The Hoodwinkers (1): Akpabio Versus Shema

...if am sitting on a seat and somebody is coming to remove me without consultation, I will hold on to the seat even if the seat want to break; Senator Aloysius Etok (above left), commenting on Gov. Godswill Akpabio’s ambition to unseat him as the Senator representing Ikot Ekpene District. The battle is now being fought in Abuja FCT

On Wednesday 8 May 2013, campaign posters of Ibrahim Shema and Godswill Akpabio - Governors of Katsina and Akwa Ibom States respectively - magically appeared on the streets of Abuja promoting their intent to campaign for the 2015 presidential elections.

The symbolism of the posters was not lost on anyone. In 2007, similar posters of another Katsina and a south-south governor also appeared, except that, at that time, it was for real; the controversial Yar’Adua-Jonathan ticket was being born.

If we recall that Governor Rotimi Amaechi, another south-south governor, is currently in hot water over campaign posters that link him with the Governor of Jigawa State for the 2015 presidential election, you would very easily situate the Shema-Akpabio example in its proper (political) context.

As expected and in a bid to escape the “Amechi Problem,” Godwill Akpabio has quickly distanced himself from the posters, claiming that they were "the handiwork of mischief makers who are bent on heating up the polity for no reason whatsoever.”

Err…, Mr. Governor, there is a reason for this, if we examine the politics at play. We can offer two or more possible explanations.

Could it be Gov. Ibrahim Shema’s people muddying up the political waters by putting Jonathan’s most consistent supporter on the spot? The posters could very easily cast a loyalty shadow around Akpabio at Aso Rock, or worse, put him in the same hot water that Amechi has immersed himself.

Or is this another clever ploy by Akpabio to use the posters as a platform to further advance his bid to shove aside Senator Alloysius Etok and land a senate slot in 2015 for himself?

Or, heavens forbid, could it be that Governor Akpabio means business and is only flying a kite? After all, they often tell us that there are no permanent friends or foes in politics.

Two out of three, Akpabio appears to be the one engaged in skullduggery. Recall that in March, he stirred up controversy by “confessing” that he scratched off the name of the winner in the Ikot Ekpene Senatorial district and inserted the name of Senator Etok. The controversy that erupted over this “undemocratic” activity apparently did not achieve the intended effect – casting Etok as someone enjoying a stolen mandate in Abuja! Instead, the governor received the backlash and I’m told he had to quickly embark on a media relations blitz, to squelch the revolting news.

Will the Abuja posters help him achieve the objective of getting the nation to talk about his senatorial ambition? He is certainly not resting on his laurels. All of a sudden, we also hear that “voters” of the accursed district, led by Senator Etoks former campaign manager, have passed a vote of no confidence on their Senator, just as the Shema-Akpabio posters were appearing in Abuja.

Whatever it is, let us not lose sleep over this, my people. It is all politricks, designed to hoodwink the unwary. Peace.

The Zamfara Vision

ex-Gov. Ahmad Sanni Yerima of Zamfara

Something does not seem quite right about the Zamfara vision, as embodied in the State’s recent adoption of Shari’a law. I use the term vision advisedly, based on my understanding that it is an imaginative future outlook which grasps the truths of a people’s existence.

Visioners, then, must be seen as persons with progressive ideas and dreams. I take it that these ideas and dreams shall have the quality of not only looking ahead but, more importantly, being able to grasp the truth that underlies the fact of our existence as a people, as a one nation. I don’t know quite how to express this, but in my search for a credible explanation, my mind keeps going back to the same worries I had about (late Gen.) Abacha’s Vision 2010.

The greatest problem confronting Nigeria today – the problem that most threatens our existence as one nation – is political. Abacha’s attempt at visioning ought to have been expressed as a sort of Magna Carta – a political document. Thereafter, this political document can be translated into economic platforms by various actors who come into or seek to come into government. Having rejected the option of a sovereign national conference, the Abacha regime compounded the problem by setting up a teleguided constitutional conference whose recommendations were further bastardised by a ruling cabal of military officers. It came as no surprise that the subsequent Vision 2010 document turned out to be an economic document that was anchored on the prior resolution of our national question. The Vision 2010 report mentioned, quite correctly, that we ought to settle our political differences before we can successfully implement it.

My worry is this: Can the Zamfara experiment, expressed as a vision of our future, help us settle our political differences?

A country’s vision of its future need not be several tomes of bound report, a la Abacha’s Vision 2010. It can be captured in one imaginative phrase that fires the waning spirit of a people. We have charismatic leaders and creative writers with the necessary skills to develop and encapsulate the Nigerian condition into a vision. If we say, as the Abacha report proclaims, that A Great Country is Ours to Build, we at once thrust an unwanted burden on the individual Nigerian. We must face the truth. No one wants to build a great country called Nigeria. At the same time, we all secretly love Nigeria because, compared to other civilized nations of the world, the possibilities here are quite astounding, seemingly limitless. The goal of the individual Nigerian tends to be to sacrifice something to build a great family, to sacrifice something to amass a personal fortune, to sacrifice something to build a formidable spirit of service to the Almighty.

If what is sacrificed were spiritual, honest and progressive, we would have long ago constructed the great country of our dream. Unfortunately, rather than sacrifice “sweat, blood and tears” to achieve our goals, most of those who knock at Nigeria’s many doors of opportunity come armed with guns, poison tongues and pens, and axes to grind with the nation.

Let me reach back into history. In 1835, the French liberal statesman and political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the fledgling democracy in the Unites States of America and came away with insightful observations about what made that country work, and would make it great in the future. What he saw was a society where every citizen began life on an equal footing. What he saw, as one American president later put it, was “a nation of people with fresh memories of old (oppressive) traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action.”

Now, these old (oppressive) traditions are worth emphasizing because they were inspired by religion. The first set of immigrants to the US consisted of people escaping religious persecution in the Continent, Catholics and Protestants alike. In other words, they were escaping societies that insisted on running nation states the way that rulers perceived the Almighty had instructed. As is the case with Zamfara State today, church and state were fused, and the state thereafter became a willing, coercive tool in the hands of religious fundamentalists. The New World provided a safe haven to begin a new life that the escapees swore to be governed by the same rights and freedoms that we appear to be using today to return us to the Zamfara vision.

And this is the point. We hear some people proclaim that our constitution guarantees each individual a right to freedom of religion. The operative world is individual; our constitution does not guarantee the state the right to freedom of religion. What I thought our founding fathers were saying is that no individual should be punished for choosing to subscribe to any one faith or religious ideology. Our constitution, in my view, is not trying to provide a platform for individuals to band together in order to use the powers of the state to enforce a religious tenet, because this action will directly challenge the rights of other individuals with different religious ideologies in the same state. There should be no state law to enforce a religious tenet, in a multi-religious state, and in a secular nation-state, for the sake of democracy, order and good government.

To return to Tocqueville and America. When the Frenchman wrote his famous “Democracy in America,” the Negro and the American-Indian questions had not been resolved. But among the immigrants who took over the land, this was the American idea, described imaginatively by Tocqueville himself as the Spirit of Equality. This spirit is captured in two ideals. One: It should be possible for all men and women who start life at the bottom to rise to the highest heights where their talents and energy can propel them. Two: in this journey to the top, “neither race, nor creed, nor place of birth (nor indeed place of domicile) should affect their chances.”

This Spirit of Equality bears further explanation, since it is not possible for the condition of everyone in society to be equal; the Almighty creates people with different capacities, skills, attributes. Equality is, must be measured with the standards by which society organizes itself for the purpose of enjoying its freedoms and its opportunities. If society does not accord special privileges to some of its members on account of tribe, religion, station, sex, or birth, society members will have equal opportunity to succeed. But because of differences in individual condition, skills, and capacity, some members of society are bound to do better than others. But those who are not so well-performing will keep alive the hope that tomorrow will be better, the certainty that there will be no legal, institutional, or conventional barriers against their hope for a brighter tomorrow. This certainty is assured by the state, which remains to maintain the level playing field that protects the disadvantaged even as it encourages the advantaged.

If we assemble ten forthright Nigerians from as many ethnic groups, they would easily agree on what to do about the Nigerian problem, and on what would constitute our vision of the future.

To the Zamfara state governor and legislators, I would say this: Our vision should have been about two things; how to set the standard for conduct that would release the energies of the people to hope and to dare; and how to ensure that any individual or group does not, in future, appropriate the instruments of power and use it to unleash a reign of arbitrariness on the system. The first victim of arbitrary rule is usually the laws that ensure our spirit of equality, the rules that govern civilized conduct. The military usurps power simply because civilian politicians have so far been guilty of such arbitrariness which, together with corruption, throws Nigeria repeatedly into the Hobbesian state.