Ayomide
Last week, I had quoted the report from DAILY TRUST of Wednesday, August 15, 2007, on the statement from the Most Reverend John Onaiyekan in respect of the need for a new election in Nigeria within one year. The reason was that the level of rigging during the last election was too high for the election tribunals to deal with, and therefore, the process should be bypassed. In an interview with THE SUN newspapers of last Sunday, Retired General Victor Malu had underlined the seriousness of the intervention of Reverend Onaiyekan, wondering why it was not kept on the front burner of national discourse by the media. It is clear that the controversy generated by the massive fraud perpetrated during the April polls, would continue to haunt Nigeria’s political firmament for a long time to come. I was still chewing on the impact of the suggestion by the CAN president, when DAILYTRUST of Thursday last week, carried a report from an unlikely source, the Inspector General of the Nigeria Police Force, Mike Okiro, about the direct corelationship between electoral fraud and the aggravation of the crime situation in our country today. According to mister Okiro, as reported by DAILY TRUST, “politicians assuming the reigns of leadership through a dubious process as well (as) their failure to provide good governance in Nigeria serve to aggravate crime rate in the country”. He went further that “investigations have shown that most criminal activities perpetrated in the country were as a result of people venting their anger against bad governance and the exhibition of an uncivilised political culture by elected political officers”. I had described the police boss as an unlikely source of a truthful assessment of our national crisis today, given the role that the police force, and especially its top most leadership, has played in the institution of the gangster culture which the politicians have foisted on our country, especially since the lead to the 2003 election. But we shall come back to this presently. Mike Okiro’s very forensic mind was obviously working as smartly as any such mind should in the circumstance, when he added that “if elected political officers provide good governance through meeting the various needs of the people in terms of employment generation and reducing the looting of public funds, the crime rate will be drastically reduced”. Okiro’s dissection of the Nigerian malaise hit a high point, when he “also identified the rate at which the nation’s politicians strive to assume the reigns of power as another major contributor to insecurity in Nigeria. He said many politicians, in their bid to get elected, engage in illegal importation of arms and ammunition and they arm the unemployed youths to kill or main political opponents”. Okiro has come very far, and he deserved to be commended for his words of truth, even when we can detect an element of ‘selective amnesia”. He forgot to add the amount of money given to the police force to aid the subversion of the nation’s electoral process as the police, working in cahoots with INEC and political thugs under the direction of political barons of all hues, subvert the democratic aspirations of the Nigerian people. But we can begin to deconstruct the facts that emerged from the courageous intervention of our honourable police chief. Mister Okiro might not understand it in those words, but he has confessed the fact that criminal activities reflect the collapse of confidence in the state and the political process. When a people feel unable to express their electoral preferences they find refuge in criminal activities as a platform of protest. The state has been “privatised” by political actors; the people suffer a total absence of governance; the so-called “democracy dividends” are a charade; people see how relatively poor politicians of a few years ago, have become stupendously rich members of the political inner-circle today! So in response, a systematic increase in criminal activities has been recorded all over our country: homes are not safe, the roads are spaces of crime and business establishments are vulnerable. A corrupt state relies on an equally compromised security apparatus to try to stem the tide and the people are caught, almost in a vice-like grip, in the duel between these two adversaries. Even Malam Umaru Yar’Adua agreed with us, last week, that security is a very serious problem that must form a central kernel of whatever work that he will do in Nigeria during his tenure. President Umaru Yar’Adua also told us that one of the many points he wanted to bring to the centre of inter-political party discourse in Nigeria, is the need to build consensus on such issues as the violence in the Niger Delta. I was taken aback either by the naiveté of the thought or the inability to face the truth of the scenario in respect of the violence in the Niger Delta, even by president Umaru Yar’Adua himself. This is said with the utmost respect. Today undeclared low intensity/high octane warfare is taking place in the Niger Delta, and in recent days, the army has deployed fully in Port Harcourt to stem the violence of alleged cult groups. Clearly, Nigeria’s Niger Delta is awash with all manners of arms, from the humble Kalashnikov to more sophisticated weaponry; criminal gangs are extorting money; they are kidnapping people and increasingly making oil exploration very difficult, while the existence of the vast majority of the people with its Danteesque propensities is now becoming completely reduced to the Hobbesian state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish and short! This is the scenario. But can we forget so soon that the roots of the criminal activities of today were sown in the lead to the elections of 2003? The fact is that the PDP machinery actually bred the monster that is let loose on the people of the Niger Delta today. In those years, the PDP could not go to the electorate on the basis of its record of service, which was woeful. So the restive youth were recruited as thugs, were given a lot of money as well as guns, to help in the theft of the 2003 elections. It was on the basis of that decision and its implementation, that Obasanjo received 100 per cent of the votes in some of the constituencies in Rivers state! The elections were massively stolen, with people being stopped from even getting to vote in very many constituencies. However, the arms given out to steal the elections remained in the hands of the young militants; and having acquired a taste for the criminal life that the PDP machinery had facilitated, it became impossible to return the genie let out, to the bottle. The expediency to steal elections by Obasanjo, the PDP and the political buccaneers of the southsouth, has led to the weakening of the powers of the Nigerian state in that region of the country. This is a state whose operatives have suffered a legitimacy crisis from soon after the 1999 elections, on the basis of the irresponsible manner that they have wielded power: stealing huge sums of money; exhibiting the ill gotten wealth in the midst of the grinding poverty of the mass of the people. So when the Inspector General of Police, Mister Mike Okiro, was making allusions to politicians who engage in illegal importation of arms and ammunition, then arm unemployed youths to kill or maim political opponents, in their bid for power, this is the scenario he was actually describing. The PDP has been largely responsible for the deepening of the process of criminalisation which Nigeria has witnessed over the past eight years, especially in the Niger Delta. It is the chickens that have come home to roost, with their devastating consequences for the stability of the Nigerian state itself. Of course, the general situation is compounded by the fact that these massively rigged elections have also translated to the most irresponsible behaviours in the process of governance. This is logical; those who did not need the people’s mandate to achieve power, can never see the people as the motive force of the democratic process. Power is attained only as a platform for theft and the immeseration of the people is deepened. An anarchic “luddism” is a response amongst the people; they do not destroy factory machinery the way the Luddites did, in response to capitalist exploitation, in the early days of the industrial revolution. Here, there are no factories; so open criminal activities which prey on individuals and the state; on nationals and foreigners alike; become the order of the day. The state loses its grip, and a political process built on the mantra of finding development on the basis of attracting foreign investment, unravels before our eyes, as even the most dogged expatriates, who swim in all the petrodollar, are gradually beginning to withdraw from the country’s Niger Delta region! If we go back to the beginning of this write up, I was quoting the call by the Most Reverend John Onaiyekan, for Nigeria to go back to the polls, within one year; given the fraudulent manner in which INEC, PDP, Obasanjo and the security forces rigged the 2007 elections. The Nigerian people were robed of the right to make a democratic choice of who will govern them and the entire political process lacks legitimacy. But as we al know, Nigerians were visited with a “do-or-die” elections, because Obasanjo must impose a president he chose, willy or nilly; the PDP must be back in power by hook or by crook, largely because on the basis of their record in power over the previous eight years, they could not trust the freely expressed choice of the Nigerian people. As we have also noted, even the chief of police has come clean to attribute the increase in criminal activities, to the subversion of the nation’s political process, by a bandit political elite that operates only on the basis of fraud; it atrophies the flowering of the nation’s political process and denies the Nigerian people of the right to enjoy the decencies which civilised conduct of governance could give to them. It is this reason why I believe, as my title today posits, that we are caught between the suggestions of the priest and the coldly rational forensic analysis of the police chief. We must brace up for those two choices: either to re-run the elections in order to return those who get the genuine mandate of the people or harvest more criminal violence which might sap an illegitimate state structure of its abilities to secure the country and the lives and properties of the people. These are uncomfortable choices, but these are the realities staring us in the face, when matters are presented in their naked nastiness!
