By Chuks
Iloegbunam
The fight against insurgency is not as straightforward as swatting
a fly. In the past week, I have snatched every free time that strayed into my
schedules to critically look again at two invaluable books on Nigeria.
Professor Ben Nwabueze (SAN), one of Africa’s
most renowned constitutional lawyers, authored both. The one book is How
President Obasanjo Subverted Nigeria’s
Federal System; the other is How President Obasanjo Subverted the Rule of
Law and Democracy. Gold Press Limited, Ibadan, published the books simultaneously in
2007. These seminal works, each of 22 chapters, pack a combined pagination
running to nearly a thousand pages. They demonstrate incontrovertibly that Nigeria’s
primary political problem issues directly from the bastardization of its
Federal constitution.
This indictment appears on the blurb of How President Obasanjo subverted
the Rule of Law and Democracy: “This
is an account of how President Obasanjo turned Nigeria from a law-governed
state, a legal order, bequeathed to us by the British colonialists, into a
lawless one; from an organization of power and coercive force limited and
regulated by, and to be exercised in accordance with, law into a system of
personal rule in which law was replaced more or less by arbitrary whims and
personal political interests of one individual, and in which government actions
were determined largely by might, by the application of organized coercive
force in the exclusive monopoly of the state, altogether careless of legality.”
Anyone who reads these books will find detailed examples, page
after page, of how a man elected to promote the development of his country’s
nascent democracy behaved, by words and actions, like a bull in a china shop.
Professor Nwabueze detailed how Obasanjo’s government wantonly
bastardized the concept of the separation of powers, how, in illegality, it
forced Governors DSP Alamieyeseigha (Bayelsa State), and Rashidi Ladoja (Oyo
State) from office; how it illegally impeached Governors Joshua Dariye
(Plateau State) and Ayo Fayose (Ekiti State); how that government compromised
the judiciary; how it turned the Department of State Security (DSS) and the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) into Leviathans for the
annihilation of perceived opposition; and how Obasanjo routinely violated
Governors’ constitutional immunity. The books detail countless other anti-Federal
acts and actions perpetrated under Obasanjo’s watch.
Two questions arise:
(1) How did Obasanjo literally get away with murder?
(2) Is today’s Nigeria
a regression into a nightmarish replication of Obasanjo’s totalitarianism?
There is for every cause, a consequence. During Obasanjo’s
despotism, Odi was flattened; Zaki Biam was pulverized. These resulted in the
massacres of innocent thousands. Of course, the military expeditions were not
altogether surprising, coming as they did from a man who, as military Head of
State, had set up the Ita Oko penal island, where Nigerian citizens were
banished into oblivion. Is Nigeria
banished now to the avoidable and intractable consequences of despotism, at the
hands of someone who, as military Head of State, condemned Nigerian citizens to
death on the strength of a retroactive decree? These questions are apposite,
given the volatile developments unfolding in the Niger Delta. All kinds of
militant groups are emerging or re-emerging, destroying pipelines and oil installations.
In their first incarnation, President Obasanjo failed to halt and reverse
their threat and potentiality for knocking the country down to its knees. He
thought the problem could be combated and defeated by the brutish application
of military force. He failed woefully.
