That logjam in Taraba

This time around the crisis is not so much about anything that Governor Suntai has said but more about what he has not said, which other people are claiming that he has said but which still other people, notably members of the State House of Assembly, do not believe that he said. Now, in the […]

This time around the crisis is not so much about anything that Governor Suntai has said but more about what he has not said, which other people are claiming that he has said but which still other people, notably members of the State House of Assembly, do not believe that he said. Now, in the traumatic business of power transfer, the constitutional process is easy to follow when death comes swiftly to a chief executive. I often thought how lucky Danbaba Suntai was to survive a plane crash when the governor of my native old Sokoto State, Alhaji Shehu Kangiwa, died from a horse accident in 1981.
There was also no succession problem when Yobe State Governor Mamman Bello Ali died in a Florida hospital in 2009. Dr Goodluck Jonathan, who was the Acting President of Nigeria on that day because President Umaru Yar’adua had transmitted a letter to the National Assembly saying he was on leave, ordered deputy governor Ibrahim Gaidam to immediately take the oath of office. Maybe it was a dress rehearsal. I do not think the people who wrote the 1999 constitution of Nigeria ever thought that someone will be an Acting Governor for two years. They also never thought that someone will be a substantive governor when he has not so much as entered the governor’s office in two years.
The Taraba imbroglio is not without precedent, a very ugly one. When President Yar’adua fell very sick in 2009, persons close to him absolutely shut out Nigerians from any information about his state of health. Yar’adua didn’t transmit a letter and was in no state to write or sign one; hence Jonathan became the Acting President only when the National Assembly contrived the “doctrine of necessity.” Things have been made slightly easier in Taraba State because the Constitution has been amended to provide that where the chief executive is unable to transmit a letter within 21 days, the legislature could act and recognise his deputy as acting governor or president.
But for how long should a man act in that capacity? In the civil service an acting appointment is for a maximum period of six months, after which an officer must either be confirmed or he reverts back to his normal position. My first temporary job when I finished secondary school was as receiving clerk at the Sokoto State Public Service Commission, so I knew this matter very well. Later in life, I personally became tangled in the matter of prolonged acting appointment. I was appointed the Acting Editor of New Nigerian in January 2000 and I continued in that capacity for nearly two years. Several times during that period, super permanent secretary and former Secretary to the Federal Government Malam Liman Ciroma called to ask me why I had been acting beyond six months. He said he will draw the Federal Government’s attention to it. When I said our local management was responsible, he said he would to take up the matter with the MD but I urged him not to do so because I didn’t want it to look like I reported the matter to him. Old man Alhaji Garba Umar UTC must be in my shoes now [chuckle].
Only that, in his own case, the governor’s chair is not governed by Public Service Rules. Suntai has been sick for two years now with little sign of improvement in his mental and physical state. One would have thought that, for his own sake and also for the progress of the state, a man in that position should relinquish the office and concentrate instead on regaining his health. However, Suntai is not in a position to resign even if he wants to. Were he to transmit a resignation letter to the State House of Assembly today, good conscience and policy consistency requires that it must be rejected on the same grounds that his letter of “resumption of duty” was rejected. That is, until it can be proved that he actually wrote it. Of course family members and close associates will never permit Suntai to write such a letter, if their conduct so far is any guide.
Which leaves only one option, to follow the route prescribed by the Constitution to declare him incapacitated. This route was embarked upon three weeks ago when the state executive council passed a resolution asking the Speaker of the State Assembly to constitute a medical panel to determine Suntai’s state of health. Speaker Kente has already done so. He selected the panel with an obvious eye to expertise in the relevant area. Its chairman, Professor B.B. Shehu, is one of Nigeria’s most eminent neurosurgeons with a long reach abroad. I heard stories years ago of Nigerian patients with spinal problems who shunned our hospitals and went to Germany, only to be attended to by him! For a man like that, Taraba looks like a surgical piece of cake.
Why would anybody stand in the way of a constitutional process to ensure an orderly transfer of power? At the most charitable, it is because family members hope that Governor Suntai may fully recover and return to his office. We would not know what German, American and lately British doctors have told the family about prospects for Suntai’s full recovery but surely time has been lost. Even while he recuperates, there is such a thing as the larger public interest. Taraba is one of the more backward states in Nigeria. Ideally, it needs a leadership that is twice as vigorous as Lagos State’s in order to reduce the development gap. Maybe Alhaji Garba Umar’s smiling face and white goatee beard is not the political answer to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but even a slow performing substantive ruler is preferable to the permanent acting situation in Taraba.
Now, a power transfer from Suntai to Umar will entail not only a loss of power by one man, his immediate family, his circle of friends and his political godfather. It is also seen by many people as transfer of power between two religious communities. I do not know the demographic statistics of Taraba State. This is partly because I have not set foot there since September 1990 when, as a cub reporter of Citizen Magazine, I spent a week in Wukari reporting on the Tiv versus Jukun crisis. There was even no Taraba State then. Even from afar though, it looks like the two major religions are heavily represented on Taraba’s mountains and along its rich river valleys. Someone should reassure them that the feeling of communal loss of power is only just that, a feeling.
It is a difficult point to make these days when many Northerners are saying they have been short-changed by Jonathan’s rise to power and are clamouring that power “returns” to them. I, for one, do not participate in clamours for communal power. I do not feel that under Goodluck Jonathan, state power is further away from me than it was when Yar’adua inhabited Aso Rock.
The biggest stumbling block to the conclusion of power transfer in Taraba, reporters say, is the state’s most prominent statesman Lt Gen T. Y. Danjuma. Days after Suntai returned to the country in August last year, T.Y. answered a phone call from Alhaji Garba Umar. “Who is it?” he asked sharply, even though phones of nowadays show you the caller’s identity. Umar said, “It is the Acting Governor of Taraba State.” At that, T.Y. deployed a tone and temper fit for the Battle of Uli and shouted into the phone, “My friend, stop parading yourself as the Acting Governor! You are the Deputy Governor! The substantive Governor is back!” Could someone kindly call this statesman to order?