ON Tuesday, September 29, the National Council of State met, as usual at the prompting of the President. It mandated President Olusegun Obasanjo to “crush” any group threatening the unity and stability of the nation. Ordinarily, this should not be news to anyone. The President is empowered by the Constitution of the Federal Republic, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, to maintain the territorial integrity and stability of Nigeria. The President, whoever he is, has a duty to respond effectively to nix internal insurrection and external aggression threatening the Nigerian nation.
If President Obasanjo feels at this moment that the situation around the country is such that calls for the invocation of these executive powers, he hardly needs to approach the Council of State – an advisory body made up of past heads of state, retired chief justices of the country and governors of the states of the federation – to obtain the mandate to do so. He needs the National Assembly for that purpose. So, we can assume that he convened the Council to obtain the moral support of the boldest face of what we usually refer to as “the Nigerian political establishment.” Obasanjo has shown a tendency to go to this body when he is faced with controversial and potentially bloody decisions. We remember how he ran to them on his way to jerking up the prices of petroleum products from N26 to N38 – N40 late last year.
Two reasons can be adduced for Obasanjo’s propensity to resort to the Council. The first, but not necessarily the more important, is that this Council has a tendency to rubberstamp the President’s intentions. It is a body of retired top public officers and serving governors, all of whom individually depend on the President for one favour or the other. The favours the retired members of the Council – past heads of state and chief justices – seek are prebendal in nature. They need to be on the President’s good side to be able to make simple telephone calls and get their interests in the system continually serviced. These interests may be in form of employment (of their children and relations), their businesses, and sundry involvement in the affairs of the country. For the governors, it may not be wise to antagonise the President, even if political party differences exist. That is why an Attahiru Bafarawa of the All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP)would denounce the President in the day and crawl to Aso Rock by night to seek his “understanding”.
HOWEVER, the second and by far the more important reason that Obasanjo would naturally gravitate to the Council of State even before (and if he will go to) the National Assembly on crucial matters is that, as we said before, it is the boldest symbol of the Nigerian political establishment, of which the President is a member. Last week, as we counted down to the 44th Independence anniversary, we ruminated on the relationship between the state and the citizenry and concluded that the state has become a slave master. The Council of State is made up of the very human elements that have steered the ship of state since independence at the highest level. Speaking more concretely, the Council of State is currently made up of the elements that prosecuted the Nigerian civil war on the federal side. They were the ones who declared “no victor, no vanquished” and enunciated the three “R’s” – “reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation.” But rather than using these otherwise inspiring ideas as a Marshall Plan to heal the war’s wounds and relaunch Nigeria on the path of genuine nationhood, these elements allowed the civil war to continue to rage in their hearts and pursued insidious policies of creating the political and economic haves and have-nots.
The problems of deliberate uneven development, uneven privileges, uneven political rights, uneven access to political and economic power and decision making, flourished from the days of General Yakubu Gowon and persist today. It was under these people that the monstrosity of state power perfected by the colonialists became “indigenised” to create the phenomenon of the state as a slave master. It was under them that the people of Nigeria were denied the right to choose their own leaders and to contribute democratically to the processes of decisions on how they were being governed. And it was under them that the state transferred power from one hand to the other as it wished without caring about the feelings of the Nigerian people or bothering about the issues of equity, justice and the national good, but being guided only by their narrow prejudices and selfish interests. This is the class that excavated Obasanjo from jail and made him President, despite the fact of his being a political nonentity. And this is the class that is preparing to crown another person of their choosing, President in 2007.
It is this very class that does not understand the people’s feelings, because they have never really paid for the services they enjoy. They live on the state, and are therefore shielded from the environmental reality of the Nigerian system. When they were in power, they ruled by the principles of “crushing” discontent, rather than seeking their root causes and solving the problems once and for all.
BECAUSE of this inept and incompetent method of running the affairs of men, the discontent rather than staying crushed, either spreads to other groups or comes back again soon enough. Adaka Boro’s rebellion, the Biafra secession bid, the Ogoni MOSOP uprising, were all crushed. Today, the Asari Dokubo group has surfaced for the same cause that Boro stood.
MASSOB has risen again to pursue the Biafra dream, even if in a non-violent manner this time. Has Saro-Wiwa’s killing made life easy for Shell in Ogoniland? Did it stop Dokubo rising to threaten our oil production infrastructure? Did the crushing of the Dimka coup stop the Gideon Orka coup? Did the crushing and later appeasement of NADECO stop the OPC taking positions to protect Yoruba interests?
The Nigerian political establishment only knows how to use its muscles, not its brains, if it has any. No wonder that it is unable to solve problems!
