The King Is Naked, Why Fear The King?

 By Felix Oguejiofor

A naked king is like the legendary naked truth: both are contemptible, unwanted.

As the legend goes, truth, always impeccably dressed in white, was the darling of everyone. On the other hand, lie, always dirty and in rags, was despised by everyone, a complete turn-off. One day, according to the legend, truth went to the stream to bathe and, to be sure, she removed her white clothes, put them by the side of the river and dived into the water. Lie, ever looking to better her lot at the expense of truth, took the latter’s white clothes, put them on and ran away.

Truth came out of the water in her full nakedness and ran after lie, to no avail. In one of the most dramatic examples of trading places, well before the legendary Eddy Murphy and Dan Aykroyd acted it out in the 1983 epic American comedy film, Trading Places, lie, now resplendently dressed in white (white lie) became society’s darling while truth, now completely naked and unkempt, became society’s despised and unwanted. As it is today, while many would rather be told ‘white’ lies, very many others are simply loathe to hear the ‘naked’ truth. Meaning that even truth, once it becomes naked, becomes abhorrent!

When I first read about this legend in one of columnist Ike Abonyi’s must-read pieces in his Thursday Political Musings column in New Telegraph, it struck me as quite symbolic of the current Nigerian situation: our king is, certainly, naked now and the aura of the throne gone. So, society must of necessity redeem itself. Or will the cabinet answer to a naked king on the throne? Will a land and people allow a naked king to interact and conduct business with other kingdoms on their behalf? Will the palace guards still give their limbs to protect a naked king insistent on sitting on the throne of their forefathers?

In ancient Israel, as recorded in the Bible, once the glory of God left a king, he was all but dead to the kingdom. Until his death, Saul was only a king in mouth after the God of Moses and Joshua pulled His support from His own anointed and gave it to David. It was obvious from the unimaginable missteps of Bubu that the glory of God had long left his ‘house and kingdom’ (read APC).

Indeed, while the lifeless one was king, we, at first, lived in mortal fear of him. Because we thought he was a king with his clothes on. For a moment, even our eternally erratic power supply stabilized and we were only too happy to ascribe the development to the king’s aura and our fear of him. The usually disruptive, not to say sabotaging, electricity workers, it was said, were afraid of the long, punishing hands of the presumably no-nonsense king. Until we discovered that he was nothing more that a hobbled Khalifa, one with neither the purity of heart nor the wisdom that progressive leadership required: he was just an existence in time and space – a naked king without any substance!

Needless to say that our honeymoon with Bubu was brief, nothing more than a year plus, before he was completely unmasked as a man with nothing to offer as a leader. What we did was to stop fearing him and start despising him. Any surprise that Bubu, to say the least, was such a disaster, a leader who turned Nigeria upside-down for the eight years he answered president?

Unfortunately for the current king, he became naked from the very beginning. Therefore, having known or seen him inside out, what do we have again to fear him for? As my friend Abraham Ogbodo recently offered in one incisive piece on a platform to which I also belong, Bola Tinubu has no wherewithal to recommend him for the Nigerian presidency beyond the corrupting influence of money. Of the three most prominent presidential candidates in the February 25, 2023 election, Tinubu has the least national appeal. And one doesn’t even have to believe former SGF, Babachir Lawal’s word for it. For, as they say, by their fruits we shall know them. And, of course, PBAT’s fruits aren’t exactly the universally or, if you will, nationally consumable types.

So, yes, why would the Nigerian establishment still hail this king? Striped of all moral authority (thanks to the recent discoveries about his embarrassing propensity for forgeries) to reward good behaviour or punish infractions, why would the operators of this system still appear so willing to do the bidding of this king, even to the extent of courting the risk of practically throwing the nation under the bus without a tinge of conscience? Why so eager to please a naked king?

Let’s face it, what judicial system would garland a man whose obvious infractions of the law warrant that he should actually be out of circulation for his sins? While Bubu was clean enough (or so we thought initially) to harass even the judiciary and get away with it, on what grounds would the Nigerian judiciary subject itself to the current public pillory and odium that have become its lot, for the sake of one man whose records have been proven by courts of competent jurisdiction in Nigeria and elsewhere to be unwholesome, unable to withstand any legal scrutiny?

What debts of obligation, which must be repaid even at the risk of  destroying the foundations of the nation’s democracy, does the Nigerian judiciary owe PBAT and others like him holding positions of trust in society but with personal records that are clearly at odds with what are permissible under the law? Would the Nigerian Bench and Bar so conveniently destroy the hallowed position of the judiciary as every democracy’s bulwark against dictatorship and other manipulative geniuses of politicians, simply on the altar self-aggrandizement?

Elsewhere in the world (as we recently saw in the case of Atiku Abubakar v Bola Tinubu in the district courts of Illinois, Chicago, the United States), the judiciary gets people who infract the law to account for their actions, irrespective of their status in life.  Immediate past President of the of the United States, Mr. Donald Trump has been in and out of courts since leaving office in 2020 for his alleged offences against the law, in his private and business life. Every attempt by President Tinubu’s lawyers to prevent the Illinois courts from forcing Chicago State University (CSU) to release the president’s academic records expectedly fell through because the United States courts couldn’t be dissuaded from releasing the documents whose release, the courts were persuaded, was in public interest.

 

 The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had initially said it would not make public its files on PBAT until 2026 but had to decide otherwise, agreeing to release them batch by batch starting this month (beginning from October 23, to be precise). The FBI’s change of plan followed a freedom of information request filed last year by Aaron Greenspan, owner of PlainSite, a website that pushes anti-corruption and transparency in public service,  in collaboration with Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin. Again, the need to serve justice in public interest overrode the technicality of the seeming inviolability of FBI’s rules and schedules, hence the decision to release PBAT’s well ahead the earlier scheduled 2026. Although PBAT’s lawyers are fighting hard to prevent those FBI files on him from being made public, it is most likely that, as in his case with Atiku, the Nigerian leader will have his files with FBI made public as already scheduled by the agency.

 

That is what Nigerians expect from their judiciary: to always courageously stand on the side of justice for the many and not destroy its own essence just to serve the interests of a few powerful elements in society. As the Supreme Court hears LP presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi and his PDP counterpart, Atiku Abubakar’s appeals against the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) dismissing their petitions against INEC’s declaration of Tinubu as winner of this year’s February 25 presidential election, starting this Monday, the question many have asked and continue to ask is, will the Nigerian judiciary ditch technicalities and stand on the side of justice for the many this time around?

Soon, very soon, that question will be answered one way or another.

*Oguejiofor is a commentator on public issues 

The Bola Tinubu Papers

 By Ugo Onuoha

Alhaji Bola Ahmed [or Adekunle] Tinubu’s plot to become Nigeria’s president was not incubated only over the last 24 years as appears to be the refrain in recent years. It has been a lifelong ambition and he said so himself in the presidential villa in Abuja in January.

A man who had no sinister plot will not willfully erase and expunge and diligently hide his beginning and his early childhood as Tinubu has done successfully or so it seems, until now. Even if he was born in the Dark Age, there was no way his first twenty-something years on earth would have disappeared to the extent that they have almost become irrecoverable.

Federal Republic of Fiction @ 63

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is fiction. The country’s Constitution has been transferred to a new shelf in the library: the shelf containing fictional works. The latter-day patriots of Nigeria can cry all they want against me, but in this instance I only choose to stand solidly in solidarity with the words that Samuel Johnson uttered on the evening of April 7, 1775, to wit: “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

There can never be a short supply of toadies and ill-assorted scoundrels defending the many fictions of the government of Nigeria in this new age when former activists and revolutionaries have turned into government spies and informants. 

Tinubu-CSU Certificate Saga And Nigeria’s Value System

 By Emeka Alex Duru

No matter how one tries not to bother at the certificate issue involving President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Chicago State University (CSU), the institution he claimed to have attended for a degree, the matter keeps popping up. Like the mythical incubus, the bad dream which hardly dies, it keeps coming and does not let go. In a way, it has become a sore on the thumb, which only Tinubu can cure. 

In our days in the rested The Post Express newspapers, a hardworking colleague was about being made the daily editor, when, overnight, his rival contemporaries connived with corrupt minds in the administration department and all his academic records were removed from his file, leaving only the West African School Certificate. The smart Aleks had their way and rumours were injected into the organisation that he was not adequately educated for the position.