of the land.

The judiciary is effectively in the column of these astute politicians with the “minister of court affairs” doing a yeoman’s job by constructing for the hapless judges plush houses. Today, everything is being done to ensure that Musiliu Akinsanya, popularly known as MC Oluomo, takes over as the president of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, NURTW. Strenuous effort is deployed by the powers that be to harass the de jure national president, Alhaji Tajudeen Baruwa, out of office.

Recently, MC Oluomo claimed that he was elected unopposed as the union’s national president in Osogbo and he is still parading himself as such, even when a three-member Appeal Court panel comprising Justices Hamma Akawu Barka, Nnamdi Okwy Dimgba and Asmau Ojuolape Akanbi, nullified his so-called presidency and reaffirmed Baruwa as the legitimate NURTW president.

The only reason that the powers that be are going to this extent to destabilise the NURTW is perhaps because of the politics of 2027. Sure of the judiciary, police and INEC, they want to ensure that the fourth leg is in place by bringing in a man who will be in-charge of the thugs.

This is the nature of politics in Nigeria. It is the criminal enterprise that Chris Anyanwu saw and wrote about in her new book. And that explains why rather than making any progress, every New Year ushers in more horrendous misery. No progress can be made in the circumstance unless this fatuous estate of criminality is decriminalised by taking politics out of the hands of quislings who are ruining our collective patrimony. 

*Amaechi is the publisher of TheNiche