The
moral imperative that confronted President Goodluck Jonathan at the inception
of his administration was clear. At the time, public debate revolved around the
outsized remunerations of members of the National Assembly. President Jonathan
was expected to challenge the culture of unbridled acquisition and unhinged
entitlement that is ballooning the cost of government. Had he done so, he would
almost certainly have ignited a civil war within the Peoples’ Democratic Party
since he would be endangering the party’s sacred cult of patronage. But
Jonathan could then have rallied the people behind him and served as their
knight in the battle to deepen accountability and probity in governance.
Instead, Jonathan took the opposite
course of action. His decision early this year to abolish subsidies on fuel
amounted to raising taxes of poor and middle class Nigerians in order to fund a
broke government – a government that is being bankrupted by the uninhibited
appetites of avaricious politicians. Rather than cutting the waste and
extravagance of his co-travelers, Jonathan elected to increase the burden of
the people. That decision provoked a weeklong strike action and nationwide
protests that assumed the shape of a public inquisition into the character of
governance.
Sensing the potential for a broader
anti-government backlash, federal legislators, have since then, undertaken a
series of high-profile investigations of the executive branch. These probes
have had public support because they assuage a popular desire to see a
cleansing of the Augean stables of the state. They have also enabled the
federal legislators to outflank the president, deploy populist rhetoric and
deflect attention from their own misdemeanours. Theatrics aside however, the
House of Representatives investigation of fuel subsidy payments uncovered a
festering edifice of fraud. The representatives’ report indicted senior
administration officials and placed the onus on the president to cleanse his
government of compromised figures. In some other climes, the scale of fraud
uncovered would have led to mass resignations, the prosecution of indicted
officials and would certainly have ended the administration.
It is a measure of how much grief the
representatives caused that the chair of the investigatory committee,
Honourable Farouk Lawan became the target of a sting operation involving the oil
baron Femi Otedola and the State Security Service. Honourable Lawan now stands
accused of soliciting and receiving a bribe from Otedola. In recent weeks, news
of his alleged corruption has displaced the urgency of implementing his panel’s
recommendations from the news cycle. The probe report brimming with scandalous
disclosures of how government officials and their business cronies defrauded
the country to the tune of billions of naira may not be completely discredited
but it risks being forgotten even as we are titillated by the salacious
renderings of Lawan’s alleged escapades.
Lawan’s travails, now dubbed
“faroukgate,” correspond with a culture of political intrigue that can only be
described as the doctrine of mutual incrimination. The most pungent
dramatization of this principle came in 2006. President Olusegun Obasanjo
accused Vice President Atiku Abubakar of corruption, tried to evict him from
the presidency and ultimately disqualify him from contesting the presidential
elections in 2007. Atiku’s response was not to exonerate himself, but rather to
discredit Obasanjo by arguing that he was equally complicit in the theft of
public funds. The former governor of Plateau State, Joshua Dariye’s riposte to
being charged with money laundering was to argue that he had funneled much of
the loot into the PDP’s campaign treasury thereby effectively incriminating the
top hierarchy of the party including Obasanjo.
In 2008, Honourable Ndudi Elumelu, who
chaired the House of Representatives probe of the Obasanjo administration’s
power projects was himself subsequently prosecuted for contract fraud by the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, along with Senator Nicholas Ugbane,
the chair of the Senate Committee on Power. Honourable Herman Hembe who chaired
the Representatives’ investigation of the Stock Exchange Commission earlier
this year was removed after the commission’s director-general, Arunma Oteh
accused him of soliciting a N40 million naira bribe from her.
The logic of mutual incrimination is
not only that politicians who live in glass houses should not throw stones; it
is that our democratic institutions are glass houses. In an equal opportunity
kleptocracy, it is the height of moral arrogance for a politician to presume to
invigilate his brethren. As Obasanjo once put it, “There is honour among
thieves.” At the time, the then president was explaining why Anambra Governor
Chris Ngige should turn over the state’s treasury to his political godfather,
Chris Uba, who happened to be Obasanjo’s aide. By this understanding, the
political consensus under which Nigeria is governed is a pirates’ covenant
which requires “fair” and “just” distribution of plunder. Those who question
the piracy itself are vilified as traitors or spoilers. It is no surprise that
government increasingly resembles a criminal consortium.
Democracy rests on the principle of
checks and balances yet the executive and the legislature, paralyzed by mutual
incrimination, cannot check each other. The net effect is the delegitimization
of our institutions. A presidency crippled by its equivocation in fighting
corruption has shrunk; while the National Assembly is seen as a citadel of
sleaze. This has resulted in a widespread public loss of faith in civil
institutions that makes our young democracy extremely vulnerable to
extra-constitutional shocks.
The senate’s deliberation on the
recently uncovered multi-billion naira pension fraud was revealing. The
senators cursed the perpetrators and their descendants and committed them to
eternal damnation in the hottest part of hell. Not one senator raised his voice
in favour of prosecuting the perpetrators of the fraud right here on earth. The
pseudo-spiritual histrionics disclosed the bankruptcy of a political class so
morally paralyzed by its own indiscretions that it cannot summon the will to
address crimes against the Nigerian people.
It is often the case that when
political elites cannot regulate themselves and lose legitimacy, new agencies
of political sovereignty emerge to do the job. We are in a familiar and treacherous
historical environment. Three decades ago, public faith in the Shehu Shagari
administration plummeted as the entire government became synonymous with
unfettered graft. The military struck terminating that democratic experiment. While
there is currently no potential for similar military intervention today, there
are other threats. Consider the deepening hold of cynicism on the national
psyche. Young Nigerians are observing the shenanigans of politicians and
internalizing a nihilistic view of life and politics as a Machiavellian domain
where high values and ideals do not apply. This is not the sort of outlook that
will raise the quality of governance or prolong democracy. The rise of
non-state violence and anti-state militancy in recent years is an index of
public nihilism and loss of faith in government.
Politicians who are customarily
preoccupied with their own ends should care enough about the institutions they
presently inhabit to realize that they cannot survive popular apathy. Should
President Jonathan find the courage to vigorously and unequivocally challenge
the strongholds of graft, he would be saving not only his presidency from
opprobrium but preserving Nigerian democracy as a whole. But can he?
All images sourced from Google Images
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