Electoral Tribunal as Pandora’s Box
The 2019 Presidential Election Tribunal is turning out to be something else. It would have been quite amusing but for its nation-disabling possibilities. This one began as a piece of wild rumour. An excellent outing of a sadistic imagination. Then it began to gain furious traction. Finally it turned out to be true.
A major pillar of the federal authorities’ defence against the allegations by Mallam Atiku Abubakar that the last presidential poll was hopelessly rigged and serially compromised is the serious allegation that Atiku himself has rigged his nationality by claiming that he is a Nigerian whereas he is not. Since Atiku has reached for their balls, they also headed for his jugular.
It is a major bombshell. Surely, if a man is not a Nigerian, it will be difficult for him to insist that he has been rigged out of an election of Nigerians, by Nigerians and for Nigerians. This is one of the planks of integrity of democratic rule. That is unless in the brave new world of globalization, the very idea of nationality has become a sham. It may yet be, but not so fast.
So it is then that what began as another senseless spin from Nnamdi Kanu’s macabre smithy of malarial concoctions has now been given full legitimation by the federal authorities. Suffice it to say that if the allegations are to find favour with our lordships, it means that a person who has served as a major paramilitary functionary of the Nigerian state, a serial presidential contender dating back to 1993 and a vice president of the nation for a walloping eight years has become a non-Nigerian or better still an unNigerian,technically a stateless person. It doesn’t get any more fascinating.
With a stroke of the judicial pen, Atiku would have been completely disarticulated, like an articulated lorry that has unravelled spilling its murky contents all over. Without any doubt, this presidential electoral dispute is fast turning out to be the most rancorous and ill-tempered in the history of the nation. It is electoral tribunal as a Pandora box.
It recalls with haunting terror the brilliant judicial summarisation of the drama surrounding the deportation of Alhaji Shugaba in the Second Republic. According to the presiding judge, the unlawful deprivation of citizenship and the summary deportation is tantamount to “civil death”.
In 1979 despite strident allegations of a stolen presidency by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s fanatical supporters and the infamous twelve two-thirds abracadabra, the electoral tribunal of that year never strayed from the ambit of legal technicalese and jurisprudential sword-crossing.
Forty years after, the nation is witnessing the nastiest and most polarizing presidential dispute in its electoral history. Nigeria’s luck is that this is taking place between two most favoured and influential scions of the northern establishment, northern stars of the same religion and the same ethnic extraction. Except for the fact that the leadership stakes and the order of preferment in both the north and the nation has reached a point of irreconcilable contradiction, both General Buhari and Alhaji Atiku ought to know what is really at stake and begin to act with wisdom.
It speaks to a fundamental rupture in the northern leadership structure and an even more fundamental flaw in the British colonial nation-making that has witnessed appalling suffering and misery brought upon natives on the Indian sub-continent and the African continent in the last three hundred years.
It is a known fact that Atiku’s parents, from Sokoto and present-day Jigawa State, journeyed to settle in Jada. It was an open migratory field which has seen criss-crossing and nomadic restlessness all over West Africa. It was a borderless space. The only border recognized then was the border of civility and good neighbourliness.
There is no problem querying the validity of the League of Nations and subsequent UN trusteeship which ceded former German territories in Africa to friendly countries and the legality of the 1961 Plebiscite in which former British Cameroonians elected to join Nigeria while their French Cameroonian counterparts chose to remain in Cameroon.
But we might as well go the whole hog to question the 1914 Amalgamation itself which collapsed and conflated Crown citizens and subjects as well as an indigenous free city-state together in an unholy and unhealthy colonial brew. It is now a known fact that beyond economic exploitation, the Brits had no master roadmap for their colonies. You cannot blame them. Nobody can give what they don’t have.
Theirs was a simpleton’s formula based on experience. Just get a master-nationality to whip the rest of the folks into line and let them get on with it thereafter. In the colonial imaginary, order is superior to justice or equity. Since every crisis presents its own golden opportunity, this may as well be a golden opportunity for a heroic and visionary reconstruction of the sclerotic hulk of aborted nationhood that Nigeria has become before our very eyes.
Readers of this column will confirm that we once cautioned Atiku about the dangers of taking on an embattled post-colonial state with his flanks terribly exposed. The modern Nigerian state is the equivalent of what is known in the old Congo as Bula Matari or crusher of rocks. As somebody who has wielded its power once and with maximum ruthless efficiency too, Atiku ought to know better.
There are many who insist that Atiku’s current difficulties could be traced to his former boss and current patron, General Obasanjo who in his rendering of accounts wrote devastatingly and with acerbic scurrility about Atiku’s mystifying provenance and ambiguous paternity. Obasanjo thought he was settling accounts with posterity. But posterity has a way of stealing upon us with amazing celerity.
No one at the moment is sure of what damning evidence of state-disrupting and nation-combusting activities the federal authorities have against the Adamawa politician to have led them to raise the stakes so dramatically and devastatingly. There are hints and echoes of Atiku-induced foreign meddling and of a Venezuela-like ambuscade of the state in the horizon. But it remains to be seen whether questioning his very nationality does not amount to killing a fly with a sledge hammer.
In the past week, snooper has listened to some of Nigeria’s finest legal minds argue about the pros and cons of the allegations about Atiku’s nationality. While they all made eminent sense as far as the legal nuances and finer jurisprudential complications are concerned, none of them spoke to the nation-disabling possibilities of having a former vice president, a whole people and a vast swathe of prime land suddenly confronted by loss of nationality. The messy post-restoration politics of the Bakassi Peninsula is still very much with us.
Famously, there used to be a certain Governor Michika from Adamawa State who always threatened to go back to his people on the other side of the border with Cameroon should Nigeria continue to displease and disappoint him. But that was mere political bluff and bluster.
The people of Jada and environs who have been law-abiding citizens of Nigeria would certainly feel the psychological trauma of sudden statelessness. Ahmadu Bello whose vigorous campaigns in the area tilted the balance in favour of Nigeria will be weeping in his grave. Regional political cohesiveness and granite political alliances do not seem to last for long in these climes.
To be sure, African countries are no stranger to controversy when it comes to the nationality and sub-nationality of some of their rulers. Till date, there many who insist that the late Ghanaian leader, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, was a Nigerian marooned in Ghana. In fact some people maintained that his middle name Kutu was a corruption of the Yoruba name Kuti. There were rumours that Kwame Nkrumah himself was of Ivorian descent.
Up till date nobody knows where the founding leader of Malawi, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, actually came from. While he was alive, the topic was off airing and off the record, except you want to be fed to crocodiles. It was said that when he finally succumbed to senile dementia, Banda often lapsed into a strange pre-colonial Southern African dialect which was straight out of Sir Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine.
Coming home to Nigeria, speculations about the actual nationality of at least three of the past rulers often surface at enlightened gatherings. But nobody ever begrudged the fact that Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi’s father was of Sierra Leonean extraction while Sani Abacha was fingered to be of Chadian provenance. First generation Nigerians of Sierra Leonean parentage have been known to surface at the uppermost reaches of military intelligence in Nigeria.
Ironically it was rumoured that it was bitter animosity arising from a dispute about ethnic nationality and state of origin between two bosom friends and senior military officers jostling for promotion that was to lead to a memorable bloodbath and savage reckoning when one of them eventually emerged as military leader of the nation.
On the wider continent, the nationality question can get very nasty indeed. In Cote D’Ivoire, the attempt to deny the Ivorian nationality of the current president, Allasane Quattara, led to disintegration and a bloody civil war.Having served as the country’s Prime Minister and top technocrat, the former high-flying international bureaucrat was summarily excluded from vying for the top job on the grounds that he was the son of itinerant nomads from Burkina Faso.
Laurent Gbagbo, the former ruler of Cote D’Ivoire, was subsequently indicted for war crimes and jailed by the International Court sitting in Hague. In the old Zaire, Mobutu was to pay a high price for summarily expelling the Congolese Tutsi whose ancestors have lived in that corner of the Congo for over two hundred years. The Zairian war-cry was that a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water.
We have not yet reached this dangerous point. But this is how it starts and utmost care must be taken. As it is noted, however much we choose to ignore history, history will not ignore us. It is interesting that the much ignored and much derided National Question keeps rearing its head in the most dangerous and unexpected of places however firmly we keep the lid sealed. This is the crux of the problem and not a mere electoral dispute.
*Written By Samuel Adesanya
