The recent violent invasion of the National Assembly by the Presidency, using the police and other security agencies, is a grave threat to the survival of democracy in Nigeria. When armed police invade the precincts of the national parliament, lock out the Speaker and other legislators and brutally teargas them, the country’s descent into anarchy, fascism and a police state, appears real indeed. Unless they bow to reason and show restraint, President Goodluck Jonathan and the security agencies may soon violently push Nigeria into an abyss.
Regardless of how the impasse is finally resolved, the pointless invasion has left a dark stain on our civil rule. Despite our disastrous past experiences, it is depressing that Jonathan has failed to appreciate that only a primitive society seeks to resolve its political disagreements by force of arms. But in the desperation of the Presidency to force Aminu Tambuwal to give up the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives following his defection to a rival party, caution has been thrown overboard.
As the House prepared on Thursday to reopen for a “special plenary,” armed policemen and Department of State Service operatives, donning their now familiar hoods, sealed all entrances to the National Assembly and prevented lawmakers from entering. Since then, the premises have remained under siege. But before then, the police had withdrawn his security aides and announced with breathtaking arrogance that Tambuwal was no longer the Speaker. But when did it become the prerogative of the police to determine who should be the Speaker of the House of Representatives?
This executive gangsterism is outrageous. There is no justification for this violent assault on another arm of government by the Executive. It is disingenuous to suggest, as the police authorities have done, that there were “intelligence reports” of an imminent attack on the National Assembly by some hoodlums. The principle of separation of powers underpins democracy and the rule of law, with the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary charged with specific and distinct functions, and more crucially, with each arm acting as a check on each other. These three major institutions of state should be functionally independent and no individual should have powers that span these branches. There is no liberty, a French philosopher, Charles de Montesquieu, once said, if the power of judging is not separated from the legislative and executive branches.
Indeed, the legislative arm has a robust mechanism to resolve its internal conflicts. And if it cannot, the judiciary is the only authority known to law that has the final word. When this delicate concert is violently upturned, anarchy, dictatorship and unchecked use of power could result.
That is the danger we face today. Worse, when police and other security forces are allowed to turn on elected representatives of the people, it presages fascism and going by our sordid past, a possible collapse of democracy. The dangers are real, and all stakeholders should put aside partisan considerations and demand the supremacy of the rule of law.
The siege represents an escalation of the increasing misuse and abuse of the coercive powers of the state by the Presidency. It is a slippery road that past governments have trod and thereafter driven democracy aground. Earlier this month, backed by scores of policemen, seven Ekiti State legislators seized control of the state House of Assembly and claimed to have impeached the Speaker and his deputy.
To facilitate this, the police physically prevented the majority 19 opposition lawmakers from accessing the parliamentary complex. Under his watch, the Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba, has allowed the police to stand idly by while thugs assaulted judges and lawyers in Ado-Ekiti. Before him, the then state Commissioner of Police, Joseph Mbu, assumed the role of opposition to the Rivers State Government, and deployed policemen to assault governors and disrupt any opposition political gathering.
Despite admonitions, the current and past IGs have continued to subsume the police to the personal whims and perceived interests of the incumbent head of state, rather than as impartial enforcer of law and order and an agency of the state. Sadly, other hitherto impartial security agencies such as the military and the DSS, are increasingly being deployed as the President’s political enforcers. The raid on a political party facility in Lagos by the DSS and police and the use of military personnel in the impeachment of Murtala Nyako as Governor of Adamawa State, are examples of this dangerous trend.
But if there is any useful lesson from Nigeria’s political history, this abuse of entrusted power for private political gains, though quite dangerous, cannot last. Such thoughtless behaviour precipitated the collapse of the First and Second Republics. In 1962, rather than allow the elaborate constitutional provisions to resolve the dispute over the control of the defunct Western Regional government, the Federal Government of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa sent in police to the regional parliament after a contrived fracas and imposed a state of emergency to facilitate the ascendancy of its allies and overwhelm the majority. That action became a trigger in the events that led to the Operation We tie riots and the eventual shipwreck of the First Republic in 1966.
Under Sunday Adewusi as IG, the police virtually became the enforcement arm of the ruling party during the Second Republic (1979-83), when the mobile unit acquired the fearsome sobriquet of “kill-and-go”, hounding opponents, storming media houses and engaging in brutal assaults. Police were devastatingly put to use in the fraudulent electoral “landslide” of 1983 that ended in disaster for democracy a mere three months later. The police tear-gassing of a political gathering in Kano in 2003 under the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency is blamed for the death, a few days later, of Chuba Okadigbo, a former Senate President.
Evidently, storm clouds are creeping back over our democratic experiment. And Jonathan cannot claim ignorance of the unfolding tyranny. Abba and the Director-General of the DSS, Ita Ekpenyong, are doing Nigeria a great disservice by using their personnel as political muscle. Their loyalty should be to the Nigerian state, not to those who temporarily control the levers of power.
The role of the Senate President, David Mark, in the entire saga is dubious. Assuming specious power not known to law, he proceeded to shut down the National Assembly as “chairman” of the parliament, a position that he can assume only during a joint sitting of the two chambers, which is rare. Mark should not lend himself to the desecration of democracy and the rule of law.
It is worth restating that Jonathan should rise above pettiness and desperation for power. The onerous responsibility of his office demands maturity and a sober appreciation of the consequences of presidential actions. The controversy over Tambuwal’s defection is better settled through due legislative processes and the courts that recently returned a wrongly impeached deputy governor as acting governor of Adamawa State.
As it is said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. These fascist tendencies are threatening the very survival of our civil rule. All stakeholders should rise in protest against this rapid descent into perdition.
