Captured hereunder are some thoughts of the British philosopher and political theorist John Locke in his enduring treatises in the 17th century. He wrote about the form of his world and power relations going back to almost 1000 years ago. Though he was a genius, he would still have been shocked, if he was to be alive today, to observe how his analysis about 800 years ago appears to still apply to many African countries including Nigeria. He was not a prophet in the classical understanding of that word. He was certainly not another Nostradamus who was said to have correctly predicted events that would happen centuries after his death. But Locke’s demonstration of future – thinking, for lack of any better description, was legendary.
The Online Library of Liberty (OLL) in an entry about two years ago said of Locke: “Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins”. The thoughts continue by explaining that ‘The equality of all citizens under the law is a linch-pin of the modern notion of the rule of law in a democratic state.
A revolutionary implication of this idea, well appreciated by Locke in the tumultuous 1680s, is that even rulers and their magistrates were also under the “sovereignty of the law”. Locke concludes that when any member of the state exceeds his legal authority or in any way violates the law, he ceases” to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another’. Has Nigeria under the All Progressives Congress (APC) since 2015 not been ticking the boxes of descent to tyranny?
There was a viral post on WhatsApp recently which appeared to warn readers to worry about any society or country where any citizen who exposes crime is himself treated as a criminal. The post said that any country where that is the case, then the country can conveniently be said to be fully under State Capture. Yet, another recent viral WhatsApp message said something to the effect that nobody captures power and uses it for public good. Does that ring a bell? Does it not represent our unfolding reality?
The process towards the capture of the Nigerian State by rogue rulers and their accomplices may have started since the beginning of this republic 25 years ago. But as it has become obvious today, the people who were at the helm of affairs earlier were benign rulers. In 2006, the eve of his term limit, the then president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, was alleged to be plotting to rig the Nigerian constitution so as to remain in office beyond 2007. He has repeatedly and vehemently denied the allegation.
But his henchman who was deputy senate president, the late Ibrahim Mantu, confirmed the existence of the plot while he was alive. He should know because he was the chairman of the constitution amendment committee in 2006. He told Premium Times newspaper in 2016, years before he died in 2021, that he would have laid down his life for Obasanjo to continue as president if he knew that the country would be so badly governed. At the time Mantu was interviewed, the All Progressives Congress (APC’s) Muhammadu Buhari was in power. And at that time Nigeria was not half as bad as it is today. We will leave it to the imagination what Mantu would have said were he to still be alive.
Buhari was an affliction on Nigeria. He was the person who led those who have turned out to be barbarians to seize power in 2015 through a democratic insurgency. But the preceding statement gives too much credit to Buhari. It has since been doubly confirmed that the man from Daura is incapable of doing anything well except for nepotism and sectarianism. He is a rabid Islamist. In 2014/2015, Buhari could be likened to an Igbo saying of imanye aka nwata na-oku (jar) ka ndi ozo nwe efe busasia ihe di n’ime oku. It will be a struggle to find an English language equivalent for the foregoing. So let me try an explanation. A group of adults convinces a child to take cookies from the jar at home. Then they would subsequently capitalise on that to empty the jar. When the woman of the house or head of the household returns, the adults would claim that it was the child that took and ate the cookies. You probably have conspired with others to do something like this in your past life.
Buhari was a failed military ruler between December 1983 – August 1985 when he was ousted by his colleagues in a palace coup. He failed again under the regime of the former head of state, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, who appointed him to head the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). That agency under Buhari was turned into a cesspit of fraud and corruption. Projects funded by the agency, which was created to equitably use proceeds from the removal of petrol subsidy for infrastructural development in all parts of the country, was disproportionately cited in one part of Nigeria- the north. The PTF stank so much so that Obasanjo initiated steps to probe the agency when he was elected president in 1999, but dropped the idea apparently in furtherance of esprit de corp. Like Buhari, Obasanjo was a retired army general. Buhari was not indicted. PTF was not probed. No sleaze was linked to Buhari. But it still speaks to what Nigeria was (and still is) that a man with such baggage was even considered, and then elected as president.
In the wake of what Nigerians are now experiencing in terms of impunity, Buhari, despite being a former general in the army, could be classified as an apprentice or wannabe tyrant. Under Tinubu the gloves are off. He is the head of the executive arm of government, and the de facto head of the national legislature. There’s no evidence that he has purloined the judiciary, suspicions notwithstanding. Though it was no fault of his, what else would be the reasonable thing to believe in a situation where Tinubu was positioned to appoint about 50% of the serving 21 justices of the Supreme Court. The president recently performed an absurdity of administering the oath of office on a non-substantive chief justice of Nigeria. She may need to swear a fresh oath when and if she’s confirmed by the spineless senate. A recent study found that judges, the judiciary and sundry officers of our courts housed the highest number of bribe takers in Nigeria. So, the judiciary is there for the taking, if it has not already been captured.
A democrat does not act in a manner Nigeria’s president does. Tinubu has no regards for Nigerians. He is contemptuous and disdainful of the people. He is a pseudo democrat. And this aspect of his life has been in the public domain for at least 25 years. A casual examination of his political trajectory in the last 30 years, and his stranglehold on the politics and the economy of Lagos State which he ruled between 1999-2007 will more than adequately tell the story. A Nigerian of Yoruba stock warned in the lead up to the 2023 presidential election that any ambition that was premised on emi lo Kan (Yoruba for it is my turn) was fraught with danger. He said that the concept was an open expression of the determination of the advocate to corrupt the system and purloin the outcome of the election. Though Tinubu was the exponent of emi lo kan in Nigeria’s political lexicon, he cannot be said to have stolen the presidency. All the courts in the country absolved him of any wrongdoing, and affirmed that the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission (INEC) correctly called the results of the presidential election. The only sore point is that the judgments happened during the period that the study we referenced earlier found that judges and other officers of Nigerian courts were the highest takers of bribe money.
Tyranny is not an event, it’s a process. And the process as it concerns Nigeria was substantially set in motion during the eight years of Buhari. It is gradually becoming suffocating in this dispensation. Tinubu is at the head of it, and those working with him have become fast learners. The fact that the heads of the three arms of the Nigerian national government carry their share of baggage is not coincidental. Even the chairman of the ruling party is mired in corruption issues. It is not also a happenstance that the leadership of the three significant opposition parties – Labour Party, People’s Democratic Party, and the New Nigerian Political Party – are mired in problems and so unstable. APC is already firmly in the grips of Tinubu. For tyranny to get rooted and to fester, there’s a need to destabilise leading opposition parties. And that’s on course.
The other day, Alhaji Sule Lamido, former governor of Jigawa State and a political gerontocrat, alerted the country that Tinubu is increasingly entrenching himself to make it impossible to remove him through the ballot in 2027. He was right. Unless something drastic happens, the chairman of the National Assembly will be in office during the election in 2027. He is a Kept Man. Two helmsmen of secret security agencies were recently removed and replaced. One of the newcomers is of the ethnic stock of the president. The tenure of the in-coming substantive chief justice of the federation, Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, the president’s kinswoman, will run through 2027. If there’s any dispute from the presidential election, she will constitute the apex election tribunal, and probably head it. Whoever will be the INEC chairman in 2027 will be Tinubu’s lapdog. He will superintend another mago mago and wuru wuru election.
The same can be said of the service chiefs. For certain, the police inspector – general will still be around given recent shenanigans with his tenure. Ordinarily and statutorily the police inspector-general should be out of office this month. He is also the president’s kinsman and was Tinubu’s aide-de-camp when he was the Governor of Lagos sttate. Then add the issue of incumbency for a man who has no scruples in using state power for personal gain, then the picture of 2027 will be complete.
Not quite! Here’s a glimpse into the set up for 2027. Those who may dare to contest for the presidency will start with almost insurmountable handicaps. As we said the police chief will be Yoruba. The chief of army staff, Yoruba. Head of the secret police, Yoruba. The director-general of the National Intelligence Agency, Yoruba. Head of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Yoruba; Customs comptroller-general, Yoruba; Immigration comptroller-general, Yoruba; Central Bank governor, Yoruba, just to mention a few. Many of these agencies are effectively in control of manipulating elections in Nigeria. For instance, the Central Bank warehouses sensitive election materials. The army and police escort materials and election staff. So everything is fixed. Only the God factor cannot be factored in at this time, or at any time for that matter.
Tinubu is Nigeria’s usu biara orji ntagbu – locust, cankerworm and caterpillar. How ironic that Usu in Igbo is bat. Even usu will shrug at being BATified. The president’s wife had boasted last year that their family was so blessed materially that they would have no need to be parasites on the country. The story is different. The truth is that previous presidents of the country who never laid claim to riches and stupendous wealth did not assault the commonwealth as the Tinubu family is doing. The president buys an aircraft which Nigerians do not know the cost. He hops into the craft and travels abroad while the country is reeling from energy crisis, acute petrol scarcity, and pangs of hunger of citizens. He buys an upscale bomb-resistant American Escalade Sport Utility Vehicle. It was procured from the public till but Nigerians do not know for how much. The regime spends money with little or no accountability, as if money is going out of fashion. And the money is borrowed. The lavish lifestyle of Tinubu underpinned by the concept of emi lo kan is happening at the same time millions of people are slipping below the poverty line. Despondency and despair have straddled the land.
In this dispensation we operate many national budgets concurrently making tracking and accountability nearly impossible. The budgets on their own are problematic. Everyday we are assailed with budget provisions in strange places. It’s no longer abnormal to find allocations for the construction of culverts in the budget of the country’s space exploration agency. Nothing makes sense, and the president does not care. If he cares, there’s no evidence. Under Gen. Abacha, the then Anglican Bishop of Akure Diocese, in Ondo State, the Right Reverend Emmanuel Bolanle Gbonigi, described the former head of state as “thoroughly wicked”. But Abacha was a military ruler. What do we say of the country today?
*It’s almost impossible to exhaust the perfidious activities of this regime but we will sign off here as the third leg of the trilogy which started two weeks ago.
