In his recent media chat, a programme he has taken as a routine forum to dress down the nation,President Obasanjo told over 130million Nigerians that they have been ‘fools’ and “idiots” for not appreciating the higher “moral questions in the Ngige saga that is beyond constitutionality and legality” in the Chris Ubah’s open declaration of war in Anambra state.
Few days after President Obasanjo’s endorsement of Chief Chris Ubah’s war effort, Ubah’s private army ferried in a reportedly six commuter buses, opening fire on the Governor Chris Ngige’s convoy in the presence of a visiting senate committee.
If not that Governor Ngige’s men marched fire for fire, the story would have been different. However, the anatomy of Obasanjo’s new theory of moral question that is beyond constitutionality and legality in the Chris Ngige/Ubah saga, is simply that the earlier private agreement of the duo, whether in the dark recess of the infamous Okija shrine or the finely decorated altar of the Aso Rock Chapel, to the effect that one bankrolls the other to public office fraudulently of course, and the office beneficiary hands over the state treasury and other public properties to the benefactor in return.
For the president of a country who is sworn to uphold public interests at all times and defend the constitution and laws through which public interests are both articulated and concretely represented, a fraudulently private agreement in which public interests were both criminally and wantonly subverted, should subsist above and beyond “constitutionality and legality”. I think, President Obasanjo has added a cruel humour to his incendiary and deliberately calculated assault on public sensibilities.
Since July 10 last year, when a section of the police, ostensibly acting through the orders of their high command invaded Anambra state in an execution of mini coup plot, where the governor was abducted and his deputy hurriedly sworn-in in his place, President Obasanjo has shamelessly played the ostrich, burying his head in the sand and suggesting that as the Chief custodian of law and constitutionality, he has no private opinion on the matter which is in court. Suddenly, shocked out of his shell of hypocrisy, the lord emperor of more than 130million has invented a new theory of morality beyond his earlier sacred legality.
What is left now, that the President has discovered a new moral code beyond constitutionality and legality, is to dismantle all apparatus of state, through which laws and constitutionality are interpreted and enforced and in place of them, we can have Obasanjo’s army that enforces his moral code.
All over Africa, state power has been terribly abused and misused. From having their spouses, mistresses and children plunder freely from public resources to using state power to achieve obscenity like endorsing themselves as fathers of the nation as Kamuzu Banda and Mobutu did in Malawi and former Zaire respectively, nowhere in Africa, however has a sitting President endorsed the use of private army and violence to remove a provincial governor, whether he is recalcitrant or belligerent to the central authority. President Obasanjo has authored a shameful page of state craft in Africa, that has never been seen anywhere in the continent, not even in countries privately owned and run like Cameroon and Togo.
In the height of Idi Amin’s buffoonery and terror, the worst he could do, beyond his chilling barbarism to assault the sensibilities of Ugandans, was to make his 10-year old son, a General in the army and have his serving Generals and Commanders salute the urchin and himself a field marshal.
President Mugabe in Zimbabwe may have rigged election to remain in power, and even harrass his opponents to maintain power, but inside Obasanjo’s Nigeria, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main opposition party would have been broken to pieces or its leadership retained as clients on government pay roll to the extent that it would have been a mere dissident faction in the ruling party.
To suggest that Nigeria has slided into an authoritarian dictatorship is to misapply the concept reserved essentially by western political science to visionary leaders in a hurry to jump start their nations by sometimes by passing the formal laws and process, like Dr. Mahatir Mohammed of Malaysia, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and the Chinese and Vietnamese communist leaders. Nigeria is not sliding into any authoritarianism, totalitarianism or even dictatorship. The country has bumped into a bare faced criminal gangsterism and private tyranny which feeds and sustains the former.
The economic reform measures ministered by the regime and administered harshly by the lonely technocrats and rampaging neo-liberal academics seconded from the western dominated financial institutions are ensuring by the mass loss of jobs in the public and private sector, a stream of frustrated youths available for recruitment for private armies.
The state of Nigeria tethers and oscillates between anomie and debauchery. The disengagement of the critical social category, the middle class have left the stage for urchins, riff-raffs and thugs, though with enough money power to orchestrate mischief. The whole institutions of state and organs of constitutional rule like the parliament and even judiciary have been bent in one single direction, the optimization of private tyranny and the establishment of corporate gangsterism.
If Nigeria is to be rescued, it does not deserve the self pity of constitutional egg heads and pro-democracy agitators, but the direct action of the popular masses as in the struggle against colonial and alien rule. The democratic pretensions that brought President Obasanjo to power has imploded and the initiative to regain the democratic threshold is for the popular masses and their representative organizations, labour, students, market women, artisans, to engage the regime’s urchins street by street, corner by corner and deprive them, the comfort of their homes as they wickedly deprive the public of its facilities. And only in that way would president Obasanjo appreciate that the ‘moral issues involved in the Ngige saga which is beyond constitutionality and legality is not a one way traffic that zooms from the over fed tummies of our tormentors-in-chief.
Onunaiju is a journalist based in Abuja.
