Power Mongers & the Rest of Us

I like the simple and the ideal, and I love keeping to a gentleman agreement. And so, at the risk of going against the current tide of public propaganda, I would like to toe a different line, to remind us of where we are coming from, and what we ought to have done at this hour of political need in Nigeria.

There are laws and conventions that could have been used to rescue Nigeria from her current crisis of governance. There are also persons and institutions that, in my view, failed woefully to take advantage of these laws and conventions, in order to save the nation from her needless political troubles. These persons are our President, members of the Federal Executive Council, members of the National Assembly, and members of the National Working Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It has become obvious that, rather than use either the law or the convention of the PDP to resolve the problem, these individual and corporate persons have been busy chasing shadows, and thereby plunged this country into an avoidable political crisis.

I am sure the average person likes tasks that are simple, uncomplicated, and easy to execute. Both Sections 144 and 145 of the 1999 Constitution that the National Assembly is rushing to amend are all of these. They could have been invoked to help us out of our current political problems without this amendment, if the National Assembly, as well as Dora Akunyili and her colleagues in the Federal Executive Council have mustered the political will.

Section 145 encourages the President to transmit a letter of notice to the National Assembly, if he is proceeding on an extended medical trip. Once the National Assembly receives this letter, Goodluck Jonathan automatically becomes “acting” president. He is thus empowered to carry out the executive functions of the absent President, but in an acting capacity.

The issue here is that this Section 145 does not force the President to transmit this letter under any circumstance – it is the President’s choice whether he wants to do so or not. And so, we can accuse the president of bad faith, we can accuse him of being insensitive to the demands of governance, we can heap a host of moral accusations on our president, but we cannot accuse the President of violating the constitution, should he fail to transmit this letter.

If he fails to transmit this letter and the country is burning, what options are there in the constitution, then, to deal with such a leader who has decided to take the symbol of his presidential authority to a hospital bed and asked the country to await his return before serious and pending executive decisions are taken?

It is only members of the Federal Executive Council of the Federation that can checkmate the President, if he is found to be incapable of executing his mandate, and does not want to let go. The FEC is empowered, under Section 144, to declare that a President is incapacitated, and to transmit such a declaration to the National Assembly. On getting this declaration, the Senate President is mandated to constitute a medical panel to prove or disprove what the declaration says. If the medical team corroborates the FEC declaration, the Vice President automatically moves up to become, not an acting, but a substantive President!

From the foregoing, those who have failed the country are (a) the President of the country and (b) members of the federal executive council. For the avoidance of doubt, there is nowhere in the two sections (144 & 145) where the 1999 constitution empowers the National Assembly to play a lead role in making, or unilaterally doing anything that would transit Goodluck Jonathan either to an acting or to a substantive president.

The National Assembly unilateral power to act resides elsewhere, in Section 143. This section empowers the National Assembly to impeach the President for act(s) which two-thirds of its members consider as “gross misconduct in the performance of the functions of his office.” Thus, if the Senate had wanted to make Jonathan a substantive president, the president’s action – leaving the nation in limbo for 90 days with no one at the helm – could very easily have qualified as “gross misconduct.”

The President is in error by not transmitting the letter; members of FEC dithered over what to do, and the National Assembly exceeded its bounds, and went outside its brief to invoke a strange, illegal, and unconstitutional resolution, which the FEC in another bizarre twist accepted, in order to make Goodluck Jonathan the “acting” president of Nigeria.

Having apportioned blames where they are due, I would still go ahead to show understanding with the actions and inactions of the President, the National Assembly, and the Federal Executive Council. They are unwilling actors who are being variously called upon to grapple with and resolve an inherited problem. That problem is the north-south leadership question, which the PDP constitution sought to resolve by its power rotation principle.

In my view, this power rotation principle, for the so-called North and the amorphous South, worked well in the legislative branch during the Obasanjo presidency. For instance, we witnessed the spectacle of senators from each of the five states in the South East (where the position of Senate President was zoned) successively having a taste of the Chair. It was instructive that once a senate president was felled by the proverbial “banana peels”, Deputy Senate President Ibrahim Mantu was never asked to step up and occupy the chair. The same zoning arrangement worked in the House, where the first speaker, Salisu Buhari, was disgraced, and Ghali Na’Abba took over from him as speaker, rather than Chibudom Nwuche who was then the deputy speaker. When Na’Abba failed to return to the House in 2003, the position still went to Aminu Masari from the same zone. For many of us, this was a strange arrangement, but it turned out to resolve the leadership struggle. I also recall that whenever any crisis of confidence over this arrangement erupted, the PDP faithful would quickly rally and stoutly defend their power rotation convention, fending off critics by insisting that it was a “family affair.”

This “family affair” strategy also worked in the executive branch, even though with hitches. In 1999, all three parties (AD, APP and PDP) fielded Yoruba politicians as their presidential candidates. Both AD and APP settled on a common (AD) candidate, Olu Falae. The entire country nodded in agreement to this unwritten agreement to benefit the South West – and the south in general. After the election, General Obasanjo, a Yoruba, was given the first shot at the Presidency in order to compensate this ethnic block for the Abiola Presidency that was denied by a band of power mongers.

It is also instructive that in 2007, the three major parties (AC, ANPP, and PDP) once again fielded only northerners as their flag bearers, thus indicating a tacit support of the PDP power rotation principle. This does not downplay the fact that there were hitches, mostly prompted by what many saw as OBJ’s lust for power. The first hitch was in 2003, when President Obasanjo was expected to yield the presidency to the North, but bulldozed his way to a second term of office. Not content with this, he (or his acolytes as he said) pushed for a third-term of office, and it took the heroic challenges of Vice President Atiku, the human rights community, the Nigerian press, and the National Assembly to nip this ambition in the bud.

Looking back at this period when this gentleman agreement on power rotation was respected (despite occasional executive power mongering), it would have been “normal”, ideal, and constitutional if the same “family affair” strategy was applied in the present case by the PDP, in any of the following ways:

• By prior arrangement, the Vice President resigns his office, the Federal Executive Council declares the president incapacitated, and whichever northerner eventually emerges as president re-appoints Goodluck Jonathan as Vice President to complete the tenure;

• The PDP-dominated National Assembly impeaches both President Yar’Adua and Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, thus paving the way for either the Senate President (a northerner) or the Chief Justice (another northerner) to mount the throne in order to organize a quick election at which a northerner would probably be elected to complete Yar’Adua’s tenure, with a south-south governor as running mate. This would have been a quick way to dispense with the trouble that was dumped on us by the departing OBJ.

Both strategies would not have violated the 1999 constitution, they would validate the PDP power sharing agreement under which the country has been governed in the last 10 years, and they would have saved us from this needless dangerous drama. It may not be the best arrangement, but it would have secured peace and harmony for us, until such a time that we would eventually outgrow our parochial tendencies in our perpetual struggle for selfish power in Nigeria.

I like the simple and the ideal, and I like people who keep their words and respect gentlemen agreements. But I am also mindful that we live in a nation with a few privileged, deceitful individuals who would cheat, given half a chance. And this, to me, is at the root of our current political problem.

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