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
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