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An
inauspicious August
By
Mohammed Haruna
Newsdiaryonline
Tue Aug 30 ,2011
Victim
of UN House bombing
August as in, say, “August visitor,” is, a
dictionary says, someone or something “full of solemn splendour
and dignity.” Solemn perhaps, but in Nigeria the month of August
this year which takes a bow today has been anything but splendid
and dignified. On the contrary it’s been awful, to put it
mildly.
First, last Friday the 26th of the
month, witnessed a most senseless bombing of the United Nations
Building in Abuja for which the now much dreaded Boko Haram
Islamic sect has since taken credit. That attack was as cowardly
as it was senseless; it took 23 lives at the last count and
wounded scores more, all of them completely innocent of the
persecution of its members its leadership
has often accused the
authorities of, albeit not without some justification.
Certainly compared to the Nigerian Police
Headquarters, Abuja, which they had bombed months earlier, the
United Nations Building couldn’t have been a softer target.
The attack was also senseless because it’s
impossible to see how it could further the cause of Islam as a
religion of peace. On the contrary, it could only put Islam in
Nigeria on the defensive in a world where its profiling by
Western propaganda as a religion of violence has become
virtually a global article of faith in spite of the fact that
the West’s production and use of the weapons of mass destruction
has been unmatched before and since America, as its leader,
recklessly nuked the Japanese at the end of World War II.
The country was still reeling from the shock
of the bombing of the UN Building when violence broke out last
Monday in violence-prone Jos, Plateau State, between some
Muslims celebrating this year’s Eid el-Fitr, and Christians.
There were no official figures of casualties as at the time of
this writing but reports talked of several dead and many more
wounded and hundreds of the worshippers’ vehicles destroyed.
However, unlike the bombing of the UN
Building, the authorities in the state apparently saw the Sallah
day violence coming; security officials and religious and
community leaders had met to discuss strong rumours of possible
reprisal attacks on worshippers for last year’s unprecedented
Christmas bombing in the town which had been blamed on Muslims.
In the end their plans to avert the violence came to nought
partly because a group of the Muslims decided to celebrate
Sallah a day before the security arrangements agreed upon could
be put in place, but more so because the authorities in the
state continue to discriminate between creed and tongue in
carrying out their responsibility to protect citizens in the
state.
Both last Friday’s bombing of the UN Building
and the Jos Sallah violence show that beyond mouthing the usual
knee-jerk rhetoric of giving no quarters to terrorists, the
authorities are yet to get down to the hard task of identifying
the right but difficult mix of carrots and sticks that can bring
an end to the deepening insecurity in the country.
For me the main obstacle to identifying this
mix is the self-interested politics of our leaders. I believe
between the attitude of our leaders and the appropriate rules of
the game, attitude is far and away more important if democracy
and good governance is to take root and grow in our society.
It is because our leaders, as a rule, lack the
right attitude to democracy and governance that things have
hardly worked in this country. Instead they seem to have an
attitude of ignoring any fact or logic, and of subverting any
rule that gets in the way of their goals, even if the rule is as
well-intentioned and as unambiguous as can be.
In the case of the Boko Haram menace, for
example, the facts and the logic of the involvement of the
former Governor of Borno State, Alhaji Modu Sherrif, with the
sect’s leadership before the extra judicial murder of its
leader, Mohammed Yusuf, provide a clue to its possible solution.
Yet because the former governor played a key role in securing
much of the votes in the North East for President Goodluck in
the last presidential elections, all indications are that Abuja
has neither the will nor the intention to pursue that clue.
Instead the authorities have been too keen on
pursuing the easier scorched earth policy of collective
punishment of the residents of Maiduguri, the Borno State
capital, when it is obvious that such a policy is no solution to
the problem.
If this country has had two visitors on the
security front this month that are anything but August, what has
happened on the judicial front during the month are, in a way,
worse, except of course, for the loss of innocent lives and the
scope of destruction of property that resulted from the bombing
of the United Nations Building and the Jos Sallah violence.
I am, of course, talking about last week’s
sacking of Justice Isa Ayo Salami, as the President of the Court
of Appeal by the now departed Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice
Aloysius Katsina-Alu, clearly with the connivance of President
Jonathan. Salami’s alleged crime was that he perjured himself
when he accused the former CJN, who retired last Sunday, of
instructing him to direct a panel of the Court of Appeal sitting
in Sokoto to dismiss an appeal against the state’s governor,
Alhaji Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko. Salami’s key witness and now
the CJN, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, had testified on oath than
nothing of such had happened. Mustapher, according to Salami,
was the third party when the former CJN so instructed him to
favour Wamakko.
Salami’s sack was the culmination of what has
clearly been a proxy war between the ruling Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP) and the leading opposition party, the Action
Congress (AC), a war which begun when the Court of Appeal
replaced most of the PDP governors in the South-West that had
come to power in the 2007 general elections with those of AC
ahead of this year’s elections.
Naturally the court’s judgements did not go
down well with the PDP; several of the party’s kingpins in the
region went on to accuse the court of accepting bribes to answer
AC’s prayers.
For the PDP it seems Sokoto State was the
limit when all indications were that it was about to lose the
state to the opposition DPP’s governorship candidate, Alhaji
Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi, following his appeal against the
decision of the Court of Appeal to allow Wamakko to stand in the
re-run of the 2007 governorship election which the court had
annulled on the grounds that Wamakko was not initially qualified
to run for the office.
There are, I believe, rights and wrongs on
both sides of this unfortunate proxy war. I believe, however,
Salami is more right than the former CJN. First, the former CJN
may or may not have instructed Salami to rule in favour of
Wamakko, but he certainly instructed him to keep the judgement
the Court of Appeal was about to deliver on hold and
reconstitute the panel. However well-intentioned the former CJN
may have been, he knew he had no power to have so intervened.
Second, the Constitution seems to have given
the CJN almost absolute power in the composition of the National
Judicial Council, the disciplinary organ of members of the
bench. Of its 25 odd members, only four – himself, the number
two in the Supreme Court, the President of the Court of Appeal
and the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court – are ex-officio.
The rest are appointed entirely at the CJN’s discretion.
It seems to me in settling his score with
Salami, the former CJN deployed his near absolute power with
little or no discretion that of the use such power requires.
Above all, the NJC was obviously wrong to use
the outcome of the report of the panel it set up to look into
the quarrel between the CJN and Salami as a basis for accusing
him of perjury and proceeding there from to recommend his sack
in the guise of “suspension” to the president. Perjury is a
matter for the courts to determine and the NJC is no court.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case it
is now as clear as daylight that the politicians, as I said when
I wrote about this issue on these pages for the second time on
February 16, have succeeded in dragging the judiciary into their
fight for power in a way that cannot auger well for democracy in
this country.
Then as now I believe
the ultimate responsibility for restoring the judiciary’s honour
and independence following this squalid affair lies with the
members of the bench themselves. It was their fault that they
allowed themselves to be dragged into the war of the
politicians. They owe themselves and the country to do
everything lawful to drag themselves out of it.
Previous article:
Al-Mustapha: the
canary’s song this time
-By Mohammed Haruna
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