Governors and Foreign Grips
The Chief of Staff, General Aliyu Mohammed-Gusau, has at last put the presidential plea into writing. Titled "Travelling Abroad Without Informing His Excellency," the chief's letter expressed His Excellency's displeasure with the refusal of some governors to inform the president of their foreign trips despite earlier pleas to do so. As the letter puts it, the absence of governors from the country without the president's knowledge poses some kind of danger to national security.
Though the letter was equally dispatched to some ministers and presidential aides, the governors are its unmistakable target. After the letter was issued, anonymous presidential aides went to work in the media giving hints of what would befall recalcitrant governors who refuse to confess to their foreign trips. They have all alluded to the presidential "big stick" and the fate that befell suspended Governor Joshua Dariye whose Plateau State is now under emergency rule.
This sort of subtle blackmail is not only crude but quite unnecessary. We are not under either a military rule or a unitary government. This is a federation with constitutional devolution of duties and powers to different tiers of government. If we must run our presidential system of government in this federal set-up, we had better run it well in the proper spirit of the Constitution.
The president can issue this type of order to his ministers and aides who are his political appointees and sack those of them who refuse to comply. But governors are different. Not being his appointees, they are not answerable to the president. Like the United States from where we borrowed our Constitution and the instruments of government, governors there don't have to inform the White House before travelling abroad because they know it is absolutely unnecessary.
It is a constitutional fact that states don't require the president to run their affairs. And in the absence of a governor, the deputy is there, naturally and constitutionally, to run the state. In matters of national security, we know that the Constitution humours the governors as the chief security officers of their states. But that is only a manner of speaking. In reality, however, all the instruments of giving effect to this security object are wholly in the hands of the president.
If any of the security agencies briefs the governor at all, it is a matter of courtesy, not duty. And they neither report to nor take instructions from governors. The security agencies, be it the police, the state security services or the armed forces, are wholly answerable to the president from whom they take all instructions. In the strict sense of it, the president doesn't require the presence of a governor to maintain security in a state.
Still, we don't believe that the president's concern over gubernatorial trips is entirely misplaced. Truth be told, some governors have been behaving irresponsibly, frittering away the meagre resources of their states on junkets abroad. Like Nero, the now suspended Governor Dariye was practically fiddling in London while Plateau State was on fire. Again, the recent flare-up in Rivers State in which many persons died caught Governor Peter Odili abroad. When all of this is taken together with allegations that governors are squirreling away their states' financial resources into their personal bank accounts abroad, it isn't surprising that the president scolds them routinely like errant school children.
The natural thing to expect in this sort of situation is that the governors would learn either to check themselves or to be checked by the Houses of Assembly. Unfortunately, not much of this is happening presumably because many of these political office-holders were not elected freely and fairly, and so don't have a sense of a pact with the electorate.
This is a pity, no doubt. But this is not a defect which a presidential memo can cure. If the president is merely using threat to national security as a ploy to dissuade governors from spending public money on frequent personal trips abroad, there's pretty little he can achieve by that strategy.
But if the real issue is one of corruption, then we are sure that this president, with his anti-corruption rhetoric and array of institutions to fight corruption, knows exactly what to do, that is, if he has the political will.
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