OBASANJO, THE LEGISLATORS AND THE PEOPLE

By

Mike Ikhariale

- Edmund Burke

Let me begin by stating that President Olusegun Obasanjo is a bad case, the type no regular advocacy can easily redeem, while also noting that our legislators are of a worse variety whose cases are certainly beyond redemption. I must therefore not be understood to be making any defense for the executive department in its conflictual relationship with the legislature. My argument here however is that but for the complete failure of the national legislature, perhaps the quality of Obasanjo’s administration would have been a lot better than it is today because the government of Nigeria is made up of three branches of which the executive is just but one. One branch must not be permitted the exculpatory luxury of playing a 'holier than thou' samba to the detriment of the others when indeed they habitually collaborate with each other when duping the nation.

The seemly inability of the President to fully realize the justifiably high expectations associated with his office is to a great extent an inverse indictment on the legislative branch which, for the love of the ubiquitous Ghana-must-go bags, unabashedly joined in the "eat well, well" pastime of Abuja. People who are supposed to be the instrumentality for the institutional checks and balances as articulated under the Constitution became midnight contractors and ready accomplices in the corruption industry all in the name of democracy. It is therefore not acceptable that some of them, inspite of the blood dripping from their hands, are now fashioning insidious political alibi for the collective failure of the post-military politicians in Nigeria. Verdict: They are all guilty!

On a proper balance, however, the degree of culpability of the national legislators far outweighs that of the president and they cannot in good conscience seek to isolate and hold the president alone liable for the wholesale failure of governance in Nigeria. That is why we are in a constitutional democracy and not in a one-man dictatorship. The buck may indeed stops at the president’s desk but when we are faced with a truly conspiratorial situation in which politicians think that they have got the nation and her resources as war booty under their wrap, the right thing to do is for us to treat all of them as partes crimis. More importantly, the people of Nigeria equally reserves the right to also hold the parliamentarians even more accountable for impeachable misconduct and wholesale abdication of their representative legislative duties because of their inordinate love of ill-gotten money. In any case, it is a notorious fact that they have all abandoned their watchdog role on behalf of the people and had willfully immersed themselves in the unscrupulous "kill and divide" politics of Nigeria only to occasionally bark maliciously whenever it suits their whims and caprices or they are broke. It would be unduly presumptuous for these irresponsible polticians to hope that Nigerians would fold their arms and watch them again destroy the political process when in fact there is neither any normative or ethical paradigms upon which they fight each other beyond the looting of the nation And in doing so, they do not seem to care a hoot about how the whole drama resonate with the long-suffering people they had sworn to serve.

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 in a fortnight as if it is a ‘time out’ call in a basket ball game contest. Who do these people think they are fooling?

What would really have been the path of honor for these men and women of dubious political morality was for all of them to resign en mass and at the same time call on the President to follow suit as they have collectively failed the nation. The noble cause of democracy is not served when the legislative arm of government thinks it can abuse the democratic process by frivolously and maliciously deploying the procedure of motions and resolutions to be tarnishing the other organs of government at the gallery of the media. It is wrong and should be condemned because at the end of the day, it is the hapless common people of Nigeria that suffer such unproductive detours. The drama may satisfy their narrow partisan objectives of a few but the citizenry ought not to be dragged into the mess occasioned by the greed and avarice of those they have wasted their ballots on. These people, expectedly, would be settled and would head back to their banks in the context of ‘business as usual’.

But then, they would have wounded the concept of constitutional democracy as well as the integrity of the nation, quite unnecessarily. And as citizens of the same country, some of us are regularly faced with the uncomfortable task of having to explain the incongruity of these dramas to other curious people whose motive for their queries is evidently mala fide. We therefore reserve the right to demand that these clowns should stop embarrassing Nigeria and her citizens by their antediluvian form of politics.

The whole matter raises the issue of the nature of the party system in Nigeria. One of the reasons societies form parties is for like-minded people to come together and fashion out how they want their society to be governed. Paramount in this coming together is the ideological compatibility of all the participants within the party. Unfortunately for Nigerians, the soldiers saw to it that the people were denied their fundamental right to freely associate with one another as well as the free exercise of the freedoms of conscience and beliefs by administratively establishing parties and exercising the veto power over who joins and who is excluded. Even with the democracy in place, the militarists in power still do not recognize that as a people, Nigerians should freely form their own parties without government interference. The legislative forgery that was involved in the infamous section 80 (1) was an attempt to deny Nigerians that right until the Court of Appeal over-ruled the practice which INEC and some legislators had evilly perfected to exclude all those the political gatekeeper wants to exclude from the political arena.

The immediate cause of the mayhem at Abuja is the well known fact that most of the legislators are in varying degrees of financial embarrassment and downright insolvency as they are investing heavily on their re-election projects whether or not they truly deserved to be returned by the electorate. Nigerians should not forget that these crooks gave themselves a monthly emolument of more than N1, 000,000 each in addition to the sundry collections they make in the name of their unfortunate constituencies aides and. We are not talking about the "cuts" and briberies that they routinely collect from contractors and all others that do businesses with the government for their "support" and "approval".

How can people who themselves have made a habit out of the violation of the constitution be teasing the executive branch endlessly as having no regard for the rules? There is no doubt that the President has violated the constitution many times, more by his style rather than in the objective of his actions, which, by all means, is condemnable. But they condone it when they benefit by it and only cry foul when their share is not to their expectations. It is therefore self-serving and totally hypocritical for people who "made it" all by living through a heartless dictatorship in the past to now be speaking of the president not respecting the constitution just because they are in the red. If they don’t know, most Nigerians do not get a millionth fraction of their privileges and opportunities.

If they complain that things have gone worse since 1999, they must go further to tell us in what context are these things worse. They should also be sincere enough to tell the nation why things are so bad and what is their share of the mess. With what are they comparing the performance of this government? Of course, many of them would have preferred that we be back to the evil days of the military when cheap government money was available to people just because of whom they were. That may still be so but it is now debatable that the rate of the largess has reduced and that is what they allude to when they complain. They are not talking about the improvement of the lives of the common man. They are not interested in what becomes the plight of the helpless worker in Kano or the petty trader at Alaba market or my uncle back home in my village. So what is the justification in all these shadow boxing? I would have loved that there is. But unfortunately, all I can see are lies and hypocrisies unduly exacerbated by the Nigerian brand of self-destructive partisan politicking.

Let the legislator who has not traveled abroad in the last three years raise the first stone against the frequently ‘flying status’ of the president? At every opportunity they all jet out like birds, waving ‘diplomatic passports’. The last set of people that would be traveling outside of Nigeria is the legislators because their constituencies are largely within the countryside where our suffering people inhabited. But they are never there unless elections are near. Nigerians must be told that for every trip that the President makes abroad, there are always legislators in the entourage! These are the same people now blaming the President for his perpetual travels. I just cannot see the justification for the man who represents my Esan Central constituency at the National Assembly junketing to Australia, Germany, the UK, Disney Wonderland, Papua New Guinea, etc. etc. when indeed he should be visiting the people who voted for him in their villages, their farms, their workshops and study their peculiar problems and go back to Abuja and then initiate appropriate laws that would alleviate on their miseries. If that is not irresponsible, nothing else will. One could go on and on to vitiate the moral and political grounds on which these noises are emanating from.

But the real tragedy in all these is the perfidious reality in which the ruling PDP is only a party in name. Otherwise it would have been unthinkable that a party in power would be so possessed with a masochist instinct that it would readily decimate it self out of existence. This should be enough confirmation that the kind of political craftsmanship Babangida intended for the country by creating government parties as well as appointing the polticians and branding them would have failed, did fail and must fail. What we are witnessing with INEC right now is only a subtle variant of the aberrational practice of government ordination of political parties – a recipe for accelerated national disaster. It would, for example, be abominable that Republican members of the US Congress would be the ones pooh-poohing President Bush, giving his propensity to goof on the microphone, in the absence of any valid and justifiable misdemeanor. That is what party discipline is all about. In Nigeria the whole political field looks like a cage where a pack of hunting dogs have been let loose upon each other. Confusion!

When about three years ago I wrote a lamentational piece entitled "The Legislators Nigeria does Not Deserve", which was published in the Vanguard newspapers and also widely circulated on the world wide Web, some people thought I was too hasty in my judgment of these characters that we have been misled to elect as lawmakers in Nigeria after several years under a grueling dictatorship. My position then was that the moral and ideological materials from which these people were made can only lead them to mortal sins against the people that ‘elected’ them to power because the idea of service is the very last thing on their minds and beyond the shameless accumulation of Ghana-must-go bags, there is nothing else encased within their infertile skulls. Today, that fact should be clear to all, including the blind.

Three years into the democratization journey, it is pretty clear now to all and sundry that what we call the National Assembly is nothing but a veritable sanctuary for criminals and undesirable characters who had used their alliance with the outgoing military dictatorship to infiltrate the hallowed chambers of the nation’s lawmaking institution so as to continue to perpetrate their habitual subversive, corrupt and anti-people activities in the guise of legislating.

Ordinarily, the parliament of any constitutional democracy should be the people’s palladium of liberty and accountability. The French writer, Montsqeui certainly had that in mind when he wrote to extol the beauty of the doctrine of separation of powers as well as the attendant mechanism of checks and balances. As far as I am concerned, it is the organ of the legislature in the government that gives a democracy its meaning. After all, we had both the executive and the judiciary functioning, somehow, during the long period of military dictatorship. What was missing and which we fought for, was a deliberative and independent legislature, for that is the soul of any self-governing people. But what we presently have in Nigeria as parliament has unfortunately only added to the social, political and economic adversities of the nation, the problems rather than the solution. I knew that we were in for a dispensation in which very irresponsible people would be calling the shot in government the moment the military made it clear that they were only going to permit those that they could trust would cover their evil tracks and perpetuate their philosophy to vie for offices in 1999. There is no better evidence of the moral bankruptcy that prematurely debilitated the National Assembly than the fact those who could make it to the leadership positions in both chambers of the house were certified crooks, fraudsters, men of dubious backgrounds and June 12 annulists.

That was why we had Salisu Buhari, a 29-year old certificate artful forger and multi-millionaire of no business record, who became the first Speaker of the House of Representatives. At the upper house, we once had an Evans Ewenrem, who was also a liar and a forger. And many others! No one was surprised at the fact that only crooks and people of sodomic backgrounds landed the plump jobs of the National Assembly because wherever thieves are gathered, the biggest of them all must be the boss and that was why those who emerged as Speakers and Presidents, Chairmen and leaders for the House of House Representatives and Senate of the National Assembly, respectively, were not the type that in a normal society would be saddled with such serious jobs. As a matter of act, the most appropriate place for such people should be prison yards where criminals go. But not so in Nigeria and that is why we are now dazed on seeing the outrageous outcomes of the type of leadership the military foisted on the nation.

Since the inauguration of the National Assembly all that we have been spectators to is how very little minds have become the designers and propeller of our national affairs and because they cannot naturally do beyond their intellectual and moral capacities, they have managed to stunt the growth of the nation and reduced the serious business of legislation into and instrument for defrauding the society and creating unnecessary stampede, confusions and commotion with the further hope of profiting therefrom.

They started out by scandalously invading the national treasury by awarding to themselves stupendous allowances, palatial furniture budgets and economically ruinous perquisites of offices. I do not know why on earth individuals who were elected to promote the social and economic welfare of the nation had the moral audacity to fix for themselves salaries that can only provoke industrial unrest and a seismic dislocation of the national economy. And that was exactly what happened. One does not need to be an economist to know that it was dangerous to the health of the economy for Nigerian legislators to, for example, be running a retinue of 12 employees as ‘personal aids’ each.

In simple arithmetic terms, members of the National Assembly have as aides, an utterly outrageous population of 6000 staff! If this were not a payroll of fake and ‘ghost workers’, the unemployment situation in the country today would have been eased very considerably. But we all know that the wages of these so-called aides directly enhance the private bank accounts of our "honorable" and "distinguished" men and women. It was preposterous for a country at the throes of a collapsing economy to put her legislators remuneration at par or in anyway comparable with US lawmakers as our yeye legislators demanded and shamelessly got! The quality of life of a national leadership cannot be too far removed from that of the people they work for, otherwise, you will have something completely at variance with democracy as we now have at Abuja.

Three years into the democracy frolic, not much progress has been recorded in the form of legislations that are fashioned to reduce on the problems of the nations. Instead, it has all been about the illicit traffic in Ghana-must-go bags, frivolous tutorials receiving and estacodes gathering tours of various foreign capitals while the national economy is crying for a creative legislative response.

It has not occurred to this band of legislative terrorists that it requires New Deal laws to put the economy aright. It has not occurred to them that the first step towards a lawful resolution of such national problems like insecurity, armed robberies and undevelopment is through creative legislative intervention. But how can that happen when all that we hear of is the abuse of the legislative process to feather their nests and personal egos? Whenever these people are broke they resort to blackmailing the President whose underbelly they have an open and vicious access to quit easily. Yes, the President is very vulnerable to the evil antics of these terrorists disguising as legislators. I recall when a few months ago I referred to them as ‘legislative terrorists’, one of them replied apparently seeking for an exception. Of course, that he will never get from me as they have continued to prove that they can do with their ill-conceived motions and defective and ad homonien legislations, what Osama bin Laden would do with bombs and planes hijacks - just creating calculated fear, insecurity and confusion in the populace.

Someone should tell these ranting nabobs of negativism in the National Assembly that they are amusing nobody anymore. There is no doubt that President Obasanjo whom these clowns love to embarrass endlessly brought the whole thing upon himself by the way he and carried on as if he knew everything. How does one explain that a man like Obasanjo continues to run the country on the otiose formula of employing the children of established figures as if he is in dire need of identity with the ancien regime in a government that is supposed to be predicated on a new moral template? Why does Obasanjo think that the only people to serve in his cabinet are those who had been there all along, dead wood, for that matter or those he can readily refer to as aburo? Now that he is in some mess, whom are those openly fighting for him? How many of the children of big men that he stuffed his government with is speaking out right now?

Obasanjo must know that he is, for all practical purposes, a man from the commoner’s rank. His children may later well become members of the other group because of him but he, for one, is not and no purpose is served trying very hard to please a class you do not belong. For a man who wants to effect some positive changes in the society held down by corruption and undue privileges, he ought to be building alliances with the People; the masses, instead of the Jones he is trying hard to associate with. President Clinton for example, did not forget that even though he was president that his political base is with the urban poor and the minorities of America. In history, President Peron took side with the weak and the poor of Argentina and held on against all the conspiracies of the extreme right. Al Gore was born into a well-to-do elite political family but by choice, has taken side with the poor, the weak and masses of the Democratic Party, so much so, that even though the conservatives rights robbed him of the presidency in 2000, he still managed to win the popular vote which is very symbolic. He can not possibly forget that the late Murtala, as briefly as he ruled, endeared himself to the people and his untimely death proved that Nigerians have the capacity to love their leaders whenever they deserve it. But talking down on the people, like a local bully, as he is wont to do is not the way to win the love of the masses. So my free advice to Obasanjo is to begin to forge real alliance with the downtrodden by meeting their basic needs and they will not abandon him in days of trouble. He must demonstratively re-align his interests with those of the suffering people across the length and breath of Nigeria instead of degrading his worldview with those formulated by special interests.

Unfortunately, Obasanjo seems to want to save Nigeria by allying with the reactionary and oppressive pro-militarist class, the same people that brought us to the current pass. Tactically, this is not the people that anyone seeking a place in history as a builder or reformer can count on because systemic sabotage is their sock-in-trade. That is where I think Obasanjo got it all wrong. If he is ever to be free, he must begin immediately to enter into some understanding with the Nigerian People and not with those who would readily conspire to derail the democratic project by shamelessly forging unconstitutional amendments to the Electoral Act; privatizing national budgets; designing shenanigans to unlawfully exclude other Nigerians from the political arena and deliberately overheating the political space for their selfish ends.

That Obasanjo is not a deft polticians is self-evident by the ease with which his aides push him into self-destructive steps such as thinking that unless you kowtow before the alter of the presidency, your views are irrelevant and indeed useless. One pitfall that Obasanjo must avoid desperately now is what I may call the "Akintiilo Syndrome" wherein he would allow nepotist ethnic characters from Yoruba-land to make him think he was elected a president just to better the lot of his kinsmen. Those who have been insincerely supporting him ‘blindly’ are simply sycophants whose activities he cannot afford to let continue. For example, when the whole world condemned the Ota gathering of politicians who went there to "begged" him to seek re-election, a certain Mr. Adedeji Akintiilo came out from nowhere, abusing everyone that disagreed with that event ostensibly to prove that the president is his "egbon mi". These are the types Obasanjo must avoid very clearly at this his trying hour for they are fakes and self-serving ethnicists who only profit by leading their leaders to their political graves. Obasanjo should not be made to look as if he is an ethnic champion – something which, in all fairness, he has never been.

Obviously unknown to him, many of those in his party (PDP) who came to him at Ota by the dead of night to beg him to run for presidency and thereby save them from the impending wrath of the aggrieved people of Nigeria at the unexpected termination of the military dictatorship are only bidding their time. There goal is to use and thrash him ignominiously and now that they think that they have sufficiently used him, this is the time to jettison the old man. That is the only way one can hope to rationalize the hullabaloo that the illusory impeachment debates had generated. What the constitution says about such disciplinary processes are so clear that there is just no point going over them here. If and when Nigeria truly arrives at the impeachment river, I trust she will cross it without much ado. But for now it is only a diversionary ploy for attention and yet more settlement.

But here is where the Na’ Abbas of Nigeria are underestimating the ability of our people to tell where their best interests lie. It is futile to want to escalate personal and ego clashes over the spoils of office to the pedestal of ‘national crisis’. Our people are wiser than that. Many who suffered and even died for the June 12 struggle did not know or like MKO Abiola as a person but when the annulists thought they could fool the nation at the expense of justice and the Rule of Law, the people adopted Abiola and fought for him all the way. I can see a similar development unfolding for Obasanjo in a curious twist of fate. If Obasanjo can simply take his case to the people of Nigeria that voted him into office and resolve to work for "them through them", he can be rest assured that he will overcome a million vexatious motions by deranged members of the House of Representatives. No polls are needed to prove that the president’s otherwise sagging popularity rating has soared tremendously since the menace of the legislators. What his army of muted clannish spokesmen could not do for him in months has become possible overnight just because of indolent legislators who do not know where to draw the line on their egnunje inspired mischief. The fact that everything they are accusing Obasanjo for is what they are also guilty of a hundred folds and more should be a lesson to all of us that it is not yet uhuru for democracy in the country as charlatans still run the show.

For the members of the House of Representative to be calling Obasanjo corrupt, incompetent and unruly is the worst case scenario of the kettle calling the pot black. Nigerians are no fools and neither are they blind. While it is constitutionally improper for the president to set up an audit of the National Assembly, which is known to be oozing with corruption, and shady deals, it is however imperative that the legislators prepare themselves to account to the people someday. Technical and procedural delays cannot be taken for immunity from the justice of the people. The August 12^th vexatious motion by some members of the lower house of the National Asembly 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.

It is a disaster of unimaginable proportions that three years into the new democratic dispensation, some members of the National Assembly have nothing positive that they have contributed to the development of the nation to show the electorate that put them there beyond the fact that they have been very busy fashioning and sponsoring several ineffectual motions calling for the impeachment of the President of the Federation. Don’t they think that they too could be recalled under the Constitution and, in fact, with relative ease? Because of the old saying that too much of everything is bad, it has now reached the point where Nigerians must tell our frivolous and perpetually absentee lawmakers that they were not elected to become legislative nuisance but rather, to use their powers to contribute to the growth and progress of the nation. Unfortunately, we have been treated to some of the most ludicrous abuses of time, money and privileges just to pursue the most mundane of legislative functions – passing malicious motions.

The battle ahead for Nigerians is how to transform our nation from the present pitiable state of decay to one, which we should all be proud of. Our legislators are not bothered that we are rated as one of the poorest nations of the world inspite of our resources; they are not bothered that our schools and hospitals are in shambles; they are not bothered that our roads are impassable. Yet they want us to hear them bash the president so loudly. Let them show us how many laws that they have passed to ease on the traffic lawlessness in Nigeria from which we suffer abnormally high carnage yearly; let them show us the medical aid law that they have passed to help our sick people; the laws forbidding officials from undue frivolities that they have fashioned. None! It is not enough to be going about as "honorables" and "distinguished" nonentities when in fact so much is crying for legislative attention. These men have overreached themselves and have failed the nation and they should be clearly told so today. All Nigerians of goodwill must stand up and call these ruffians to order because, as Burke warned his society years ago, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." Ours cannot be different.

August 2002