Letter To President Yar’Adua —Niyi Osundare AND a Response by Biko Agozino
toyin adepoju
Yes, South Africa, until barely two decades ago, the site of one of the most cruel and barbaric racist regimes in the history of humankind, was, indeed, inaugurating its third president since the apartheid system came to a painful, inglorious end in 1990, and genuine democracy commenced in 1994. Not far from you, on the dais reserved for dignitaries, were the country’s two former presidents - Mr Zuma’s predecessors: the inimitable Nelson Mandela, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and first democratically elected leader of South Africa; then Thabo Mbeki, his successor, the cerebral, patriotic, and honourable man who stepped down from office when asked to without bringing down the entire country with him. Two enviable statesmen, no doubt, respectable and worthily respected, their places assured in history as memorable nurturers of democracy and the electoral process which serves as its engine of continuity. They are genuine heroes of democracy because they went into office in the democratic way and left office in the democratic way, thus laying the foundation for a tradition of smooth and civilized succession. They never used ‘the power of incumbency’, as is the practice in Nigeria, to imperil their country’s political peace. I am sure you must have noticed the peaceful, celebratory atmosphere, the ebullient dignity and sense of purpose that characterized the entire occasion. You must have felt the pulse of a country poised for development and progress, History’s shackles and contemporary challenges nothwithstanding. You must have seen a truly ‘nascent democracy’ at work.
Were you surprised, Mr. President, that the grandeur and significance of the occasion was not marred by grim-faced, discontented opposition party members cheated out of victory through electoral fraud? Were you surprised the inauguration site was not besieged by placard-carrying demonstrators with banners loud with proclamations such as DOWN WITH THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION; VOTE-ROBBERS, SHAME ON YOU!; WE WANT REAL ELECTION, NOT FRAUDULENT SELECTION; MR PRESIDENT, HOW MUCH DID YOU BUY YOUR VICTORY? In your exploration of the mass media, did you find newspaper pages dripping with words and phrases such as ‘rig’, ‘ballotbox-snatching’, ‘thugs’, ‘collation errors’, ‘INECGATE’, ‘ballot papers with missig serial numbers’. Did you read about any ward where the number of votes supposedly cast was double the number of potential voters in the voter’s register? Did you discover any cases of biribery and subornation of electoral officers? Did you find a South African Tatalo Alamu protesting the ‘abolition’ of the South African electorate? Did you observe citizens clamouring for the electoral petition tribunal as though it were a natural, inevitable, extension of the voting process? Did you see demonstrators in the streets carryng the coffin of democracy and performing mock burials of its murderers?
Mr. President, April was, indeed, the cruelest month for you. For while you were in South Africa toasting the healthy culmination of a working electoral (and political) process, the country over which you rule was unraveling from a shameful but customary electoral brigandage in one of its vital parts. The story of the famous ‘re-rerun election’ in Ekiti is now so familiar that even the roadside grass knows its pith and plot. But to refresh your memory, and for History’s sake, here it is in a nutshell. In February this year, an election tribunal presiding over the chaotic 2007 elections nullified the votes in 63 wards in 10 local governments in Ekiti, sacked the sitting governor who owed his electoral victory to those illegal votes, and ordered a fresh election in the affected areas. April 25 was fixed for this election. The campaigns leading up to the election were fierce and frightening. You should know because Your Excellency and the top guns of your party stormed Ekiti State with spectacular federal might to campaign for your candidate. Your party leaders vowed to recapture Ekiti ‘by all means’, including the use of the Mobile Police and soldiers. Many well-meaning Nigerians wondered why your party, the PDP, was so insistent on the deployment of armed personnel in a civil election, and not on a ‘free and fair’ election that the other party was demanding.
Well, April 25 arrived and polling commenced with all the dread and violence foretold. The situation in Oye was so tense that polling in its two wards had to be postponed. A federal senator from that town was reportedly arrested along with about 65 weapon-wielding thugs found in his house. In Oye, Ifaki, and some other places, accredited journalists and election observers were beaten up and/or detained, their professional equipment seized or damaged. But somehow, polling was relatively peaceful in other areas, and the returns started coming in, with the vote tally virtually even for the two candidates.
Then came the now famous Ido-Osi figures which allocated nearly 16,000 votes to the PDP and barely over 3,000 to the AC. These figures got red flags flashing everywhere in the way they violated every law of probability, and the amazing manner they ran against the voting trend in all other areas. And to make the curious curiouser still, on-the-spot reports later revealed that these Ido-Osi jumbo figures were collated at a police station, the designated collation centre having been burnt down. And these returns were reportedly not endorsed by the appropriate party agents as required by law.
The arrival of the Ido-Osi figures opened up another act in the re-run’s macabre drama. Ekiti Resident Electoral Officer, 74 year-old Mrs Ayoka Adebayo, JP, discerned the fraud in the figures and refused to announce the results, disappearing instead into the dark anonymity of Ado Ekiti night, and shocking a bewildered nation hours later with a letter of resignation from her REC position. She had to abscond, the letter said, instead of succumbing to pressures from powerful quarters to announce what she described as ‘fake results’, an act grievously against her ‘Christian conscience’. Significantly enough, this letter was addressed to you as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, although I am not sure if it ever got a reply. The nation’s political heart stopped beating, for a while, as people pondered the uncommon, un-Nigerian, courage that produced Ayoka Adebayo’s unprecedented action.
But the federal response to the REC’s resignation was jittery, awkward, and unmistakably suspect. Mrs Ayoka Adebayo was treated like someone whose act was likely to bring about the collapse of the Republic. First, the nation’s Inspector-General of Police declared her wanted; Maurice Iwu, INEC boss, lied to the nation that she was ill but wanted her in Abuja all the same. As for Professor Dora Akunyili, your Minister of Information and Matron of the Re-Brand-Nigeria campaign, what mattered most was not the electoral bringandage in Ekitiland, but the damage the Ekiti REC’s resgnation would do to Nigeria’s international image. The Ekiti REC remained underground, the nation held its breath, wondering what next.
Your Excellency, while all this show of shame was unfolding, you feigned a kind of presidential distance, but that did not prevent you from holding two or three meetings with top-notchers of your party, the PDP, the INEC boss and state security - meetings to which the AC, the other major party in the Ekiti contest, was not invited. Many Nigerians wondered why you opted for such narrow partisanship at a time which called for national leadership; why, indeed, you showed no moral concern for the fire burning in one part of the country your rule. They began to speculate about the likely impact of your attitude on the boiling electoral stalemate in Ekitiland. They began to wonder if a true ‘father of the nation’ would behave the way you did.
Well, Nigerians didn’t have to speculate for too long. Soon after, Mrs Ayoka Adebayo sprang out of hiding and headed for the INEC headquarters in Abuja. After what must have been a loaded and very confidential meeting with Maurice Iwu, the INEC boss, she emerged, astonishingly happy and confident, assuring the curious press and all the world that she was, indeed, still a member of ‘the INEC family’, and was now ready to return to her post as Ekiti REC to complete the task she left behind. What about her former letter of resignation? What about those fake figures she complained about being pressurized to declare? What about, what about. . . . Ayoka Adebayo parried all questions, and with an ominous smile on her face, she zoomed out of the INEC premises.
A couple of days later, surrounded by soldiers, fierce-looking police, and all the paraphernalia of the federal might, Ayoka Adebayo, JP., declared those same ‘fake figures’ from Ido-Osi and returned the PDP, your party, to power in Ekiti. Since then, there has been palpable tension in Ekiti and an atmosphere of rage and bewilderment in the county.
Mr. President, all this dangerous and frightfully ominous electoral farce played out in one part of a country under your watch. The whole world (including, alas, your hosts at the Zuma inauguration in South Africa!) stood aghast as they watched Africa’s delinquent ‘giant’, making another mockery of democracy and the sanctity of the ballot box.
Now, Mr. President, reasonable people in the world are asking: where were you as the political, constitutional, and – very important – moral leader of Nigeria when all this ‘show of shame’ was unfolding in Ekiti? Did you hear or read about how hoodlums, armed to the teeth by politicians, brutalized press men and women, harassed election monitors, and made polling impossible in certain areas considered the ‘strongholds’ your party, the PDP? Did you learn about a particulat senator of the Federal Republic who harboured over sixty dangerously armed thugs in his house? Did you read newspaper reports about the arrest of these thugs and their expeditious release when the news reached the top brass of the police? Were you told about other senators of the Federal Republic who ‘visited’ the voting areas with dangerus weapons in their convoy? President Yar’Adua, as a scientist, teacher, and moral being, weren’t you startled by those jumbo figures from Ido-Osi? Did you ask Maurice Iwu, your INEC boss, how they came about? Did you cross-check his response with the on-the-spot reports by electoral officers, security agents, accredited election observers, and the media? Tell me, Mr. President, how did you take the Ayoka Adebayo story? Do you think she acted according to the dictates of her conscience and her God as you urged in that grand and laborious press statement by your presidential spokesman on the eve of her return to her post? Don’t you see her moral somersault as an indelible blight on whatever is left of the credibility of Nigeria’s electoral system? Do you think that after all this electoral and moral abomination, it is business as usual in Ekiti and all is well in the country you rule?
Dear President Yar’Adua, the Ekiti re-reun election fiasco has finally put an end to your honeymoon and shredded that mask of incorruptibility that seems to hang around your face. Not many Nigerians were pleased with the way you came into office some two years ago in a do-or-die election considered as the corruptest and most shameful in Nigeria’s history. But your humble admission, upon your assumption of office, of the imperfection of that election, and your pledge to be the rule-of-law President earned you a measure of patient toleration by a country severely violated by the imperial presidency of your predecessor. Not a few Nigerians were also pleased to hear your promise to reform the electoral system. Now, with your connivance at and tacit endorsement of the recent electoral and political fraud in Ekiti, we are beginning to wonder how to square up your rule of law posture with your silence on the murderous, man-pass-man impunity displayed by your party, the ruling party. Are senators caught with pump-action guns in pollig areas adherents of the rule of law? Are heavily bribed electoral officials exponents of the rule of law? Where does Ayoka Adebayo’s electoral perfidy fit into the scheme of rule of law? Are those phantom figures from Ido-Osi products of the rule of law? Can you deem a candidate returned to office through this foul and violent process a rule-of-law governor?
No, Mr. President, the panel of enquiry just set up by you to investigate the Ekiti re-run fiasco has been rightly decribed by thoughtful commentators as far ‘too late and too little’. In like manner, your tardy expression of concern about the election is insincere and insultingly disingenuous. You look very much like that guard desperately shutting the gate after the horse has already escaped, or that dog struggling to hide the knife after its ear has been cut. Your action is salt in the injury of aggrieved Ekiti people and an insult to the intelligence of discerning Nigerians.
Truth be told, Your Excellency, you have displaed a gross failure of leadership in your handling of the recent electoral fraud in Ekiti State. By putting party loyalty above national consideration, by vanishing from our moral radar at the time your presence was most needed, by taking refuge in dubious silence at a time your authoritative voice was loudly imperative, by acting so reactively in a situation warranting an urgent proactive response, you created the kind of moral – and political - void capable of swallowing up a whole country. What manner of panel will heal the wounds already inflicted on our hapless country’s psyche? What kind of probe will unearth what we already know? In an administration suffering from acute panelititis such as yours, hardly has anyone told you that there are certain moral responsibilities that just can not be delegated; that there are decisions that must not be allowed to die in the red-taped files of humdrum, red-herring commissions of enquiry.
The real leader, Your Excellency, is one that is more pro-active than re-active, a medium of divination, not a grand master of post-mortems. He is one who is able to combine spontaneity with deliberativeness, balance the exigencies of the short term with the visionary pressures of the long term; one that is able to bump partisan loyalty for the national imperative. That is the kind of leader who is trusted by the people because he has made himself trustworthy; a leader who earns respect without demanding it. A Mandela who heals the wounds of a nation. A Gandhi who liberated his country from a rampaging Empire with unassailable political, moral and spiritual force.
You will agree with me that our country has not been blessed with this kind of leader at the national level in our nearly 50 years of flag independence. Basically, we have been saddled with two types of ‘leaders’: the pit-bull type and the head-in-the-sand dissembler. The first is the hectoring maximum dictator who rides rough-shod over our human rights while playing loose and free with the nation’s treasury. In this category, generally, are the military adventurers in power who rule through the bullet rather than the ballot box.
The second category comprises the so-called civil ‘leaders’ with a pervasive pretence to democracy. They usually come to power through compromised elections, and make sure they do not leave office in less perverted circumstances. While the pit-bull thunders across the country with abrasive assertiveness, the head-in-the-sand type plays up a pious disinterestedness, his dagger held gingerly behind his cloak. He belongs to the breed of the so-called ‘God-fearing’ rulers whose wisdom is nothing but cunning, whose so-called distance is calculated aloofess. They affect some kind of national/global attitude while pursuing the narrowest of partisan/ethnic/ religious/ideological agenda. They are ‘fathers’ of a nation’ of unequal children, and see nothing wrong in keeping it so. You will agree with me that a country wedged between these two monstrosities is unfortunate indeed. This has been Nigeria’s plight; and this is why the country remains what Soyinka has rightly called the ‘open sore of the continent’.
Mr. President, your action and inaction in the recent Ekiti electoral fiasco has swollen the ranks of those who doubt the sincerity of your much-touted electoral reforms, given the disquieting disconnect between the ideals you profess and the actions you take. Nothing demonstrates this more eloquently than your treatment of the Muhammed Uwais Report. In the opinion of many Nigerians, the most salient recommendation in that report is the one that transfers the appointment of the INEC Chairman from the President (as presently obtains) to the National Judicial Council. But you are seeking to retain that power of appointment based upon the shockingly questionable logic that ‘Integrity is not who appoints the people. It is the integrity of the people who are appointed’. In other words, you do not need to be a person of integrity to appoint those who possess that virtue. So, a thoroughly reprobate boss can appoint a saint. Does this logic belie, then, the time-tested axiom that like attracts like? Talking seriously, Your Excellency, do you expect reasonable Nigerians to believe you when you say this – trust the appointee, not the appointer? And why do you consider integrity so easily discountable as a sine qua non for the person with the power to appoint? Is this a Freudian slip or an abiding plank of your moral and political philosophy?
No, Mr. President, whoever hires the boss is bound to influence his action. This is why the ‘I’(standing for ‘Independence’) in the acronym INEC has been such a gratuitous and tragic lie. The major reason Nigeria has not been able to conduct a successful election since independence is the incestuous closeness between the State House and the Electoral Commission. And it is the kind of closeness which flies in the face of equity: when a President running for re-election is the same person that appoints the electoral boss, can he still pretend to be on equal footing with other contestants in the presidential race? Can the boss so appointed lay much claim to credble impartiality? The provenance and nature of their appointments have been largely responsible for the controversial tenures of past and present overseers of Nigeria’s electoral process. This is why Ani, Ovie-Whiskey, and Nwosu, were such hamstrung and compromised umpires? It is why most Nigerians see Maurice Iwu as nothing more than a glorified errand boy of the President and his ruling party? Simple logic, Mr President: the vey nature of the appointment of certain functionaries automatically nullifies the ‘integrity’ which you talk so confidently but so unconvincingly about.
President Yar’Adua, remove the executive stanglehold on Nigeria’s electoral process. Let some other body see to the appointment of the INEC chair. It is politically risky and morally wrong for the President to appoint the umpire for a game in which he or his political party is a principal contestant. Letting go of this immoral responsibility will not in any way diminish the awesome powers you already have as President. Genuine democracy is not possible without a truly independent and impartial electoral system. And what’s more, the country’s destiny depends on the integrity of that system. As I said in my open letter to Chief Obasanjo, your predecessor and benefactor, after the fraudulent polls of 2007, ‘apart from occasional religious riots and their ethnic fall-outs, no other issue has brought Nigeria closer to the brink of disintegration than rigged elections’. Your rejection of the salient recommendations of the Uwais Report can only lead this unhappy country futher down the precipice of chaos and possible disintegration. Mr. Presidnt, it is a supremely serious crime to play foul with a people’s commonweal expressed through their electoral choice. The present situatin in which the people cast their vote and the rulers have their way is a recipe for avoidable civil strife and instability. It is abominabe hypocrisy to chant the rule-of-law mantra in a country where the ballot box is in chains.
And heaping all the blame for Nigeria’s political problems on some faceless, nameless monster called ‘poliical class’ is as disingenuous as it is untenable. Besides, it is a thoroughly unconvincing cop-out. What kind of ‘political class’ do you have in mind? Are all members of that class equally guilty, and equally able to hide their crimes? To take a specific example, in the Nigerian situation today, which party is home to a political class that swaggers across the country with such criminal impunity because their being both ‘in government’ and ‘in power’ ensures protecton by and complicity with state security paraphernalia? Why do the police and security agents always look the other way when ballot boxes are being snatched in favour of the ruling party, your party? Which party’s ‘political class’ have the money to bribe and bulldoze their way around as a result of their federal might and immoral access to the country’s resources?
You have pretended long enough, Mr. President. Time to get down to the business of fulfilling the pledge you made at your inauguration some two years ago. The buck stops at your desk, and the world is watching. Nigerians are not fooled by the presidential distance you affect; they are justifiably impatient with the father-of-the-nation, rule-of-law posture which raises no eyebrow at electoral frauds. Having been ruled and misruled by all kinds of masquerades in the past 49 years, we have learnt to spot the face behind the mask. I implore you to ask yourself before you go to bed tonight: is your party, the PDP, helping or hurting Nigeria’s fortune by so insidiously working towards turning the country into a one-party state? What would be democracy’s fate in that kind of state? How much rule of law would it accommodate? Have you ever pondered the fatal contradictions between the agenda of the party you chair and the ideals and visions of the country you lead?
In the thinking and comments of many Nigerians, you are too slow, too tardy, too vacillatory for a backward country like ours that is in a dire hurry to join the rest of humanity in the 21st century. Though you look very much like a person of temperance and moderaton, your political leanings and affiliations portay you as too cozy with corruption, too chummy with the corrupt, too lenient with the sleaze and graft which clutter the veins of Nigeria’s body-politic. And oftentimes we ask: how can a decent man find such inexplicable comfort in the company of political skunks and moral cripples? What do they say to one another when they are together? How do they manage to reach their foul consensus? Under your watch in the past two years, Nigerians have become hungrier, sicker, more insecure, more unhinged than in any other period in our history. Their nights are dark (we are still waiting for the promised emergency daclaratin in the energy sector); their days are dreary. They cannot feel any positive impact of your government on their lives.
Time waits for no one, Mr. President; History is an unbribeable judge. You have already chalked up two years on Nigeria’s presidential board. Let not future generations call your tenure ‘Nigeria’s wasted years’. From every indication, the Nigerian spirit is faster, more ambitious, more purposive, than you and the government you head. The outside world is tired of – and justifiably angry at - Nigeria’s seemingly incurable delinquency. Nigeria has borne the burden of the ‘big-for-nothing’ country for so long now that our necks have shrunk in shame. Which is why the G-12 does not want us at their summit, and foreign dignitaries shun our door. The world does not celebrate failure, Your Excellency. A thousand slogans cannot re-brand a rotting corpse. President Yar’Adua, time to shed the mask of the dissembling politician and assume the mantle of the statesman who inspires his country to greatness. Going by your behaviour and performance in the past two years, many observers have come to the conclusion that you are incapable of rising to that height. You owe this country and the world a duty to prove them wrong.
With my best wishes,
Your Compatriot,
Niyi Osundare
NB: *This piece was written before the news emerged about the on-going military bombardment of the Niger Delta.
MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2009
NIYI OSUNDARE: A RESPONSE
By Biko Agozino
Dear Prof.,
If to say na me be President Yar’Adua, I for reply your long letter like this: Thank you for your so long a letter in the tradition of Mariama Ba. How madam and pickin them dey? Na waa for you brother Niyi self. You done dey turn oyibo o! How you take write your brother so long a letter and you no even ask about family, unlike Mariama? Plus, na only oyibo man go write one letter put am for three envelopes say this one na part one, that one na part two and then this last one na part three. African man go put all the parts for one envelope to save money for stamp. Abi na lie? You sabi how much poor man go pay to buy The Guardian for three straight days (May 26-28) just to read your dogon turenchi? You know say your letter dey sweet like your poetry wey we no dey miss for Sunday Tribune in those days. I beg make you no stop o, make you keep on writing a column now. I beg now, e joor, biko nu, mbo, dualla.
Anyway sha, joke na joke and Joké na person name. The national problems that you bemoaned in your letter(s) also preoccupy yours truly, wallai tu lai. I thank you for adding your powerful voice to the task of seeking solutions. In the words of the young Nigerian Pan Africanist, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, who was killed in a tragic motor accident in Kenya on Africa Day and buried in Funtua recently; Do Not Agonize, Organize! Feel free to join us in doing what you can to help solve the problems.
But Prof, even you will admit that you were going over the top when you concluded by suggesting that the re-branding of our country could be represented with the metaphor of re-branding of a rotting corpse. Haba! Quite to the contrary, Insha Allah, our people dey kamkpe, we continue to be vibrant and very much alive, for as you said in one of your poems, ‘Our Earth Will Not Die’, and as you put it in your letter, our people remain dynamic. Our task is to tap the dynamism for the development of the people in a sound environment.
I was also surprised that you heaped all the bucks at my door mouth without a word of advice to the international community that created the financial meltdown that is affecting the local economy on how to lend a hand while they spend hundreds of billions to rescue their own firms. Nor did you have any words for local politicians and residents to please behave themselves in a democratic manner. Our people should learn to lose elections gracefully or go to court to challenge the results reasonably instead of all that magomago and gragra to intimidate voters or influence electoral officials. Four years time, you have a chance to try again, it no be by force. The same goes for militants who boast about kidnapping and killing workers in Nigeria – let them go to court if they have a genuine case.
My next surprise is that you did not mention anything positive that we are doing on the ground in Nigeria. I am pleased to tell you that I discuss our Seven Point Program with other African servant leaders and I hope that they will accept and implement the key principles. For instance, we are making available this year, a two hundred billion naira credit facility for commercial farmers. This has never happened in this country before whereas Europe and North America routinely give hundreds of billions annually to their farmers as farm subsidies alone.
In the past leaders of developing countries have tried to lobby that the developed countries should withdraw subsidies from their own farmers to level the playing field. None of them figured out that it was much more practical to provide as much help as they could to their own farmers on an annual basis as Professor Biko Agozino has been arguing for some time now. This has changed from this year in Nigeria. Do you advise that we continue to invest hundreds of billions annually to support farmers in this country? As I told The Guardian, agriculture contributes 60% to our GDP compared to 20% from petroleum and gas and 5% from industry. We need to build up our capacities in all areas with the state acting as an activist and catalyst for development in partnership with the private sector and the community at large. Shouldn’t we make similar grants to the arts, research and development, small businesses, inventions, sports, health, education, power-generation, transportation, annually?
Bros, let me end before my letter gets as long as yours. You know say I no sabi book reach you, Prof! Thanks again brother Niyi for writing. Please write again soon and keep the suggestions for innovative policy options coming. Make you greet your family for me. If na me be him, na so I for reply you. We go see now, Se gwo be, Ka e mesia nu, Alafia.