From friend straight to foe

Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara is the latest high official to discover a golden rule of Nigerian politics. It is that close political associations almost never end on a note of mutual respect. Most often they end up as bitter animosities. Almost everyone who helped someone else to succeed him as a […]

Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara is the latest high official to discover a golden rule of Nigerian politics. It is that close political associations almost never end on a note of mutual respect. Most often they end up as bitter animosities. Almost everyone who helped someone else to succeed him as a governor in Nigeria ended up regretting it. Every governor who made someone a powerful commissioner but later found reason to sack him ended up regretting it. The Speaker is now learning that making a man the chairman of a plum committee and then sacking him instantly turns him into a deadly foe.
If Dogara is a corrupt budget-padding Speaker, Abdulmumin Jibrin should be the last person to say it because he was the one that nominated Dogara for the top job and he accepted a plum committee chairmanship as reward. He also kept quiet when allegations of budget padding were flying all over the place. Apart from padding in N4 billion for Bebeji/Kiru, Jibrin did his best to defend House leaders from the charges. There is a time to tell the truth or else it is no longer worth it. It is not for nothing that minutes before a priest formalises a marriage, he asks anyone who has something to say to say it now or forever hold his peace.
Since his sack as Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Jibrin has mounted a crusade to bring the entire house crashing down. It is a relatively easy job because the National Assembly’s esteem is very low in Nigerians’ eyes. Most Nigerians seem to think that the National Assembly is made up of selfish crooks who are only after their own interests, many of whom are truants, who collect stupendous allowances for doing little, who engage in frivolous foreign travel, who turn legislative oversight function into an avenue to extort money from chief executives, who corner the funds meant for constituency projects, get the contracts awarded to themselves and most often abandon the projects and misappropriate the money. Trouble is, that is only one side of the ugly story. If truth be told, Nigerian voters are every bit as culpable as the MPs. People line up every day in legislators’ houses incessantly demanding for money to solve personal problems. The way many a legislator sees it, he is extorting the money in order to meet the demands of his constituents.
When a man becomes Speaker, his first very tricky task is to appoint chairmen of legislative committees. Sure there is a selection committee; sure a member’s educational background and career count for something; sure a member’s political stature as a former governor, retired Army General or prominent businessman cannot be ignored; and sure there are some guidelines such as that each geopolitical zone and each state should get to head one or two major committees. Yet the most important guidelines are the unstated ones, such as the Speaker must reward the men and women who were central to his emergence. It was not for nothing that Jibrin, who nominated Dogara for election, got the plum Appropriations job.
Now, other factors could complicate the task of rewarding loyalists. The trickiest one is the need to placate the losing side, especially if it is powerful. In 2011 when Aminu Waziri Tambuwal led a rebel faction and defeated PDP’s anointed candidate Mrs. Mojisola Akande for the speakership, he had to give her the position of House Leader. This was no easy task because Tambuwal’s winning coalition must have pledged the post to one of their own. Speaker Dogara adopted the Tambuwal formula last year and made Femi Gbajabiamila the House Leader after defeating him in the main election. Senate President Bukola Saraki’s failure to do the same thing earned him the wrath of the Presidency and he has paid a high personal price for it, including standing in two docks.
In a way, a Speaker’s dilemma is similar to the situation faced by a governorship aspirant who wins his party’s primary election but is then required to nominate his defeated rival as his running mate in order to prevent a split in the party. Insofar as Nigerian political parties of today are bereft of ideological content, it is easy for a vanquished aspirant to move with all his supporters into another party, so he must be prevented from doing so by being nominated as running mate. Trouble is, this makes for a potentially explosive relationship down the line between governor and deputy governor.
In Nigeria, appointing someone to a juicy political office is one thing; removing him from it is another thing altogether. Nigerian politicians do not take kindly to a reshuffle, whether of a cabinet, legislative committees, board memberships or party positions. Any state governor who reshuffles his cabinet and removes a commissioner is guaranteed to have created a new enemy. If the dropped person has been a commissioner for many years and has acquired wealth, visibility and influence, then he becomes a very dangerous political foe. Advisers will sincerely tell you that the man is already too powerful to be sacked, and a governor often has to stomach the pain and allow an unfit person to remain in office. A governor in his first term, especially, cannot afford to take such risks.
No fight is messier in politics than one between two once close associates. When people who once collaborated closely to bribe voters, to undermine foes, to rig elections and commit sundry electoral crimes fall apart, then we begin to hear all sorts of revelations. In a way, politicians here are not different from young women. During our carefree bachelor days in Kaduna, I once adjudicated in a dispute between two girls who were close friends for many years but who engaged in a nasty quarrel. Each one tried to outdo the other by revealing what she once assisted her to do just outside the boundaries of morality and law. So I stepped in and said, “Look, why don’t you restrict this quarrel to the issue that caused it? There is no need to reveal things that you once did together. Police have something they call an accessory to crime so you should be careful. Also, by broadening the scope of this quarrel into past issues, you are making it unsolvable.”
In 1983 when the great Ibadan politician Alhaji Busari Adelakun fell out with Oyo State Governor Bola Ige and decamped to NPN, he publicly said Bola Ige’s UPN could no longer rig elections in Oyo State because he was the one that always did the rigging for UPN. I was surprised that the police did not act on that confession. What Abdulmumin Jibrin said last week was not much different. If indeed padding budgets is a criminal offence and four top House leaders called the Appropriation Committee Chairman and told him to pad it with N40 billion as Jibrin now alleges, did he tell the police? He is the modern day Adelakun. Ten years ago when Gombe State politician Alhaji Abubakar Mu’azu fell out with Governor Muhammed Danjuma Goje, he came to us in the newspapers with damning allegations of what he said were Goje’s misdeeds. I wondered; were you not for many years his closest and most powerful aide and the alleged leader of the notorious Yan Kalare?
The same thing happened in Bauchi when Governor Isa Yuguda sacked his Chief of Staff Shehu Gabam. Newspapers were soon awash with allegations. Now, I know that security agencies and judges like the confessions of former associates. In fact, prosecutors happily grant generous plea bargains to suspects in return for their implicating their former comrades. Personally however, I do not like listening to a politician who reveals the secrets of his former associate because he has been sacked.