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Back to the barricades By For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes. Luke 6: 43-44.
Permit me to relate our present problem vis the time bomb of a fraudulent document being touted as electoral law by Federal Legislators to the spiritual principle of sowing and reaping. We now have the evidence – permanent with us – that those who argue for a toleration of a transition of anything goes in order to effect military disengagement in 1998 were soundly wrong. The chips are down. The euphoria of military disengagement is gone. We are now faced with the nitty-gritty and the latent function of democratic governance as tyranny. We are caught napping. We are just discovering that bad people were asked to operate good principle and are now corrupting it.
Given the antecedents of the people in the National Assembly, it is strange that Nigerians are expecting them to bring forth good fruits. That is highly unrealistic. The spiritual principle of trees producing after their kind must be fulfilled. In the name of military disengagement we allowed all sorts of people to be our leaders. Many of them have no credible means of livelihood before their election. Majority were collaborators with previous evil regimes. In saner climes, a good number of them would have been serving terms. The first Senate President could not give account of his educational pedigree. The second and a few others simply converted the national treasury for private use. The present one has been operating like a thug. The erstwhile leadership of House of Representative was convicted and later pardoned for a criminal offence.
Their bag of bad fruit is not yet exhausted. Not caring for the austere state of the economy, they awarded outrageous perks and allowances for themselves. They collected furniture allowance of five million naira and lied to the entire nation that it is N3.5million. They delayed the budget deliberately because their own cut was not guaranteed. They looked the other way when Nigerians were being dehumanised and amputated by religious fanatics in government houses. As legislators, they also double as government contractors, moving from one Ministry to another, from one parastatals to another, looking for contracts, grabing, seizing, threatening and fouling up the polity.
This is another harvest season and Nigerians have their bad fruit of electoral law to contend with. Thanks, once again, to the bad-tree legislators. To concerned polity watchers, the Electoral Law is self-serving, patently undemocratic and manifestly unconstitutional. It is an assault on federalism. Its provisions are a recipe for chaos and anarchy. When this is brought to the attention of our lawmakers, they refused to budge – because it is not in the nature of a bad tree to produce good fruit. They are thumping their chest, strutting around vainly, daring anybody to contradict them. The aggrieved have been asked to make a recourse to the judiciary as if the judiciary is a ready fountain of justice. That would have been the ideal option elsewhere. But given our recent experience in which the former Chief Justice swore in an illegal interim government of Chief Shonekan without enabling laws and without the disapproval of his colleagues, the probability that the judiciary will serve the purpose of justice is extremely low. I guess those urging judicial option know this. I wish to be proven wrong, but my hunch is that the Supreme Court will uphold the electoral law, based on technicality. We will be back to square one.
Laws are the fundamental instrument of achieving social cohesion and order. Democracy is possible and workable only if good men are in power or if leaders aspire to be good. When good leaders or leaders aspiring to be good employ the powers of the state to make good laws, the result will be the promotion of justice, law and order, good governance and peace. The corollary is that bad leaders will take the same instrumentality and make bad laws with the promotion of injustice, anarchy and chaos as the inevitable end. We are faced with the danger of people losing confidence in the State system and resorting to self help in order to obtain justice in their society as the state system is being corrupted by bad leadership. The lesson of the present travails is that no people can rise above the quality of its leadership.
With the conduct of the legislators and the brazen manner in which they passed the Electoral Law, very few people are left in doubt that they are at war with the nation. It is clear therefore that the real democratic transition has just begun. The fight of democracy must be engaged at full throttle. We are not fighting against praetorian soldiers this time (though their vestiges are still around) but against dictators and fascists appropriating the symbols of democracy and using them to perpetrate tyranny, oppression and injustice. We must uproot self-seeking, insensitive and unreasonable leadership. It is not going to be an easy task. They will claim to be custodians of a democratic mandate and hence possess better democratic credentials. They also have the instrument of coercion at their disposal. They have already threatened to declare emergency rule in any dissenting state. They will therefore not hesitate to mow down protesters as they did in the Abacha dark days. For them to be defeated, we must be resolute and committed. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. December 2001 |