AS I was concluding this piece, my eyes caught a presidential sledgehammer which landed on the head of Conscience Nurtured by Truth – The Guardian. In a release issued by the State House yesterday, authored by erstwhile Editor in Chief of TheNews, Bayo Onanuga, it was accused of what General Sani Abacha accused the paper of doing in 1994 which led to its closure. It is same infraction the “NADECO government” of Bola Tinubu is accusing the newspaper of today. I will address it presently.
All over the world, Lady Justice is sacred, representing the divine order, law, and custom. It is also an allegorical persona depicting the moral force of the judicial system. Originating from the Ancient Roman goddess called Justitia, her attributes are a blindfold, scales and a sword. When a leader is depicted to have raped this personification of justice, he has violated the deity of goodliness in society. Last week, Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, narrated how he revoked the Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) of some plots of land allocated to Julius Berger in the Katampe District of Abuja. It was shortly after he had dinner with the Managing Director of Julius Berger. By his own admission, he then deployed same for the construction of 40 Judges Quarters. Wike’s revocation of the land is most likely justified if indeed the German construction giant held it undeveloped for fifteen to twenty years.
The judiciary is reputed in the playbook of democracy to be the last hope of the common man. Of recent, stenchy oozes coming out of this last bastion of hope for a regressing Nigeria are really scary. In the triad of Wike-judges-Julius Berger above, the major fear is how judges who benefitted from allocation of those lands will, without favour, dispense justice in any matter that has to do with Wike, now or in the future? It is most likely the avoidance of such dalliance that Rule 2.8 of the Judicial Code of Conduct frowns at unholy matrimony between judges and would-be litigants. It says “A judge shall avoid developing excessively close relationship with frequent litigants – such as government ministers or their officials.” It goes ahead to say that any of such appearance of alliance is incestuous and “could reasonably create an appearance of partiality.” A last week editorial of the Nigerian Lawyer affirms this when it states that the relationship was questionable. It also says that, “beneath the surface of this supposedly ‘noble’ project, serious concerns about integrity, impartiality and manipulation may emerge.” If in the near future, Wike and Julius Berger engage in a legal tango, can FCT courts be impartial arbiter?
The above incestuous relationship between the executive and the judiciary reminds me of my March 6, 2022 piece with the title, Buhari’s serial rape of the Lady Justice. It referenced an award-winning cartoon published on September 7, 2008 by the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times authored by Jonathan Shapiro. Shapiro’s cartoon identity was Zapiro. That cartoon triggered a huge ball of fire in South Africa. Named ‘Rape of Lady Justice’, it bore then leader of the African National Congress (ANC), who was to later become the South African president, Jacob Zuma, loosening his trousers’ zippers for a sexual romp with the effigy of the Lady Justice. He had a shower tap placed on his head. An impish but salacious smile lit his face. Before him, flung on the bare floor, was a blindfolded lady with a lapel inscribed, “Justice System” hung on her chest. Four hefty and menacing-looking men knelt by the Lady Justice’s side, holding down the “wench”, whose skirt was half peeled off. They were political surrogates of Zuma in the ANC, which included Julius Malema, then leader of the ANC Youth League, among others. The scale of justice had fallen down beside the Lady Justice, with Mantashe smilingly beckoning on Zuma to clamber her for a rape binge, “Go for it, boss!”
Zapiro’s cartoon depicted the rape of the South African justice system, as well as other institutions, by Zuma. The shower tap Zapiro placed on his head represented his bombastic claim that he took his shower after sex to prevent HIV/AIDS.
If Zapiro were to sketch that cartoon in Nigeria today, he will replace Zuma with the Bola Tinubu administration. His groveling National Assembly and its coterie of fawners would be Malema and co. Together, they can be more fittingly described as in a serial rape of our country. Virtually all institutions and systems in Nigeria today are being mercilessly raped to a point that they lack energy to saunter on. Tinubu, through surrogates, is presiding over a literal rape of the Lady Justice. However, his government’s version of executive rape of the judiciary is of different colour. Only recently, while Rivers State was undergoing its local government election, the name of Wike and alleged interference in judicial decisions became a singsong. Courts of coordinate jurisdictions at both state and federal levels issued contradictory rulings which were felt to have political imprimaturs. These have made the judiciary a laughing stock. In Kano State, similar rape of the judiciary was at play with the state and federal judiciary issuing rulings at loggerheads with each other.
The dilemma of Nigerians today isn’t different from that of the traditional clothes launderer the Yoruba call the Alágbàfò. The river constitutes his major economic source. He depends on it for his existential survival. As the Alágbàfò goes into enmity with the water/river at their own peril, so also will the enmity of the akara (bean cake) seller with the frying oil surely end in disaster. So, in a case where the Alágbàfò heaves the load of white clothes to the river for laundry but finds out that the river is polluted, the Alágbàfò finds self at the three-footpath juncture that troubles the stranger to a town.
Like the Alágbàfò above, Nigerians are marooned on an island. Their waters, the main source of their existential survival, are polluted. President Olusegun Obasanjo put their dilemma in perspective. In an interview on the News Central Television on Thursday, he painted the canvass of hopelessness very meticulously. This he did in a narrative of “a Nigerian president” – the people’s water, the river of their existence – who they voted into office but who rules like a voodoo priest. Voodooism isn’t about science but probability and permutations. While not specifically naming anyone, Obasanjo told the tale of “a Nigerian president who came to office without a plan” and who “then… woke up and just said, ‘three-point plan.’ What are the three points? What are they going to achieve? Who are the people who have worked on it? You came and you just opened your mouth and made a pronouncement on something that has not been.”
Everywhere you turn in Nigeria today, the river is tainted, polluted and coffee-brown. For the people, it is double jeopardy. A saying of the Yoruba encapsulates the Nigerian dilemma. It borders on a raped trust. Mirroring frustration, it asks whether, in the rules of fidelity, the one upon whom a disabled reclines, if they are about to shift from the space they occupy, should not have the honour of notifying the disabled of their intention to shift? (Eni a f’èyìn tì, bí ó ba yè, wíwí ní í wí). Nigeria today runs a struggling economy powered by trust deficit towards leaders who are believed to have questionable financial and moral fidelity, and who flex misplaced ability. Nigerians are powerless like the disabled. Their leaders, upon whom they reclined for social good, have broken their spines.
What Nigerians are doing today is, like the hopeless dry cleaner, sitting by the dirty river bank and watching whether indeed, from within the constricting thorns (ìgbágó), the palm-frond (màrìwò) shoot out. Which is very unlikely. Our dirty river has equalized and democratized suffering and hopelessness. While Nigerians are daily engrossed in a festival of lamentations and regret everywhere, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that our dirty river is clean and snow-white. Bretton Woods gave our hunger pass-mark.
Homeless roam-about children, hitherto exclusive preserve of the north, are today everywhere in the southern part of Nigeria, too. The Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Olakulehin Owolabi, raised this alarm last Thursday when the Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children paid him a courtesy call in his palace. All over the streets of Nigeria, the hungry and ferocious looks on the faces of children and even elders are frightening. Under this government, Nigeria has become one huge IDP camp and everybody is a scrounger and scavenger.
If the executive is a true reflection of the dirty waters that have constituted existential turbulence for our Alágbàfò, the legislature is an affliction. Nigeria’s twin legislature is struggling to outdo itself in the fawning sprint and self-mockery. Take for instance the bill for the establishment of a Bola Ahmed Tinubu University of Nigerian Languages. It has gone through the second reading. Sponsored by Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu and eight others, the bill sponsors said their aim was to have a university for the promotion of the learning of Nigerian languages.” Brilliant conception.
But, why then do Kalu and his legislative cohorts think that the man worthy to have his name affixed to the university is the president? If they were not suffocated by the smell of legislative groveling, no university of Nigerian languages should be named after any other person than Ayọ̀ Bámgbóṣé. Bámgbóṣé was an academic linguist and the first professor of Linguistics in Nigeria. In 1984, Bámgbóṣé became the first African linguist to be conferred the honorary membership of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).
He made tremendous contributions to education and linguistics. Bámgbóṣé’s 1963 journal article titled “A study of structures and classes in the grammar of modern Yoruba” is a locus classicus in linguistics. So, what qualifies Tinubu to be so named? In which of the Nigerian languages did he excel? Certainly not Yoruba, a language he speaks with bumbling understanding. His English is almost an aping of the Cockney. So where did Kalu and his fawners of power get their wild muse?
If the House of Representatives is a home for grovelers by the feet of the executive, the senate is worse. Godswill Akpabio, head of the senate, figuratively wears the Tinubu lapel on his arm and cap literally on his head with baffling shamelessness. He is reputed to adjourn senate sessions to enable him to quickly shuttle to Aso Rock to ask for its mind. Thus, if Nigerians expect a legislature that will hold the executive to account, they are waiting for Samuel Becket’s legendary Godot in their legislators.
The combination of a dilemma of the Alágbàfò and the serial rape of virtually all institutions in Nigeria today foretell a grim tomorrow for the Nigerian people. It was the palpable frustration of Nigerians that The Guardian lead story of October 25, entitled “Calls for military intervention: misery, harsh policies driving Nigerians to desperate choices,” reflected. It warned of chaos in the polity if the Tinubu government does not stop its bumbling misgovernance.
As usual, Onanuga, in his servile reading of every criticism, took time to pen a presidential doggerel as reply to the story. He called it inflammatory and an open advocacy for regime change. Are we sure this Onanuga is not the doppelganger of the Onanuga we used to know? Does he know that The Guardian story is a cyclostyle of what Nigerians are saying on the streets? If it is, what does he expect the respected newspaper to write? What “deliberate agenda” could the newspaper harbor other than newspapering?
What “fairness and objectivity” is he talking about if not a reportage of the narratives on the street and the hopelessness encircling the air? If you read through the so-called State House release of Onanuga, it bears semblance with Sani Abacha’s criminalizing of journalism, leading to the jailing for life of the Kunle Ajibades, his colleague in TheNews. It appears to me that Onanuga, like the Shapiro cartoon, is one of those fawners holding the wench of good governance by the thighs while his boss smilingly loosens the rope of his trousers. If you know what happened to that dog that was given a bad name, you will appreciate why all genuine democrats must rise in protection of the truth.
Festus Adedayo is a renowned columnist with Nigerian Tribune
