A similar scenario to the ongoing Code of Conduct Tribunal
(CCT) trial of the President of Senate, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, played out
in faraway United States recently. When the Court of Appeal adjourned its
judgment on Saraki’s appeal against the jurisdiction of the CCT, sine die (till
further notice) some legal minds believed that hearing into the matter
scheduled for Wednesday October 21, 2015; would also be put off indefinitely.
But the CCT merely adjourned till November 5, 6.
Many critical observers have always seen the president of
senate’s travails at the CCT as a comic show of political persecution and naked
display of legal retribution. The recent US example shows that political
wickedness is not native to Nigeria alone. Former Secretary of State, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, has been taking her own dose of political persecution based on
her use of private Email while on seat as secretary of state and her conduct
during the attack on US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi, during which
Ambassador John Christopher Stevens was killed. Shortly after the attack, many
investigative panels were set up to locate the remote causes, but also points
of possible security cum intelligence failure. And because Mrs. Clinton was
then secretary of state, most of those who know of her presidential ambition
tried to fetch some political capital out of the unfortunate attack.
Despite the fact that five House Committees including Armed
Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Judiciary as well as Oversight and
Government Reform, held their separate inquiries, as soon as Clinton announced
her entry into the 2016 US presidential election, a House select committee was
set up to probe into the Benghazi incident anew. The hearing was billed to hold
on Tuesday October 20, 2015. But thirty minutes to the hearing, something
happened. The Democratic Party front-runner announced her ‘withdrawal’ from the
2016 presidential election. There was general unease in Washington. Perhaps in
response to the news of Mrs. Clinton’s ‘withdrawal from the race’, the House
select committee cancelled its Benghazi hearings.
The New Yorker reported that while the former secretary’s
stunning notice was made by 9:00 a.m. the committee chairman Trey Gowdy’s
decision to cancel the hearings came at 9:04. Gowdy was said to have gleefully
explained that though the select committee had been engaged in a month-long
preparation for the hearing, “however, after meeting with fellow committee members
over the past four minutes, we’ve come to the conclusion that we know all we
need to know about Benghazi.” He denied that the cancellation had anything to
do with Clinton’s sudden departure from the race. But no sooner was the hearing
called off than Mrs. Clinton held a sudden press conference at 9:13 to inform
journalists she was getting back into the race. She declared: “I was just
trying to prove a point.” That same day she addressed campaign rallies in Iowa
and New Hampshire.
While that drama was playing out in Washington, back home in
Abuja, the Court of Appeal put forward its expected judgment on the appeal
filed by the president of Senate, Dr. Saraki, challenging the jurisdiction of
the CCT to try him based on its stunted composition. Further to that
interruption, a lot of non-partisan observers believed that the scheduled
hearing at the CCT last Tuesday would not hold or that even if it held, it
would be to formally adjourn the matter to an indeterminate date. Contrary to
that popular conjecture, the tribunal sat and instead of an indefinite date, it
set a return date of November 5, 6; to begin hearing on the controversial
brief.
By its choice of date, CCT gave itself out as if it was on a
mission to prove what is already known. Moreover by fixing a definite date as
against the appellate court’s open-ended dateline, it is either the CCT wants
to equate itself to the Court of Appeal or to preempt it. The perceived
overzealousness of CCT feeds the staid impression that Saraki’s travail is
politically motivated, especially when placed side by side with the fact that
former Lagos governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was let loose from similar charges
when it was discovered that he was not made privy to the charges before his
arraignment. It is the CCT’s short adjournment that makes Saraki’s case
analogous to Clinton’s. As such, if the president of Senate was to imitate the
former American Secretary of State and announced his resignation from the
position, there is no strong indication that the CCT would not adjourn the
matter sine die!
From the proceedings in the National Assembly and at the
federal level within the past five months, it is becoming obvious that
politicians are taking the Nigerian masses for a ride. Almost 75 percent of
what they do revolves around their personal political interests and
aggrandizement. It is possible that it was the sake of settling political
scores that CCB decided on the archaeological excavation of their nearly 13
years of ineptitude to activate the CCT into morbid action. Holding back the
NASS from the myriad of socio-economic challenges dogging Nigeria’s development
at this point in time seems retrogressive. What if an electoral offences
tribunal is set up and it begins to look into the 2003 election? If former
president Olusegun Obasanjo is found guilty, what manner of punishment could
restore the damage caused by that charge of electoral malfeasance? To some
extent, that is what the trial of Saraki over his 2003 declaration of assets
simulates. What the APC government should have done was to draw a line against
the past and begin a process of setting the necessary foundation to combat
graft. But, having chosen to focus on the immediate past, the party’s attempt
to reach back to 2003, while glossing over the infringements on good governance
by the executive, leaves it with the stain of guilt of political persecution.
The current impasse in the senate vis-à-vis the prosecution
of President Buhari’s anti-corruption fight reveals the emptiness of the
president’s anti-corruption architecture. As the dingdong continues between the
senate and the CCT, which is being used as a bait to get at the president of
Senate, APC may by its insistence on having its way in the appointment of floor
functionaries in the senate, irritate Nigerians with the suggestion that it was
indeed an Alliance for Political Compensation (APC); when that happens, the
millions of Nigerians that voted for change might feel shortchanged. Given such
an avoidable scenario, the President may be charged with failure of leadership.
In international relations as well as politics, leadership is perceived as
having a noble idea and being
able to communicate it to win converts for responsible
performance of noble deeds. Nigerians would thus be left to wonder what would have
been the outcome if Buhari had, for instance, in a national broadcast thanked
Nigerians for electing him and announcing to the whole nation that having been
elected on the three-fold pillars of anti-corruption, fight against insurgency
and improvement of socio-economic conditions of Nigerians, hence forth any act
of corruption or attempt to compromise national security would be met with the
full weight of state censure. Such stance could be seen as, not only drawing a
line, but providing a clean slate to undertake a change in the country. Such
frame was what the late Bola Ige said is the best approach to probing former
administrations. He explained that by so doing the people, for whom government
exits, are better placed to judge between the past and the present and draw
their conclusions without dissipating energy and wasting scarce resources. By
failing to toe Ige’s line of reasoning, APC leaders are giving Nigerians the
impression that the mandate given to them is self-serving.
On the flip side, the trial of Saraki over alleged sins of
yesterday tends to support the ongoing perception that Buhari’s anti-corruption
battle, being dead on arrival, is one-sided to the extent of its distraction
from the delivery of good governance. The president’s non-aligned posture
presents a mixed cup. But a president who has an agenda to turnaround the
fortunes and methods of national life, seeing the level of distraction and
political bickering, as provided by the insistence of party apparatchiks to
reward certain lieutenants, ought to wade in and make the best of limited time
to put the right foot forward. The failure to provide political solution to
Saraki’s ordeal, which in the main has been proven to be politically activated,
is a big minus to APC and the presidency. Moving slowly, but surely may be a
good excuse in the interim, but over time, it would be clear that indolence
fetches no returns.
APC leaders should let by-gone be by-gone and allow the
National Assembly the much needed stability to paddle their canoe. The effect
of absence of enabling bills to kindle the wheels of government policy would be
seen in the first quarter of 2016. Already the economy has started groaning. If
Ndume and other floor functionaries rejected the party’s carrot to settle for
juicy committee chairmanship, It would be in the interest of APC to find ways
of appeasing them instead of continuing to hold the nation in tension and
suspended animation. The failure of the peace process has further shown that
Saraki is being punished for not toeing the party line, unlike the Speaker of
the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, by compensating those that
lost in the election of principal
officers in the senate. Like the dramatization of her ordeal
by Mrs. Clinton, the APC has demonstrated through the stress on pacifying its
preferred candidates for Senate leadership, that it can sacrifice anything
including national interest for parochial benefits. This may not augur well for
the party in the long run. There is too much hate and division in the country
that getting the citizens together on the path to healing should be the first
indicators of change. Only that could vindicate Nigerians that voted APC.
No comments:
Post a Comment