The blood theatre ahead

Sam Omatseye


Sometimes it pays to compare politics with children at play. Yet when children play, their innocence can tease them into the province of danger. Hence a child can fall from a roof, stab his best friend, swallow poison, burn down a house and kill all that he or she holds dear, including the parents. If the child survives, he or she might utter the first cry, in his innocence, for the help of daddy or mummy. But the parents are now smouldering, without recall, in the oblivion of death.

The difference between child’s play and political fray, especially Nigerian style, is that one understands his absence of innocence and the other knows nothing but the sweet naivety of action, what playwright Tennessee Williams calls the sweet bird of youth. The sweet naivety of kids with its portent for calamity is well documented in the Nobel-prize winning novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), under the leadership of President Goodluck Jonathan, is providing material for fiction writers, especially in these parts, for a script on the adult version. We saw the play in Adamawa a few weeks ago. Now, the theatre has moved with a new ensemble to Lafiagi, in Nassarawa State. We have seen that the lawmakers do not pretend to be nice guys. They are not hiding behind any moral niceties. They are not laying any claim to the principles of democratic grandeur. They want Governor Tanko Al-Makura’s head. This is Isi-ewu as politics.

The people rose in the streets, in a Kaboom of rage, against what they saw as the low ebb of politics in the cabal to overthrow an apparently popular chief executive. But this is politics as theatre. The lawmakers said they wanted the governor out. The governor said he did no wrong. They started a process in the legislature and that seemed quite in order, and the House of Assembly mustered the numbers to call for the Chief Judge to set up an impeachment panel. That itself reflected a fidelity to law and order.

The Chief Judge, Suleiman Dikko, unveiled the panel and suddenly, the lawmakers do not like him. They said he should reconstitute the panel. Now, is that not foul play? It becomes a farce. They seemed to like the rule of law when it suited their devious designs. When they felt the process would not produce their grand design, they cried foul. It is like the youth in a soccer game who hacks a player down, but falls down himself and cries foul so the referee would not mark him down for infringement. It is the dangerous irony of our politics today. The lawmakers do not believe in the law, if it is not the law of the jungle. That is what is at play in Nassarawa state.

This is the nature of comedy. And comedy is sometimes more dreary than tragedy. As film director and screenwriter Mel Brooks says, “tragedy is when I cut my finger…comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die.” The Nassarawa lawmakers want to throw democracy into the sewer, so it can die.

When the impeachment panel was set up in Adamawa State, because they had the judge where they had him, the PDP power vortex deployed the security forces to protect the judge. In the way the politics goes, the PDP high command violates everything it touches. If it is the law, they turn into an instrument of revenge. If it is the soldiers, they do not protect the law but advance impunity. If it’s the due process, they make it a procession for doom. What is impeached is not a person, not an officer of the law, but the law itself, and the institutions set in place to ennoble it.

As I stated last week, the Jonathan presidency must realise that it owes this country the obligation not to turn it into a theatre of the blood in the name of ambition. Ambition is made of sterner stuff, said Shakespeare. But let the corporate dreams of Nigeria dwarf the puny egotism of one man’s or one group’s design.

But what is going on in Nassarawa State is the witch-hunt of the lawmaker. When Al-Makura became governor, he was on the platform of the Congress for Progressives Change (CPC). From the outset, he was set off against a group of lawmakers from the PDP on the revenge. They were angry they did not have one of their own on the throne.

But a certain uneasy calm had predominated until the Ides of 2015 reared itself. Now, the party at the centre in Abuja had begun what it sees as the impeachment cyclone as a weapon to oust “troublesome” governors. Its eyes are also on Rivers and Edo states. So far they have stumbled. Just as in Nassarawa State, their first goal is to impeach. If they cannot unseat the governor as in Adamawa State, they intend to keep the state on the partisan boil ahead of the next election so as to prime the polity for a giddy electoral process. They can then cash in and install whom they want in the state and make it ripe to secure the numbers of votes the president would need to win the presidency in 2015.

This is ordinarily funny, if it is not heavy with implications for our democratic survival. Now, it is Nassarawa State, and the option is whether to do good or evil. Russian poet Derzhavin said: “I am tormented by the desire to do honour/ I hear the sound of glory calling.” Do the Nassarawa lawmakers recognise a glory call when they hear it? Not yet.

Rather they have chosen the path of folly. They have the people to answer to, if they defy law, decency and due process.


 - In Touch, The Nation newspaper, 04/08/2014