Voice of reason
By
A lot of things can happen in the space of a very short time. Since my return from my travels in England and Saudi Arabia I have tried to read back the back issues of the newspapers to see what I had missed.
One such issue is the issue of Resource Control and the battering of Chief (Aji) Bola Ige, the Minister of Justice and the Attorney-General of the Federation.
Incidentally, I met Uncle Bola Ige in London early January and we had very brief discussions on some mutual issues. He was on his way to the U.S. and we promised to link up when we both returned to Nigeria. We have not as I write this. But Uncle Bola gave me the assurance that he would do nothing to injure Yoruba national interest; he promised he would do everything to ensure its enhancement.
From barbs manifesting from different directions, the situation is serious and Uncle Bola seems to be in very serious trouble. I hope he knows it.
In Yoruba country, the lawyer is held in a kind of "esteem". This esteem arises from the way his involvement in the administration of justice is viewed by the Yoruba public. He appears for the accused and some other times for the accuser. He uses the same brilliance to espouse the cause of the oppressed and that of the oppressor. Not too often, the public see the apparently guilty getting off the hook and the innocent biting his fingers at the ass the law has been made of through the instrumentality of The Law. The Yoruba in very trying moments call the lawyer, liar. If the Muslim feels reluctant in accepting the training of his children in law, it has to do with the general conception of the practice of law here. But there are pious lawyers; those who practise it in high belief that they will one day appear before the Higher Bench (not the Court of Appeal of Nigeria, not the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic).
Quite a few cases have been determined in this country more by technicality than by the moral imperatives of the spirit of the law.
So, the brouhaha is that the Federal Government has taken the 36 State governments of Nigeria to the Supreme Court to determine who owns the natural resources off their shores (if they have any) and by inference on their soil. The people say that Uncle Bola Ige is the architect of that coup. He is the chief law officer and the buck stops at his desk.
The suit has its focus on section 162 of the discredited 1999 (Abacha) Constitution. It is not ambiguous in my opinion. It is clear that all its provisions are in support of the Central Government that purports to be Federal. It will be naïve to think that the court will come up with a pronouncement that the Constitution does not sanction.
The South-South thinks the suit was aimed at removing the rug from under the feet of its agitation for resource control. May be, but it aims a heavier blow at the proponents of true Federalism who think the strictures of the aberrant constitution are too suffocating for self-determination.
I have not read anything from Uncle Bola Ige to show that the pronouncement he seeks from the Supreme Court will strengthen the position of the South-South and South-East or accords with the attitude of the Yoruba nation on Nigeria’s federalism. And he should know as the alternative Yoruba leader. I have read quite a lot of reactions concerning the matter. Remarkable have been Reuben Abati and Odia Ofeimum’s contributions. Odia is one of the younger people who dote on Uncle Bola. Uncle Bola trusts him to the extent that he (Uncle Bola) asked him (Odia) to hold fort for him in his Uncle Bola’s Sunday Tribune column. A brilliant mind who expresses that mind most articulately, Odia’s intellectualism did not hide his disappointment.
Odia, among copious verbiage said: "I like the problems that the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation is creating for himself. Because it is a big test of whether those who have consistently defended a resource control position for Nigerians would remain steadfast."
Reuben thinks it is Uncle Bola Ige’s darkest moment considering the petty insinuations and allegations of financial irregularities being alleged against him. Which could have been what his (Ige’s) former deputy termed as "coming to eat" in Obasanjo’s cabinet.
Uko Essien Udom, a fellow lawyer’s disillusion got my bull’s eye. He interpreted Uncle Bola Ige’s lawsuit on behalf of his employers against the states as states having no right to resources in the waters contiguous to their shores.
Uko recalled Professor Akpan Ette’s book launch at which Uncle Bola was Chairman. There in the Chairman’s speech he recalled Uncle Bola saying Nigeria as a nation was an artificial contraption. He recalled the pained situation of Professor Ette’s children when they could not get Oyo State scholarship. Ige, he recalled, said then: "The politics of Nigeria was all about the control of oil, produced by a section of the country who could not even aspire to leadership position in the country". Uko went further: "Uncle, you said that it was immoral and wicked for a group of people to sit in Abuja and control and appropriate resources in another man’s land. You said that wherever God put man on earth, He put therein sufficient resources for his subsistence. It was only greed that would make a man seek to control another’s resources. You concluded that in your village, Esa-Oke, there was no oil, and that you were not interested in it, as God had provided other resources for your people".
The truth of that suit is that it is in aid of the continued exploitation of the owners of oil by those who do not have; have not added any value to it and wont care one way or the other.
My gut feeling is that Uncle Bola Ige is being used as the cats paw. It does not appear to me however that Uncle Bola Ige is not aware of the repercussions to his future political career as a Yoruba leader.
Uncle Bola knows my stand with him. In the dark days of Abacha, myself, Reuben and others joined hands in a Yoruba renaissance group because of our regard and respect for him - at our financial expense and at the risk of our lives.
I was commissioned, towards his 69th birthday, to do a chapter of a book on him as a Yoruba leader. I did it most willingly: When things were not looking up for him among the Yoruba people I wrote to him a personal letter which I carried by DHL from my meager means.
Uncle Bola seems to be burning or has burnt his boat by this latest action. He has offended one of the federalist principles of the Yoruba people and the deep feelings of the allies of his employers.
But I know the great pride he has in his people. May I inform him that the people have been hurt and he has to recant and resign his position. Retrace his step back to the fold. I know Uncle has a great respect for history and he would want history to treat him most kindly.
The South as a whole now must know their friends. The South-South, the South-East and the South-West have a weapon they can deploy to their own defence. They need to give their democratic mandate to the President and the National Assembly that care for their feeling.