In a recent essay, I suggested that the current administration might promote national security better if it branded itself a law and order government but I also added that “our challenge is that we have never truly been a society of laws. We have long been a society of impunity, lawlessness and violence.” President Muhammadu Buhari dramatised the scale of this challenge during his media chat on December 30, 2015 when he disclosed that the former national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki and Nnamdi Kanu, the director of Radio Biafra would remain in government custody despite several court orders for their release because they might “jump bail” if freed.
Leaving aside the fact that there is such a thing as extradition and the president’s evident lack of confidence in his own government’s ability to surveil high profile suspects and prevent their flight, his statement carried a larger import. There was the absurdity of a democratically-elected president justifying the executive branch’s subversion of the judiciary, and therefore the violation of two cardinal precepts of democracy – separation of powers and checks and balances.
The president might earn full marks for zeal and righteous indignation but these pale in the face of certain inconvenient truths. Corruption will not be curbed or killed merely by the heroic personal resolve of a strongman who is prepared to do anything including trample over institutions and civil liberties to win the war; it will be defeated by strong institutions. Without the framework of competent institutions, the anti-corruption fight will surely flounder.
What is remarkable about Dasukigate and other high profile corruption scandals is the extraordinary scale of discretionary latitude that public functionaries wield over public funds, national security resources and law enforcement assets. Any critique of corruption that merely vilifies people like Dasuki without interrogating the systemic context that enables their alleged crimes, especially the institutionalised culture of discretionary arbitrariness, is wholly inadequate. Unless we address this institutional context, there will always be characters like Dasuki because of the plenitude of opportunities and incentives for malfeasance.
That more than a few Nigerians have applauded the president’s admitted contempt of the judiciary only exposes the persistence of a debilitating national disease. Nigerians remain enamoured by the messianic strongman and avenging angel who will come and magically right all wrongs and finally slay the dragon of graft. We are not so much believers in the rule of law as we are believers in the axiom that the ends justify the means. Ironically, this paradigm both inspires official wrongdoing and perverts official efforts to counter wrongdoing.
By declaring his readiness to flout unfavourable court orders, Buhari effectively proclaimed himself Nigeria’s most powerful vigilante and exposed himself to charges of executive lawlessness. Indeed, it is the very same culture of discretionary arbitrariness and official impunity that enabled Dasuki’s alleged embezzlement of public funds that also enables Buhari’s violation of court orders. This same pathological impunity is why the state-owned oil company can operate unaudited and unaccountably for years, why the central bank functions as the presidency’s ATM and why public resources are allocated to state governors as “security votes” to be used as no more than personal slush funds.
Of particular concern is how official lawlessness influences the conduct of security agencies. Early last December, agents of the Department of State Services invaded the residence of its former director-general, Kayode Are, and forcibly evicted his family in defiance of a court injunction restraining the agency from carrying out the eviction.
Were we more familiar with our history we would have realised that previous anti-graft campaigns did not fail for lack of righteous outrage but because their methodologies were warped by vigilantism, extra-judicial measures, vendettas and impunity. Anti-corruption campaigns hinged on personal arbitrary power rather than on institutions, due process and rule of law can only be temporary. The meagre “gains” secured through arbitrary means can be equally reversed by fiat. Most of the jail terms, asset seizures and sanctions imposed by the anti-corruption drives of General Murtala Muhammad and General Buhari as head of state were subsequently quietly reversed because they were seen largely as inflictions of raw power rather than lawful recompense for crimes.
That more than a few Nigerians have applauded the president’s admitted contempt of the judiciary only exposes the persistence of a debilitating national disease. Nigerians remain enamoured by the messianic strongman and avenging angel who will come and magically right all wrongs and finally slay the dragon of graft. We are not so much believers in the rule of law as we are believers in the axiom that the ends justify the means. Ironically, this paradigm both inspires official wrongdoing and perverts official efforts to counter wrongdoing. We have been burned often enough in the past to know better by now. Virtually all dictators in our history claimed to violate the rule of law in the name of fighting corruption with deeply tragic results.
The administration is also yet to inaugurate the National Council on Public Procurement as stipulated by law which was one of its campaign promises. The opacity of public procurement is arguably the fountainhead of official graft and is at the heart of Dasukigate. Truly transformative governance addresses systems and syndromes not mere symptoms.
Our predilection for political messiahs and miraculous quick-fixes for complex problems means that when the limits of our systems and processes are cruelly exposed, we apply band aids instead of badly needed surgeries. For example, no serious democracy entertains the sort of absolute control the Nigerian president wields over the police – an important factor in the dysfunction of the police force – yet the need to reduce the powers of an authoritarian presidency (and other political office-holders) and secure the autonomy of law enforcement institutions remain marginal considerations. Electoral reform that could clean up our leadership selection process, bar criminals from high office to begin with and effectively sanction beneficiaries of electoral fraud has been similarly forgotten.
Confronted by increasing violent crime and deadly terrorist groups, we do not reform the police, security and intelligence establishment; instead we unleash the army on civilian-populated locales with catastrophic consequences. When high profile criminal cases collapse from lack of diligent prosecution, we do not interrogate the quality of our law-enforcement personnel or the resources at their disposal or pursue judicial autonomy; instead, we simply disobey court orders and malign the same judiciary that is expected to win the war against corruption. What if judges, in response to this presidential affront, refuse to sit on the government’s cases until their orders are obeyed?
The administration is also yet to inaugurate the National Council on Public Procurement as stipulated by law which was one of its campaign promises. The opacity of public procurement is arguably the fountainhead of official graft and is at the heart of Dasukigate. Truly transformative governance addresses systems and syndromes not mere symptoms.
When the limits of our systems are exposed, political leaders resort to extra-constitutional, extra-judicial and desperately illegal measures in the perverse belief that laws can be enforced by breaking them. These demonstrations of raw power further erode the legitimacy of a state whose authority is already challenged on many fronts. In a clime where magical thinking is preferred to critical thinking, leaders confronted by complex problems opt for totalitarian solutions instead of total solutions. Heinous crimes have been committed and those found guilty must be punished but entrenching justice transcends lynch mobs baying for blood and the primal lust for retribution.
Today, we love Buhari and are angered by the misdemeanours of Jonathan’s courtiers and cronies. Thus, we are prepared to tolerate and even applaud Buhari’s illegal acts in the belief that he is breaking the law for our own good. Today, we hate the Shiites and the “Biafrans” and are prepared to countenance their extrajudicial slaughter by security forces, and the current illegal detention (and therefore effective abduction by the state) of Sheikh Ibraheem el Zakzaky and Kanu.
Our politics is so devoted to turning personalities into powerful principalities that we rarely notice the principles that are endangered as a result. Buhari is generally trusted but herein lies the problem for not even he is immune to the corruptive temptations of an all-powerful presidency – chief among them, the urge to rule by fiat and trample over institutions.
Our responses to abuse of power are shaped by our emotional disposition to the abusers and their victims and not by any rational evaluation of principle. Today, we love Buhari and are angered by the misdemeanours of Jonathan’s courtiers and cronies. Thus, we are prepared to tolerate and even applaud Buhari’s illegal acts in the belief that he is breaking the law for our own good. Today, we hate the Shiites and the “Biafrans” and are prepared to countenance their extrajudicial slaughter by security forces, and the current illegal detention (and therefore effective abduction by the state) of Sheikh Ibraheem el Zakzaky and Kanu.
But the winds of political necessity are unpredictable. What happens when the administration feels obliged to illegally detain members of the opposition or when security forces open fire on workers protesting economic conditions? Will we still be so sanguine about Buhari’s alleged infallibility and his good intentions? Having urged the media to stop reporting terror attacks, might the administration soon find it expedient to detain journalists and shut media houses for refusing to peddle the narrative of Boko Haram’s supposed extinction? These are far from preposterous questions. When a leader is granted the license to operate above the law, it is a slippery slope to autocracy and anarchy. In 1984, Buhari’s mass incarceration of Second Republic politicians was popular until he extended his crackdown to broad swathes of civil society.
What happens when a future administration taking a page out of Buhari’s book also disobeys court orders and illegally detains citizens, including current members of this government? Will we in the midst of our partisan outcry then remember the precedent now being set by a president who simply disobeys court orders he does not agree with?
Our grand partisan folly is that we imagine that when universal rights are casually flouted by the state, we can somehow remain exempt from the afflictions of a culture of impunity that will surely escalate if not checked. We assume that the freedoms we enjoy are somehow uniquely different from those of compatriots that we despise on account of their ethnicity, class, religion or political allegiances. These are fatal delusions that tranquillise civil society when it should be up in arms in defence of fundamental legal and moral principles. We fail to realise that an unhinged sword swings in many directions. What happens when a future administration taking a page out of Buhari’s book also disobeys court orders and illegally detains citizens, including current members of this government? Will we in the midst of our partisan outcry then remember the precedent now being set by a president who simply disobeys court orders he does not agree with?
It is precisely because the winds of political necessity are uncertain that a society’s supreme fidelity must be it to its governing principles not to its governing personalities whose moods and behaviour can change. Partisan allegiances must not stop us from highlighting a political leader’s misdeeds if only to keep him honest. We do more damage to our leaders when we become willfully blind to their wrongdoing. This is how dictatorships are born. But we did not execute the epochal dismissal of an inept government last year merely to replace its tyranny of incompetence with a new tyranny of impunity.
Chris Ngwodo is a writer, analyst and consultant.
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