In praise of SERAP

Full disclosure: I do not speak for the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).  I have never met anyone who works there.

I have never gone to tea at SERAP, enjoyed its suya or sipped a glass of its wine.  But I love the organization, whose historic work I have followed with great interest since 2004.  In a country in which citizens subsist on a diet of despair, SERAP’s dogged pursuit of the rule of law, accountability, human rights, and several other causes fills me with pride.

SERAP is not a clandestine political outfit which sprang into life recently to embarrass the government of General Muhammadu Buhari.  The dates show that it began its work around the same time as Buhari ran for the presidency for the first time in 2003.

In other words, it has witnessed not only all the presidencies of the Fourth Republic but the four presidential contests preceding Buhari’s entry into the executive mansion in 2015.

Out of that mansion last week, the Buhari government sought to discredit the work of a stellar civil society organization it ought to have been crediting with a part of its path to office.

In a statement signed by presidential spokesman Garba Shehu, the government sought to disparage and dismiss SERAP’s work—which pre-dates the Buhari administration by 12 years—as a “publicity stunt.”

“To date, SERAP has announced on repeated occasions–each time via a well-funded media campaign – that it is suing the government or President over a range of issues from alleged human rights abuses to alleged corruption,” Shehu said.  “To date, SERAP has not taken their retinue of legal actions to a logical conclusion. They don’t follow through.”

That is patently false.  The first thing is to remember that the Buhari administration is not SERAP’s first, or only rodeo.  Its concern is not with a passing government but with an idea: justice and good governance.  That is what it has prosecuted for nearly 20 years, in terms of which Buhari’s is only one-third of the SERAP story.

The immediate cause of the government’s anger appears to be SERAP’s lawsuit of November 26, 2021, in which it asked the court to “compel President Muhammadu Buhari to take immediate steps to ensure the arrest of soldiers and police officers indicted by the Lagos #EndSARS panel report for the shooting of peaceful protesters at the Lekki tollgate, and police brutality cases.”

But what I think really stoked the government’s fire took place one week earlier when SERAP embarrassed the government with another lawsuit “over his failure to publish the names of those indicted in the alleged misappropriation of over N6 trillion in the running of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) between 2000 and 2019, as documented in the recent Forensic Audit Report on NDDC.”

Nonetheless, bristling with power, the government deployed a veiled threat: “Put simply, here lies SERAP’s paradox: in a country without human rights, no rule of law, limited freedom of expression, and weak democratic institutions the cases and cacophony that SERAP causes – even the organisation itself – simply would not be permitted.”

The warning appears to be that SERAP must be careful otherwise Nigeria may well become what SERAP says it is and the organization disappears.

That is always possible.  We have seen organizations, including newspapers, shut down. We were traumatized by Decree 4 and similar excesses.  We have even witnessed spells in which vocal citizens disappeared or were murdered in the open streets by “unknown gunmen.”

The problem is that the Buhari government has unfortunately made this about itself, rather than about justice and governance, conveniently ignoring the body of SERAP has undertaken, most of it BEFORE Buhari assumed office.  To that end, here is an open-source list of the many cases that SERAP has resolved through the relevant legal systems over the years.

This is why it is laughable that the presidency, in the same breath in which it affirms “Nigeria’s progressive, modern, and liberal legal system” demeans it as “open to manipulation by cynical actors who seek nothing but to sow division amongst Nigerians and secure publicity for themselves.”

It threw down the gauntlet: “Let SERAP challenge the government publicly, legally and transparently. And while they do so, let them reveal in full view of the nation who they are, and who is funding them.”

There are two grenades here.  The first is strange.  SERAP has since the Olusegun Obasanjo government routinely and repeatedly challenged Nigerian governments “publicly, legally and transparently” in courtrooms and reports.

Two quick examples: In July 2014: it sued the Jonathan government over the withdrawal of N446.3bn corruption charges/suit against Muhammed Abacha.

In August 2017, it published the report, “From Darkness to Darkness: How Nigerians are Paying the Price for Corruption in the Electricity Sector,” in which it indicted presidents Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, and Jonathan for the loss of a whopping N11 trillion to corruption in the electricity sector between 1999 and 2015.

It is significant that when he took office, Buhari himself several times affirmed—falsely, we now know—that he would recover $16bn from those who squandered that money.  He has not.

In the same character and tradition of openly and legally resolving issues, SERAP in February 2016 obtained a court judgement which declared that Buhari and his predecessors since 1999 must “account fully for all recovered loot.” Justice Mohammed Idris ordered the Buhari government to publish up-to-date information on recovered stolen funds since the return of civilian rule in 1999, including on a dedicated website.  He did not.

He ordered that publication to include detailed information on the total amount of stolen public assets that had so far been recovered by Nigeria; what had spent of them; and details of the projects on which they were spent.  He did not.

Similarly in July 2017, and following another SERAP lawsuit, another court ordered the government to publish a list of the high-ranking public officials from whom it had recovered public funds and the sums recovered from them since May 2015, and to disseminate the information widely, including on a dedicated website.  Buhari did not.

Giving that order, Justice Hadiza Rabiu Shagari said the government owed the legal debt to “tell Nigerians the names of all suspected looters of the public treasury past and present.”

Buhari never did.  Despite an outbreak of lies by Attorney-General Abubakar Malami to obey, his Buhari government ignored those orders.  It is painful that Nigerian children must learn of such a government pontificating about legality, transparency, or democracy.

Finally, the government’s second grenade is about the source of SERAP’s funding, suggesting that because SERAP is provocative in its principles, and so beyond compromise, its source of funding is suspect.

It is tragic that as the Buhari government begins to wind down, it is showing signs of infinitely deeper desperation.  If I were SERAP, I would treat that statement with contempt.  We are dealing with a government which has lost its way.  Its best hope is that Nigerians are too blind to notice.

If you are a government and someone flouts the law, the right thing is prosecution, not blackmail.   That is how a democracy operates or should operate, a test the Buhari administration has failed for two terms.

Thank you, SERAP.

• [This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials]