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Reflections on your aborted motion on Anambra
Dear Conspirator,
I must be brief in
this appeal. Your dark conspiratorial mind is probably more inclined to the
excitement of a diamond hunt than the stimulation of such noble sentiments
as this letter projects.
Two questions
However, your
attempted motion on Anambra raises two questions which you must answer to
convince us that the attempt is not a gross abuse of your Senate privilege
and an anti-democratic ploy to sell off our democracy for a mess of pottage.
Suspicious
enthusiasm Now, the questions: What informed your conclusion that the Senate had suddenly taken active interest in Anambra crisis? True, the Senate did show some interest in the morning of the crisis. A motion, passed on the floor of the House, raised a committee, which among other recommendations highlighted the irregularity of police action, outlined the character of a coup attempt and prescribed severe sanctions. But it is also true that the Nigerian factor set in. Another committee, initiated through administrative fiat, raised a contrary action stalling further debate in the Senate on grounds of sub-judice constraints. The issue has remained swept under the carpet since then. It is therefore difficult to explain why a body which excused itself from mediation in a dispute because of the legal hurdle of sub-judice cases would suddenly turn round – when the sub-judice situation has not changed – to drop its neutral position and seek to take drastic partisan action against one side of the dispute.
Therefore, Mr.
Conspirator, your underlying assumption of both a resurgence of Senate
interest and the shift of this interest in favour of one of the disputants
is bound to portray the Senate in a suspicious light unless you explain why
and when the august body’s somersault happened.
Breakdown of
law and order
The second
question: Is there breakdown of law and order in Anambra State, the only
situation which could prompt the debatable, extra-constitutional and
dangerous action contemplated by you?
The crisis in the state is firmly under the control of due process. Every attempt to steer it away from due process has always been effectively reversed by the courts and public opinion. Each of the three honestly transparent and constitutional processes that can be used to remove a governor is peacefully being tried. The first, electoral tribunal, is at work undisturbed. The second, impeachment procedure, has been successfully tried, but in a reverse motion. The third, the resignation procedure, is sub judice. For the structure of administration, all the constitutional organs of governance – Executive, Legislative and Judiciary – are functioning.
Beyond the formalism of constitutionality, there is the reality of the reign of peace in the civil society in Anambra State. The citizens of Anambra State are plying their daily business, without any threat to life and property. The latest court verdicts and appeals indicate that none of the protagonists is able to take the law into his hands. As far as security of life and property is concerned, Anambra State is not more insecure than any other state in Nigeria. She is in fact more secure than quite a few.
Therefore any
suggestion of breakdown of law and order in Anambra is obtuse, ill-motivated
and false. It is an obvious attempt to search for a bad name to hang a hated
dog.
Filthy bribe
and greed
As one waits your
answers to these two questions, one can provisionally reach only one
conclusion: you are motivated by personal gains to play the devil’s
advocate. The personal gain is money. Throughout the evening of last
Wednesday, January 14, your house was as busy as a Bureau de Change. Some
Senators, especially from a certain opposition party, were enticed with the
lure of filthy lucre in exchange for support to your planned motion. Many
other Senators from other parties were also approached. However, greed
predictably bred its own contradictions. Some of your prospective associate
victims considered the price tag of N500,000 too low, while you also felt
short changed. You were not happy that the protagonist who hired you for
the hatchet job chose himself to serve as both the treasurer and cashier
directly dispensing the bribes in your house, instead of handing over the
treasure to you in advance and leaving everything to your angelic
discretion! There is every indication that you and your sponsors have
retreated temporarily, waiting in ambush for another opportunity to take the
Senate unawares.
Implications
Since we are able
to establish that the sudden interest which you tried to arouse in the
Senate on Anambra crisis is suspect, that there is no breakdown of law and
order in Anambra, and that your sole instrument of attempting to entice
Senators to your ill-fated motion is money, I now proceed to point out to
you and to my fellow distinguished Senators the implications of the course
of action to which you tried to rail road a few of them.
There are five
major implications: A lawless body The first is the attempt to portray the Senate, Nigeria’s highest law-making organ, as a body that has no respect for law or truth – an institution which places one value (money) above the key values of patriotism, honour, decency, truth and rule of law. Surely, the Senate is not and must not be the abode of the lower breed without the law, ever ready to jump at the bait of the highest bidder.
The present Senate
must rise as one man to reject and rebuff this insult. The injury to our
image is yet to heal fully from the smear of the recent N54 million scandal.
The present N500,000 a piece for your support attempt, if we allow it to
stick, will be a coincidence too many for the disenchanted public. We must
strive to prove that this Senate is, as it should be by the simple law of
progression, an improvement on its predecessor.
Suborned Senate Allied to this aspect of our image, is the implication of the mystery of the sudden interest in and contemplated teleguided action of the Senate on Anambra State. Majority of Nigerians believe wrongly or rightly that the Presidency is behind the crisis in Anambra. They believe wrongly or rightly that President Obasanjo hates Ngige and is determined to remove the Governor from office. The loud silence of Mr. President and the strange somersaults of the Police have not helped. Many also suspect that the sudden attempt to deploy the Senate to anti-Ngige action was prompted by the failure of all other options. One hopes that one is wrong.
Distinguished
Senators will readily agree that the independence of the Senate and its
mandatory duty to uphold good governance and sustain the best tenets of
democratic dispensation will not allow us to desecrate this hollowed
institution and demean our individual selves. We must not allow the public
to have the wrong impression that this Senate is nothing more than a piece
of Mr. President’s toilet roll.
Anti-Igbo The third implication is that the attempted motion is against ALL Ndi Igbo and ALL South East. ALL Igbos believe that the crisis in Anambra is a part of a plot to continue to destabilise Igbo ethnic nationality and prevent Ndigbo from recovering fully from the psyche of group self-rejection, untamed individualism and intimidation of third class citizenship inflicted by the trauma of the devastation of the civil war and sustained by an insidious policy of marginalisation. Ndi Igbo see any attempt to impose a state of emergency on Anambra state as a part of this plot.
Igbos hold this
view because many Nigerian states have suffered and are suffering serious
crises in varying degrees, yet a state of emergency was not being
contemplated.
• No highly placed
public officer or community leader has been assassinated in Anambra, but
when a top officer – the Federal Attorney General and Minister of Justice –
was murdered in Ibadan, there was never suggestion of breakdown of law and
order in Oyo state.
•There is
absolutely free movement of goods, services and persons in Anambra, but when
a whole Local Government was under siege and was temporarily cut off by a
group of civilians who described themselves as Talibans, there was no
suggestion of breakdown of law and order in Yobe state.
• Anambra people
have always been law-abiding and have always scrupulously avoided
confrontation with federal might even when they are provoked, yet when whole
communities (Odi and Zaki-Biam communities) were devastated by federal
troops under allegations of civil insurrections, no one suggested breakdown
of law and order in Bayelsa and Benue States.
•The periodic
ethnic volcanic eruptions among Urhobos, Itsekiris and Ijaws have never
inspired suggestions of a state of emergency.
•The Modakeke
debacle has not called for a state of emergency in Osun state. •The frequent kidnaps of oil workers in some oil producing states – acts that mock the pomp of law and order – have also not warranted a suggestion of a state of urgency in any of the states.
Yet, a similar crisis in Anambra State is being distorted and magnified by its external sponsors as a doomsday rehearsal. The aborted motion was of course designed to further intensify the continual destabilisation of the whole South East.
My dear distinguished colleagues, Ndi Igbo see any one or institution involved in initiating, abetting, acquiescing in and advancing in any way any anti-Igbo act such as this ill-fated motion as a hater and enemy of Igbo people. The Senate cannot afford to be seen by Ndi Igbo in this light. The injunctions and expectations of Article 11 of our constitution constrains us from taking an action that exposes us even to the remotest degree to the risk of such a misunderstanding.
It is not enough for any Senator to reply with the shrug that the intended mover of the anti-Igbo motion is an Igbo. It is a fact in dialectics that the most effective weapon which a ruling class can deploy to destroy a hated group is the recruitment of an element or group of elements from within the hated group. In any case, professional mercantilism or demonic love of money is not a respecter of confraternal boundaries.
The fourth implication is what the motion would portend for democracy. Recent history (Western Region, 1962) will replay itself. Any fears of a repeat bloody snowball of what may begin as an isolated incident are not imaginary. In 1962 it was an operation e wetie. But in 2004, the convergence of cesspools of alienations and frustrations in many parts of Nigeria will fuel the fire and ensure that it spreads fast like prairie wild fire across board: the inferno will consume our fledgling democracy. Many students of the Nigerian situation have observed that the declaration of a state of emergency in any part of the federation, even in a local government, will be like the sound of a death knell on our present new beginning.
The fifth
implication. A dangerous precedent. If under any pretext, we allow police
coup, a Senate motion, a judge’s whim or any other subterfuge to be used to
remove a governor and desecrate the exalted position of an elected
Executive, who is safe? For whom will the bell toll next? A governor or
even our President? It may in future require only a verdict in an Alkali
Court to move the Police or the Senate into action against a Governor or Mr.
President.
The Senate cannot
afford to lend itself to the role of a destabiliser and legitimiser of a
spiral of instability.
The Test
Dear Conspirator,
your aborted attempt could be a blessing in disguise. It will be a crucial
test whether
•Senate will be an
independent realm of government and a healthy stabilising instrument of
statesmanship.
•Capital can
stifle the rule of law and overwhelm the State.
•Nigeria will
flourish on the bedrock of rule of law or bow to a regimen of whims and
caprices of any ruler.
I am sure that the
overwhelming majority of Senators – leaders with track records of integrity
and dogged noble fights in any worthy causes – will write this test in
favour of a United Nigeria founded on honour, decency and equity, with
Senate as the propeller.
Feb 2004
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