Rivers: Beyond Wike and Fubara
By Lasisi Olagunju
Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s 1947 book, ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom’, opens with three quotations. The first tells the reader: “This above all: to thine own self be true…” It is from William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. It simply says do not deceive yourself – like the one with a sore in the right leg but who nurses the healthy left. The one who deceives himself suffers deception from the gods.
The second quote, from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, is a warning that “Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.” In today’s English, it says those who cover their faults always end up being shamed by them. The third quotation enjoins you to “fight all opinions contrary to truth, but let your weapons be patience, sweetness, and charity…” The words belong to an 18th century Catholic saint, John of Kanty, who ended that quotation with a counsel that the best cause almost always gets spoilt by violence.
My eyes caught the quotes as I was considering recommending ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom’ to the gladiators fighting to the death in Rivers State and to the puppeteers behind the problem. If the 134-page book is too thick for them to read, at least, they should buy the three quotes for their politics and, especially, for their politicking.
Rivers State suffers the oríkì of an oba who profits from planting corn of trouble in the backyard of his victims. The king’s fruited corn must not be harvested and, it must not be destroyed. It is trouble.
The people behind the crisis in that state are those who urge the creditor to demand his pay and, at the same time, nudge the debtor to repudiate his debt. Their goal is conflict that benefits the palace.
Yes, dirty water quenches fire but why not use clean water which neither stains nor stinks?
Very wild Rivers State conducted its local government elections two days ago without police presence. The police stayed away and the state said it didn’t miss them. In scoring that first, Rivers State has helped us ask two pertinent questions: is the Nigeria Police Force for the Federation of Nigeria or for the Federal Government of Nigeria? Who should determine what goes on in the local governments? Is it the state or the federal government?
In a properly structured family, a slave knows himself as slave; the indentured knows what he is too (Eru a mo’ra e l’eru; Iwofa a m’ora e ni Iwofa). If Nigeria were a properly structured nation, last week’s drama between Governor Sim Fubara of Rivers State and the Inspector General of Police would be very unnecessary. Who should be in charge of security in Rivers State? Who should be in charge of the local governments there? The Federal Government or the State Government? Or who?
We may not be a very good record-keeping country, but those who enslaved us kept and still keep records. We see in colonial records, including the Hansard of the British parliament, tomes of materials which tell us that Nigeria is a negotiated country. Every bit of its structure was argued and fought over by the founding fathers who did not take anything for granted. On Wednesday, 21 October, 1953, Lord Milverton briefed the British House of Lords on what he called “prospective constitutional developments in Nigeria.” It was essentially a report of that year’s constitutional conference. Here, I am interested in what Lord Milverton said the leaders of the Nigerian people agreed to on the structure and control of the police. Milverton said: “The Conference agreed that the police, other than local authority and native authority police, should be a central function, but control of police contingents stationed in the regions is to be vested in the regional commissioners of police, who will be responsible solely to the Governor of the region, who, in turn, will be responsible only to the Governor-General. I regard this as a very satisfactory decision, to avoid the danger of the police coming under the control of a political party.”
Subsequent constitutional conferences of 1954, 1957 and 1958 had variants of this agreement. And there are records that show that two of the regions – the West and the North – which already had local authority and native authority police, demanded regional police in addition to a central police force. The Western Region, especially, believed that “a centralized police force” would most certainly become the “deadliest weapon for any dictator.” But, the Independence Constitution of 1960 struggled to allay the fears of, especially, the West on the potentiality of a federal government appropriating the central police to decimate the regions. The drafters of the constitution – and of subsequent ones – thought that the creation of a Police Council to own and manage the Nigeria Police would keep us safe from dictators. We’ve seen how wrong the allayers of that fear were.
If you’ve ever witnessed how village folks extract kernels from palm nuts, you would understand the struggle for control of the councils between the federal government and the states. Who should manage local governments and their affairs? As flawed and inadequate as the 1999 constitution is, it contains enough hints on what local governments are and how they should be run. But our law means nothing to us – even to the courts. As usual, the judiciary shat in its pants in this Rivers matter. Federal High Court knelt for the federal; State High Court prostrated before the state. The courts messed up so much that street chickens played with their balls.
Unlike the control of the police, management of local governments was not a problem at the beginning of our journey. It is a problem created by the military which found Nigeria in a hole and stupidly dug it deeper. Their training missed for them the first law of holes. What did we inherit?
In April 1952, members of the Western House of Assembly thoroughly debated the local government system they wanted for their people. The region’s Leader of Government Business and Action Group leader, Chief Awolowo, spoke there on what he called “local self-government.” He explained this to mean “a system of local government wherein local councils make, accept responsibility for and implement their own decisions.” A year later, Chief Awolowo described local governments as “the superstructure on which the regional government is erected.” Soon afterwards, the Western Region became the first to conduct council elections and introduce elected representatives into the local government system in Nigeria. That was in June 1953. And the elections were free and fair to the extent that an Adegoke Adelabu got elected as Chairman of Ibadan District Council under a regional government headed by Chief Awolowo. The elections were strictly a regional matter.
If today’s Federal Government had known its limits, it wouldn’t have suffered the disgrace it suffered in Rivers State at the weekend. The election it struggled to frustrate eventually held. And I see it as a victory for federalism and one major step in our forward march to defeat the current forces of resurgent unitarism.
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Should the eye ever forget what the heart has seen? Those words impose on us the duty of protecting our heritage. The people in charge of the government in Abuja today claim to be followers of Chief Awolowo. They claim Awolowo but want states and local governments in their federal pockets. How do they think Awo would have taken it as premier if Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa had attempted to organise an election into Ibadan District Council? Or seek to use federal police to stall the conduct of elections into Western Region’s Divisional Councils?
Our state governors may have not managed excellently the local governments, but digging a hole to fill another will most certainly pockmark the face of the earth. When states conduct local government elections, the ruling party wins all. The present set of governors inherited that wrong from those who had been there, including the incumbent president. We do not find what the governors do with the councils funny at all. We think what they do is not democracy; we think it shames democracy. And what solution do we have? Use the federal police to balance the terror.
What else are we brewing? We have before the Senate a bill seeking to establish an agency for the federal government to conduct local government elections. The promoters call it Local Government Independent Electoral Commission Establishment Bill 2024. The day that bill is passed and signed into law is the day Nigeria becomes Paul Biya’s Cameroun. Check who Paul Biya is and what he means to the peace of his country and to the prosperity of his people.
You remember how Shakespeare’s Cassius paints the canvas of imperial Caesar?: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus, and we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonorable graves.” Historical Caesar truly became a colossus when he seized control of all Roman structures. In the vicious contest for the control of the local governments between the presidency and the governors, behind whom would you queue? My own vote on this would go to the governors. Why? Let me ask: is it not better to have 36 mini emperors ‘assisting’ us to hold down an elephantine imperial presidency than to have a sole administrator, a real Caesar, bestriding the whole Nigerian world like a colossus?
The theory of unintended consequences has ensured that governors fill the void left by what should be a virile opposition and a checking legislature. You will understand my drift if you’ve ever seen how a cackle of hyenas tackle conceited Lion, king of the jungle, and cut him to size. They have to, otherwise they all become endangered, and the forest becomes a proper state of nature – a nasty, brutish dictatorship.
Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency was stopped by the governors. Governor Bola Tinubu was the field commander in that battle. Umaru Yar’Adua’s and Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential tenures suffered pacification at the hands of their governors. The governors of those eras, warts and all, reined in the omnipotent presidents and we and our democracy were the better for it. Then a paternalistic, free-roaming Muhammadu Buhari came and tamed the governors, and crashed the plane, and landed all of us in this emergency ward. We will see the worst of it with the grasping present.
Fortunately we have a set of governors for whom flames in the tiger’s eyes signify nothing. And these governors are from all parties who have governors.
Imagine 220 million Nigerians peeping under the huge mahogany legs of a presidential table begging to breathe. The spectacle of a begging nation is worse than miserable minions peeping about in search of “dishonorable graves.” And we will have it the moment this president, or the next one, is allowed to ‘elect’ chairmen and councilors into the 774 local government councils.
I try to loan myself sense on the crisis in Rivers State. The issue there is beyond Nyesom Wike and Sim Fubara. The two gentlemen, in fact, need to be rescued; they are grasshoppers in the hands of some wanton gods. Some harvesters’ silos need the grains of that fight for their barns to be truly full. A grisly game of thrones is, therefore, afoot. Wike and Fubara and their Rivers are mere boots in that battle.
The very week of our independence anniversary was the week we experienced Rivers State.
Public intellectual and ebullient media icon, Ambassador Yemi Farounbi, early last month sent me a text: “I’m getting worried by the increasing distance from good governance, the rapid movement towards dictatorship and the deafening graveyard silence within the Nigerian elites.”
The day Nigeria celebrated its 64th independence anniversary was the day Farounbi turned 80. Amidst all the dirt and madness around, the old man has managed to keep his medal of sanity. A man with such a journey and unique birth date should be celebrated with the nation. But there was no reason to roll out the drums. For our country, the auguries are not good.
If you make a dove president of Nigeria, the present structure will transform that dove into a hawk overnight. Too much money and too much power at the centre is what I meant by ‘structure’. Everything comes down to the imperative of meeting our demand for a proper federation run on the principles of true federalism. We run an inverted federation of the centre holding the ladle at the dining table. The current revenue sharing formula gives the federal government 52.68 percent, the 36 states 26.72 percent and the 774 local governments, 20.60 percent. The oil-producing states take 13 percent as derivation revenue. Typically in this Orwellian contraption, Big brother harvests more than it should take. The Federal Government takes more than half of everything, yet it cheats.
I am aware that four states are currently before the Supreme Court asking my Lords to order the president to obey Section 162 (1) and (3) of the constitution. The section makes it mandatory for all monies made by the federation to go into the federation account. Section 162(3) provides that “any amount standing to the credit of the Federation Account shall be distributed among the federal and state governments and local government councils in each state of the federation on such terms and in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly.”
But the states say that the Federal Government, in the name of deductions and transfers; refunds and interventions, cheats them and the local governments monthly. For instance, at the July 2024 meeting of the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), N1.35 trillion was shared to the three tiers of government as allocations for the month of June 2024 from a total gross revenue of N2.4 trillion. There is a difference of over N1 trillion between what the federation admitted making in that month and what the tiers of government shared. Check other months; the pattern is the same. We wait to see what the Supreme Court will say on those four cases. It will make new laws.
The fear of the worst happening is ever present. The consolation is in one of the lines I dropped here some weeks ago. “The closer the collapse of the empire, the crazier its laws are.” The quote belongs to Roman orator, lawyer and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. You must not keep quiet, covering your faults and letting them shame you. We should know that when it rains – and it will rain – all roofs will get wet. And, so with charity and sweetness of patience, we must continue to “fight all opinions (that are) contrary to truth.”
