Ridiculing democracy or rewriting the rules
If she had done this, it would have created a perfect alibi for the heroine status she now covets. Somehow, the cynic in me says we have no details of this smoking gun. It was equally curious that Akunyili’s letter made it into mainstream media via an opposition medium – Saharareporters. There’s a curiosity when […]
If she had done this, it would have created a perfect alibi for the heroine status she now covets. Somehow, the cynic in me says we have no details of this smoking gun. It was equally curious that Akunyili’s letter made it into mainstream media via an opposition medium – Saharareporters. There’s a curiosity when a renegade minister’s memo appears on the web without full details. Again, it tells me that the devil is in the details using my instincts as a trained media and public relations practitioner. In spite of the flaws the memo has now sneaked into history books, that Akunyili in Nigeria’s moment of trial urged her colleagues to do the right thing. Sounds more like a man waking from a coma, suddenly jumping into a public debate right on cue and making sense of the contributions of co-discussants without prompting.
But political events gathered supersonic speed after the purported memo. Some said she ought to have resigned and others have argued that there was nobody to give the resignation letter. Some even argue that she reacted based on new facts about the entire Yar’adua health saga. Such facts as the truth that none of the people lying their heads off that they spoke to the President have actually done so. Or that the president did not see a foreign trip coming because since he collapsed after returning from Friday prayers on November 20, he remained unconscious until he was evacuated to Riyadh and has remained in unstable condition until the legendary interview with the BBC.
If Akunyili is a woman of conscience, as her supporters want us to now believe, and she has suddenly come across these facts, it is enough for her to tap into the emotive part of her being to do the said memo to her colleagues. Naturally such a memo ought to start with a demand of an apology from those who coaxed her into feeding Nigerians with blatant lies that Yar’adua is capable of discharging his duties even from the gates of hell. If they fail to give her that apology, then, it would have been fair that she wrote the memo now credited to her. Believe me; the devil’s in the details. Perhaps when she and others write their memoirs- if they live long enough to do so truthfully – the truth might be de-classified.
The bogus memo put spanners in the works, pushing the jet of political debate way off the tarmac but miraculously resolving the logjam created in the first instance by the selfishness and greed of the ruling cabal. Suddenly, the most reticent groups rallied round this political crash site with altruistic search tools. The National Assembly which had been playing hide and seek with the issue also wriggled itself out of the shame that is theirs by hurriedly passing what would go down in history as the most disdainful resolution in parliamentary democracy.
It beggars belief that the Senate and the House, which had earlier claimed tied hands suddenly, loosened their shackles and conferred on Goodluck Jonathan, the needed fillip to back his craving for full presidential powers. We all know, of course, that our constitution is entirely flawed. It was drawn up mostly by people who were more concerned with their allowances and placing themselves in the line for political gains than the seriousness of drafting the ground norm for a country with 150 million intelligent people. It was endorsed by a clique who has no regard for its exegetical value any more than they were bothered about the country’s corporate existence, cohesion or survival.
The National Assembly did a politically right thing, albeit rather belatedly, but it set us back fifty years to flag independence, passing a resolution based on a broadcast on the megaphone of its colonial masters. That singular act rubbished the degrees of the purveyors of modern journalism and its practitioners. Our parliament voted against the impeccable record of the Nigerian media which was used as a cannon fodder in the fight against colonial elements and as a battering ram in the fight against military hegemony. For every Nigerian pen pusher, February 9 is a black day that our parliament endorsed our corporate failure as well as its own when it based its information on an interview granted the colonial media. But this resolution has greater political implications.
It is the implication of how to view the resolution. Do we view it as political obita dicta, something passed out of expediency and not to be cited as precedent or would it be recorded as a precedent by students of constitutional law? That, for me, is the question whose answers we should be seeking in the weeks to come.