THE IMPEACHMENT MYTH VERSUS THE NIGERIAN REALITY
By
The word "impeachment" must rank as the most popular term in the post-military lexicon of Nigeria. For the better part of the second half of this year, nothing else mattered in the country beside the declared intention of the National Assembly members to "impeach" the President of the Federation. Consequently, many trusting citizens are still waiting anxiously to see the ignominious exit of the president through the impeachment door and the resulting triumphant entry of the Na ‘Abba-led legislative warriors. Well, that may never be just as it really never was. It was all a very wild political myth, which was deftly packaged and fraudulently presented to unsuspecting Nigerians as a genuine legislative process. The real story is that many people fell for it!
It is also possible that some people with the typical Nigerian rather short memory span are already bored about the whole development and are no longer interested and are indeed fully satisfied that "the point has already been made". But that is to miss the point as the issues raised by the development are still sitting firmly on the nation’s agenda and could not therefore be forgotten or waved off glibly in the usual Nigerian style. Otherwise, we would sooner or later have to relive the whole process all over again as with all societies that tend to avoid looking boldly at themselves in the mirror, more like the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, for the fear of death, committed suicide.
The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria has 320 principal sections and several schedules with their own paragraphs and clauses, all well spelt out. It was a bit surprising to discover that there is no place in the entire document where the now ubiquitous political fighting word, "impeachment", is mentioned. So, from where did Nigerian politicians smuggle the term into the nation’s political vocabulary?
There is no doubt that we all seem to understand what the term means, whether or not it is contained in the constitution, the same way many other national myths are taken for granted. To a reasonable extent, it is safe to say that just as it is in the US from where we imported the presidential system, the term "impeachment" denotes a constitutional process designed to remove a president who has been found guilty of provable acts which, in the thinking of the legislators, amounted to "gross misconduct".
Of late, however, the term has garnered additional aura as husbands now "impeach" their unruly wives and, vice versa, while employers in turn simply "impeach" their workers instead of retrenching them. It is the terminology of the moment. Thanks to Na ‘Abba and his pro-impeachment signatories who made it happen. No matter the source of the term, it remains a fact, worthy of note, that the constitution, which we quote and evoke so authoritatively on the impeachment warfare, does not itself contain that word.
By an analogous construction, we are prepared to concede that the process of "impeaching" a president implies, for the Nigerian user of the term, all the activities directed at removing him from office through the instrumentality of a special adjudicating "Panel" appointed by the Chief Justice of the Federation on the prompting of members of the legislature. That much was the national illusion that we all seemed to have suffered when some members of the National Assembly held a world press conference sometime in August this year where they gave the President of the Federation and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces a two-week ultimatum to either resign from office voluntarily or they would proceed to remove him in accordance with the Constitution.
But if one takes a look at the provisions of section 143, it would become obvious that what the legislators were doing was not in anyway related to the provisions of the Constitution dealing with the removal of the president from office, but a well orchestrated scheme for the effective harassment of the President who, apparently knows very little about the constitution and has adamantly ‘refused’ to be advised about the document. What took place in Abuja in August 2002 and, indeed, continued until recently, were mere political bluff and intentional misfeasance that were not within the contemplation of the Constitution. The inference from that "threat" was that they were determined to evoke the provisions of section 143 of the constitution with a view to removing the President from office if he does not quit on his own - just the same way an Abacha would have propositioned a Shonekan with the offer to either "resign" or be overthrown as was the vogue in those illegal and anarchic days of the military.
The fact that so many aggrieved politicians wanted the President out of their way in anticipation of 2003 second-term possibilities does not by itself imply that a legitimate removal process was afoot. It was therefore interesting to see the great socio-political turbulence that was generated by a false legal move, which became generally mistaken for an impeachment process by those who were already "tired" of the President. To make matters worse, the members of the National Assembly went on to be tabulating an ever-elastic list of "impeachable offences" over which they would want to impeach the President. The irony of the whole transaction was that these people did all what they did, according to them, in order to "give effect to the constitution" and "defend democracy" but the procedure they adopted was actually a malicious, if not an insidious, violation of the constitution itself.
It was regrettable that the mainstream Nigerian Press, previously noted for its critical evaluation of the nation’s political melodrama, this time around, fell ‘hook line and sinker’ for the impeachment hoax as almost every newspaper page, TV and radio air time were enthusiastically devoted to a process that was, for all intents and purposes, a huge joke.
Given the theatrics and the great hype and stampede that were thus generated, it would have been helpful if the media had taken a hard look at the constitutional processes involved and the procedures necessary for the removal of a president in Nigeria before jumping on the "change" bandwagon. A simple check on section 143, the relevant provisions of the constitution dealing with the process would easily have revealed that it was intellectually incorrect to speak of that development even as an "attempted" impeachment, much less, "impeachment" proper. An "attempted impeachment" would, at least, imply that certain basic steps itemised in section 143 were already being taken; but nothing that the National Assembly did could be located within the conceptual parameters of the law on impeachment.
Honourable Na ‘Abba and his men, no doubt, must have been avid readers of S. E. Finer’s, best-seller, The Man on the Horse Back in which he attempted a sociological and psychological analyses of the phenomenon of coups and political revolutions. According to Finer, coup plotters or political trouble makers habitually apply what he calls the "calculus of intervention" which comprises of two essential components, i.e., (a) the disposition to carry out the act and (b), the opportunity available for carrying it out. Regarding the first element, it was no secret that there was no love lost between the members of the National Assembly and the Presidency as was evidenced by the endless bickering over things like the budget, order of precedent, accusations and counter-accusations about corruption and incompetence, etc.
With regard to the factor of ‘opportunity’, they rightly observed a remarkable dip in the President’s popularity rating and overall political standing, particularly after the evidently damning editorial of the Thisday newspaper that pointedly harped on the ‘frequent flier’ status of the President while he was again in far away Caribbean and, of course, the mounting frustration in the land. This was a classical opportunity in Finer’s coup-making calculus and some crisis-minded members of the legislature thought that it was a perfect time to strike at the presidency. And they struck. Their strategy was to harass the man and heckle him out of composure by contriving a lengthy list of "offences" against him and, in the process, discredit him before the electorate by pretending to be acting in accordance with the terms of the constitution even as it was quite clear to them that it was practically impossible to achieve anything of the sort in view of the huge obstacles shrew along the path of the impeachment project by the constitution.
From that moment on, serious political pandemonium broke out all across the nation as the noise of impeachment rented the air. Needless to say that in the frantic effort by the PDP national leadership to douse the flame of impeachment, it actually seemed to have added fuel to the simmering flickers by becoming a willing accomplice in the fraud that the impeachment drama represented. Naturally, there was a ground swell of "supporters" and "opponents", overt and subterranean operatives, actively engaged in the booming impeachment industry as colossal amount of money allegedly changed hands.
One critical question that nobody paused to ask during the melee was: Is this a proper impeachment or just another ruse? Better still, qui bono? Of course, many well-meaning Nigerians raised their voices against the procedural, strategic and moral shortcomings of the whole affair, aside from their fear that the whole drama portends a great deal of trouble ahead for the nation. The impeachment frenzy was so high that some people were already speaking of the President in the past tense even without taking the pains to understand what is required to successfully impeach a sitting president and, in Africa, for that matter. It must be unnerving to many that the man is still at Aso Rock, after all the malevolent storms.
Needless to say that the bad publicity that came with it effectively further down-graded the nation in the perception of the world as an unstable and unpredictable business environment, a clear warning signal to investors to further stay clear of the country’s economy. While some honestly enjoyed the "huge political joke" while it lasted, the nation unnecessarily gave to the world an image of general instability, lack of internal cohesion and a potentially eruptive social order. It took the negative ICJ judgment on Bakassi to remind us that if we keep humiliating ourselves and washing our dirty linen in the open just for purely internal political objectives, our enemies would help us further into perdition by denying us our entitlements or something worse.
More than three months of abberational hullabaloos, the President, although evidently bruised and weakened, and possibly, wiser, is still occupying Aso Rock while those who vowed to depose him before the cock crows thrice are now singing new tunes to the effect that the man has "changed" or that he is now a very "subdued leader" and now "a listening president" as against the previously arrogant, stingy and bullying caterpillar. All that may be true. But does the nation need to go through such an orchestrated and debilitating experience just to achieve such elementary level of inter-personal relationship?
It also became abundantly clear that the President with the motley crowd of ministers and advisers which he hired does not have many faithful supporters around him as he was practically left alone in the lurch to carry his huge political cross all by himself while they all scampered for covers in the safety of their political bunkers, waiting for the very worst to happen to their boss. It must be a personal lesson for the President that it was indeed those who had no hands in his government that dared to speak for him during those trying times. Obasanjo, like the old woman in Esan mythology, who wanted to know those of his numerous children that would heartily weep over her death by feigning death, must have learnt some hard lessons. The only difference here is that, unlike the trickish old woman, he could not be said to have been in charge of the entire scheme, as he was evidently confused, if not rudderless.
The truth is that there are no provisions in the current constitution for the churning out of votes of "No Confidence" on the Executive by aggrieved legislators, as it is the case under the Westminster parliamentary system. So, the 14-day ultimatum and the battery of combative resolutions that followed thereafter were, constitutionally speaking, exercises in futility and the legislators themselves knew that but merely played on the ignorance of the people who are curiously hungry for some form of political gladiatoring as a diversionary elixir for their ever-escalating socio-economic woes. There seem to be a curious form of satisfaction on the part of the oppressed class in society whenever they watch their perceived oppressors slug it out amongst themselves in the open in their often inevitable intra-class squabbles over the spoils of office which contemporary act of governance in Nigeria is essentially all about. It does not matter if they (the commoners) would ultimately end up being the real sacrificial lambs of the big men’s ‘battle’.
The palpable excitement of some Nigerians over the impeachment abracadabra could only therefore be rationalised by the mass-psychological reality of the oppressed as there was really no moral or ethical pedestal upon which any of the parties involved in the impeachment fracas could effectively point accusing fingers on each other over what they told us they were ‘fighting for’: "our man is hitting their man" kind of proxy warfare. What happened was that we all went through a debilitating mythical process deliberately put in motion by people who meant nothing about was they were saying, more like shadow boxing than actually prosecutorially indicting one another. The legislators were only wallowing in a massive act of illusion when they told the world that they were about to impeach the President. That such a hoax succeeded so well in Nigeria is quite instructive; the impeachment myth is a pointer to the fact that the nation is still so fragile that any little commotion could send it into disarray, and it is therefore a real lesson for all of us to work a little harder to deepen the foundations of our new democracy.
One cannot deny the attainment of the political objectives of the "pro-impeachment signatories" as they actually succeeded in drawing attention to themselves and indeed, unduly overheated the system and, possibly, "changed" the President. In no time, it would be business as usual, and the erstwhile combatants, all winners at last, would face a bemused national audience and take a proud bow, chorusing: "Our nascent democracy", though ruthlessly debased and vandalised, has "emerged stronger". And life goes on as all eyes are now fixed on 2003.
If the nation could not get the true "dividends of democracy", it was at least generously entertained by the dramatise personae of the impeachment national theatre troupe and the court jesters of our democracy and that should be enough justification for getting your support for their second term bid at the polls when next time they come for it. The only real identifiable loser is the Nation that was unduly held hostage by a mythical charade wrongly called "impeachment".
Finally, I should say that those who took our well-considered ex-gratia counsel contained in the series of write-ups posted here and elsewhere in the course of the whole exercise, in which we strongly denounced it as simply fraudulent and self-serving would have saved themselves from some of the headaches generated by the impeachment circus, as they would have wisely lowered their expectations.
Particularly in the piece entitled, Obasanjo, The Legislators and The Common Man, we contended rather prophetically that "The August 12th vexatious motion by some members of the lower house of the National Assembly calling on the President to resign within a fortnight or face immediate impeachment is one such motion too many. It is not possible to use brazen unconstitutionality to fight unconstitutionality and still claim to be operating a democracy. Even though it will never see the light of day, the motives for the noise are clear enough: harass the man for more Ghana-must-go concessions and undermine his 2003 re-election bid, none of which solves the problem of the farmer toiling in Kaura Namoda or the frustrated fisherman in Eket" and as a consequence concluded by noting that "It is therefore nothing but misguided legislative rascality for some of them to have passed the ‘motion of infamy’ that they recently rolled out against the President calling on him to resign or they will embark on an illusory impeachment proceeding ... as if it is a ‘time out’ call in a basket ball game. Who do these people think they are fooling?"
Unfortunately, however, many people still got fooled. Those who missed our analyses or for whatever reasons, simply ignored them, allowed themselves to be taken for a very cheap ride by ordinary political jesters by relying, instead, on some extraneous theories of the impeachment process or naively took as real, the cinematography of the politics of Nigeria. From what we have seen so far, the endgame must really be disappointing to such people. Isn’t that what myths are all about?
Nov 2002