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Introduction
I have just been bombarded with torrents of inquiries by the electronic and print media houses, requesting me to comment on President Muhammadu Buhari’s alleged approval of state and local government police forces. My initial reaction was to shout, “Eureka, he got it right this time around.” Yes, because I have advocated for state and community policing in the last 30 years of my life. Google it all. Yes, in serial media activism, TV appearances, lectures, campaigns, street protests, advocacy; in the court rooms; at the 2005 National Conference; Vision 2020 Conference of 2009; and at the 2014 National Conference. But, I told the media people that PMB, based on his antecedents and pronouncements, may not actually have the necessary courage and political willpower to do it.
I then decided to google the entire story. All I found was that the Executive Secretary, National Human Rights Commission, and chairman, Presidential Panel on the Reform of SARS within the Nigeria Police Force, Mr. Anthony Ojukwu, had submitted his report on his assignment, recommending the dismissal of 37 police officers, 24 for prosecution and arrest and prosecution of others. I didn’t see anywhere the President said he has approved this my dream project. He merely gave further directives to some organs of government as regards actualisation of the recommendations. What he said regarding the above was simply, “Since the recommendations of the commission that constituted the panel are enforceable as decisions of the court, that the Inspector-General of Police and the Solicitor-General of the Federation/Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Justice, meet with the commission to work out the modalities for the implementation of the report within three months from today.”
If PMB had set up the state and local government police forces, or still does in future, I will publicly applaud such an auspicious giant step. The euphoria had erupted from part of the panel’s recommendation for “significant improvement in the funding, kitting and facilities of the Nigeria Police Force, strengthening information and communication technology of the force, establishment of state and local government police.” But, first things first.
President Buhari merely directed further action. Second, mere recommendations of the National Human Rights Commission, from which the Presidential Panel emerged, can never “be enforceable as decisions of the Court,” as wrongly stated by Mr. President.
The NHRC is not a competent court of law as enshrined in and recognised by section 6 (6) of the 1999 Constitution, as altered. So, Mr. President cannot unilaterally, whimsically, capriciously and arbitrarily set up state and local government police without the necessary constitutional amendments to that effect under section 9 (1) of the same 1999 Constitution. This section requires two-third majority approval of the bicameral National Assembly made up of 109 senators, 360 House of Representatives members, and also two-third majority approval by the 36 states Houses of Assembly and FCT. Sections 214 and 215 of the same Constitution establishes the Nigeria Police Force, giving it powers and duties and its major operatives, such as the Inspector-General of Police and state commissioners of police. Surely, our non-performing behemoth, unwieldy and elephantine organisation needs to be broken up into state and local government police forces, as we have it in more advanced countries of the world. In the USA, for example, aside from the federal police institutions of CIA and FBI, she also has state and county council (local government in Nigeria) police forces. Even cities, universities and colleges have their own police forces, e.g., NYPD, LAPD, etc. The result is great synergy of purpose and inter-agency cooperation in detecting, preventing, fighting and prosecuting crimes. My take on the present crocus is this: while commending the President for even mentioning the establishment of state and local government police at all (contrary to his earlier stiff stance against its recommendation by the 2014 National Conference wherein I relentlessly crusaded for it), PMB should go beyond mere rhetoric, presidential directives and sheer populism by instructing government officials to immediately draft and send an executive bill to the NASS for amendment of sections 8, 214 and 215 of the Constitution. Then, I will verily believe him and know he is serious about this project of giving Nigeria a new security lease of life. I will then do a piece wholly dedicated to applauding him for taking a gargantuan and major step towards devolution of powers and restructuring of the un-working Nigerian project.
Assessment of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 4 years of governance
I will, most honestly and patriotically, describe the last four years of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s government as quite uneventful, below average, colourless, clueless, vindictive, selective, exclusionary, non-nationalistic, non-pan-Nigerian, hemorrhaging economically and highly sectional, cronystic and prebendaslistic. In terms of security, its performance is below par, since whatever gain he would have made in the much-trumpeted degradation of Boko Haram (you and I know this is merely theoretical, as the sect is more deadly today than ever before) has been replaced with a more potent escalation of herdsmen’s insurgency and unrestrained banditry. Nigeria has been turned into a gruesome killing field by rampaging gun-wielding bandits of different genre. The economy is in tatters and at the lowest ebb. Hunger, squalor, ignorance, despondency, abject penury, corruption, hopelessness and haplessness have been enthroned as fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy. Never before since the forcible and un-negotiated amalgamation of Southern and Northern Nigeria by Lord Lugard on January 1, 1914, has Nigeria witnessed such nightmare of poor governance. The people have been reduced to the “living dead” or “walking corpses” (courtesy, Ayo Kwei Armah, in his epic, “The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born”). Rule of law has been replaced with rule of might and of the thumb. Fundamental rights if citizens are wantonly breached. Disobedience to valid court orders has become a norm. Corruption is on the ascendancy, rising geometrically where it used to be antithetical. Only a tiny cabalistic few have unrestrained access to the national treasury. Yet, when traumatised citizens complain, they are dismissed with a wave of the hand as “wailing wailers.”
Budgets are padded, even disappear. There is hardly any form of accountability and transparency in governance as the government is run in a most opaque manner, like the nocturnal activities of witches and wizards in a coven. God deliver Nigeria and Nigerians, amen.
President Buhari’s executive order withdrawing gun licences: The legal and social consequences
INTRODUCTION
Ordinarily, one would have readily applauded President Buhari for signing an Executive Order banning possession of guns, having regard to the unbridled proliferation and possession of small and medium scale politically-motivated and banditorily-induced arms currently in circulation. However, Buhari’s sectionalistic perceptions of governance from the opaque prism of ethnicity and religious nuances do not give one such euphoric comfort of nationalistically induced decisions.
It seems to me a panicky measure meant to forestall the threats by Niger Delta militants to declare their republic by June 1, and also for the now historic struggle by IPOB for self-determination. Whatever be his reasons, the President and his handlers appeared to have lost the larger picture of the citizens’ rights to life and self-defence. Section 33 of the 1999 Constitution provides for the right to life. Section 258 of the Criminal Code, which operates in the southern part of Nigeria, and sections 59- 60 of the Penal Code that operates in the North, all guarantee the right to self-defence and the defence of one’s property. What the Executive Order has unwittingly done is to leave honest and innocent Nigerians most vulnerable to the unrestrained murderous and blood-letting activities of marauders, herdsmen, terrorists, armed robbers and kidnappers. People may now decide to possess these arms illegally and under cover as guerrilla tactics, since even a legitimate licence cannot guarantee same, after thorough screening by law enforcement agencies. After all, self-preservation is the first law of nature. The executive order is also gravely flawed in the sense that those known and notorious to illegally possess these same arms, like herdsmen, were not even named at all. There now appears to be two sets of laws for Nigerians. Recall that the same government had incredibly set up a special radio network station for this over-pampered set of “superior” Nigerians.
No thought was given to the equally illiterate Nigerians of those communities whose wives are daily raped in their homes, children murdered in cold blood, farmlands invaded, crops eaten and such farms then set ablaze. I always wonder who advises Mr President. But as Harry Truman once declared, “buck stops here.”
Balkanisation of the Caliphate: Political vendetta carried too far
INTRODUCTION
It is no longer news that Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State has balkanized the 800-year-old Kano Emirate to achieve immediate short-term political gains of brinkmanship and isolationism. Mercifully, Justice Nasiru Sani wielded big judicial hammer to void the appointment and installation of four new emirs, ordering a return to the status quo, pending the hearing of the substantive suit challenging the appointment of the emirs. What political hubris will make a governor so power-drunk as to tamper and literally decapitate history, totems and traditions? Will he be there forever? Did Ganduje ever imagine he was fighting Emir Sanusi? Did it not occur to him his act was self-immolatory, asinine, infantile and nonsensical?
Historical background
It was chronicled that the Hausa kingdom of Kano extraction of the present-day Kano State of Nigeria was based on an ancient settlement of Dala Hill. There were fractions of chiefdoms in the pre-colonial era before the incursion of Fulani jihad and British colonialism. History has it that Bagauda, a grandson of the mythical hero, Bayajidda, became the first king of Kano in 999, reigning until 1063. Muhammad Rumfa ascended the throne in 1463 and reigned until 1499. During his reign, he reformed Kano city, expanded the Sahelian Gidan Rumfa (emir’s palace), and played a lead role in the further Islamisation of the city, as he compelled prominent residents to convert to Islam. The Hausa state remained independent until the Fulani conquest of 1805.
At the beginning of the 19th century, however, Fulani Islamic leader, Usman Dan Fodio, led a jihad affecting much of Northern Nigeria, leading to the emergence of the Sokoto Caliphate. Kano became the largest and most prosperous province of the empire. It was one of the last major slave societies. Heinrich Barth, a classical scholar who spent several years in Northern Nigeria in the 1850s, estimated the percentage of slaves in Kano to be at least 50 per cent, most of whom lived in slave villages.
From 1893 until 1895, two rival claimants to the throne fought a civil war. With the help of royal slaves, Yusufu was victorious over Tukur and claimed the title of “Emir.”
(To be continued).
Thought for the week
“If you take guns away from legal gun owners, then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs.” (Bruce Willis)
