Letter to El-Rufai
Nigeria and the World
ike okonta
This is not so much an open letter to you as an attempt to locate your recent statement that the PDP government is not bound to listen to the opinion of critics of its policies and that these critics should go ahead and establish their own 'leftist' parties if they so desired, within the wider context of recent Nigerian political history.
I should like to begin with a seemingly trite observation. Democracy does not fall from the sky. There is not a single instance in recorded history when rulers willingly surrendered power to the people. It was Frederick Douglas, the distinguished African American abolitionist and author who, drawing from his thirty-five years experience of fighting for the right of black captives in America to the bounties of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, declared that power is never given; it is taken.
Permit me to bring the foregoing home to Nigeria with a short story. I had a good friend in Kaduna once upon a time. His name was Bagauda Kaltho. He was the Northern Bureau Chief of The News magazine. I was Assistant Editor, coordinating the national desk from Lagos. This was at the height of the civil society revolt against General Ibrahim Babangida and his successor, General Sani Abacha.
Babangida had banned our magazine in mid 1993; defiant, we replied to this blatant attempt at censorship with a new tabloid, Tempo. Livid with anger, and under assault from outraged Nigerians who had seen through his 'hidden' agenda to perpetuate himself in office, Babangida declared all the senior editors and correspondents of Tempo wanted persons, and passed on the word to security operatives to eliminate us from the surface of the earth whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself.
We went underground, and continued our media campaign to force Babangida from power. Our position was clear and unequivocal: the Nigerian people wanted free and fair elections. They wanted to be governed by representatives of their own choice, representatives they would be capable of recalling if they failed to do their bidding. Babangida was an autocrat. On behalf of the Nigerian people, we in Tempo led the charge to get him out of Aso Rock.
Then came the annulement of the June 1993 presidential elections, Babangida's humiliation out of power, and Abacha's ascendancy in November of that year. We revived The News, and along with Tempo, continued the campaign to discredit Abacha's illegitimate junta and return Nigeria to democratic and accountable rule. But we were not alone. The independent media, labour unions, students, market women, progressive politicians, and all people of conscience in Nigeria, Africa, and the entire world were with us in this struggle to return light and freedom to our country.
Northern Nigeria was a particularly tough terrain at the time. It was Abacha's stomping ground, and my friend Bagauda Kaltho knew this more than most. But he was a courageous journalist. He was also a Nigerian patriot and convinced democrat. Bagauda knew that every time he picked up his pen to write a story critical of the junta, he was dancing at death's door. He knew that every morning he left his home in search of evidence of Abacha's latest atrocities against the blameless people of the north and Nigeria, he was walking in the valley of death, and might never return to his young wife and little children.
Bagauda loved his wife and children. But he also loved his country. He did not ask the UNDP to pay him in American dollars before he could pick up his pen in defence of his country. He, like the rest of us at The News, were poorly paid reporters. But he saw clearly that his country was in danger. He desired that the people should truly be sovereign and give to themselves a government that would be animated by their hopes and desires.
Abacha and his minions had set their faces against this simple request, and Bagauda elected to fight on behalf of the people. One dark day in 1996 agents of the Abacha junta murdered my friend Bagauda in cold blood. They made his young wife a widow and his little children fatherless. For democracy, Bagauda gave his most valuable possession: his very life.
I chose to tell you the sad story of my friend this morning because I take you, and the work you have been doing for our nation, seriously. I want to believe that you have not forgotten what our country passed through to get to where she is today, and who made it possible. The journey from rapine military dictatorship to the fragile democracy we have today was undertaken on a road paved by the blood, bones, sweat, tears, and banished hopes of the Nigerian left, labour, human rights groups, progressive politicians and all those that you sneered at in Abuja last week.
You challenged them to establish their own political party. You cannot pretend that you have not heard of the National Conscience Party, the Democratic Alternative, and several others. These are the political parties of the progressives, parties in which they have clearly articulated programmes and policies they would implement with and on behalf of the Nigerian people when they get to power through fair and free elections.
The trouble is that the Peoples Democratic Party, like Babangida and Abacha before it, has consistently rigged the political outcome in its own favour since 1999, employing all the instruments of the state to ensure that the Nigerian people are denied the right to choose their own representatives during elections.
The present PDP government is an illegitimate government because it does not flow from the wishes of the Nigerian people. The chief executives of the IMF and the World Bank can visit Abuja a thousand times and make long speeches eulogizing the neo-liberal economic programme Obasanjo and his advisers have been pursuing since 1999. But the fact remains that the Nigerian people did not give their consent to these policies and will promptly throw them out of the window the day elections are no longer rigged in this country and they are able to vote in leaders of their own choice.
You already have your hands full as Minister of Federal Capital Territory. You have recently embarked on the very dangerous, but very necessary task of ridding the Abuja Master Plan of distortions and abuses. You have made powerful enemies, people who thrive on abuse of law and due process and even now are plotting in dark, dank corners to get you out of office.
You need every help and support you can muster in these trying times. The progressives are your natural ally in this respect, and it would be poor strategy to alienate them and thus leave all your flanks wide open. Some, including this columnist, have had cause to question some of your recent public outbursts. They are unnecessary. They distract. You are doing serious work, your romance with the dark angels of neoliberalism regardless.
Henceforth let your work do the talking for you. And when next you want to make a public statement on government policy and its critics, remember my late friend Bagauda Kaltho.
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