Kissing the President’s ring

The past few weeks have been a circus of public officials going the extra mile to justify their appointment. When the #EndSARS protests escalated, with fears that it’s a sponsored outrage against the government intensifying in government circles, President Muhammadu Buhari directed his Ministers to temporarily relocate to their home states. The cabinet members were tasked with recruiting traditional and religious leaders to neutralize the fast-spreading protests.

This ad-hoc arrangement to prevent a disorder not only show that #EndSARS caught up with the government unawares, but also indicted the nation’s intelligence-gathering institutions. The deployment of federal employees to states for regime security was strategic, and that memo seems to have been passed to even non-cabinet members occupying sensitive offices in the government. Such resort to kissing the ring of the President is the prime job security in a state with frail institutions.

Just a few days after the protests, a report of a possible no-fly list targeting figureheads of the protests went viral. It was instigated by the experience of a Maldives-bound citizen who got stopped at the Lagos airport, with her travel documents seized by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS). The Ministry of Interior rushed to clarify that it did not generate such list, but the traveller, who had provided legal support for the protesters, was unconvinced by the excuse that her ban was communicated by an undisclosed security agency over an unstated investigation. She must’ve known who whose ring Muhammed Babandede kisses in managing NIS.

In quick succession, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor,  Godwin Emefiele, became the next public official to kiss Buhari’s ring. He filed claims, which were unfounded, to convince a federal judge to block bank accounts of #EndSARS protesters and their supposed backers. Appearing before Justice Ahmed Mohammed of the Abuja Division of the Federal High Court, the bank claimed that 20 bank accounts used to conduct #EndSARS transactions were linked to terrorism.

The commercial banks, of course, all complied with the CBN directive and participated in kissing the President’s ring. This instigated fierce backlash online, and amidst the chaos, it was discovered that Access Bank, one of the six banks that agreed to freeze bank accounts of the protesters, did so even before CBN was granted that ex-parte order. This has led to a campaign to boycott the bank, over which they’ve apologized to the affected. In its mea culpa, the bank explained that “It is common knowledge that we and the entire banking industry are regulated entities and therefore operate under the authority of our regulators and law enforcement agencies.”

The attempt by Access Bank to play down the agency of commercial banks in pursuing a partisan objective may be hard to sell. The renowned investigative journalist, Fisayo Soyombo, shared two experiences to demonstrate this climate of fear. On his Facebook, he wrote, ‘In late 2018, as Managing Editor of an online newspaper, I transferred money to my reporters so they could cover a PDP governorship primary. I labelled the transaction “PDP primary.”’ He added that his bank flagged the transaction, and called to inform him.

The contradiction Fisayo painted was that a week earlier when he authorized a similar transaction but labelled “APC primary”, meant to fund coverage of the APC primary election, it went through smoothly. Soyombo also shared that the call over a transaction perceived as done for the operations of the opposition party was the only time his bank had called to cast doubt on the purpose of his transactions. He shared his story because, like many concerned Nigerians, he was alarmed by the “government’s indiscriminate and capricious wielding of the instrumentality of public office to muffle dissenting voices.”

The latest ring kisser in this charade is the registrar-general of Corporate Affairs Commission, Garba Abubakar. Last week, on Twitter, the commission, in their partisan bid to terminate Enough is Enough—Nigeria’s foremost civil society organisation which had also supported the #EndSARS protests—de-registered an entirely different business with a similar name. The commission cited Section 579 (2) of the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) to justify such position, and that the business, which was registered in 2012 “to engage in General Contracts, Sales of Sport Equipment/Promotion deviated from its main objectives over the cause of time”.

Unfortunately for the commission, the organisation it set out to cancel was actually registered as The EiE Project Ltd/Gte. The executive director, Yemi Adamolekun, stated so in a tweet to respond to CAC, along with the certificate of incorporation. “Enough is Enough Nigeria aka EiE Nigeria aka EiE is registered as: “The EiE Project Ltd/Gte,” she wrote. “A big thank you to those who have reached out & spoken up for us! A luta continua! Vitória é certa! (sic).”

These targeted harassments of citizens exercising constitutionally sanctioned rights fit the profile of a police state. That organizations that supervise sensitive aspect of national life are dabbling in partisan politics to impress and pledge allegiance to the government, brings back the ghosts of an era in Nigeria that left various generations traumatized and murdered.

The ring-kissing brigade isn’t ignorant that patriotism doesn’t mean loyalty to the individual, but for the state. What has kept them queuing to kiss Buhari’s ring, however, is their job security. It’s also why the President’s media manager, Femi Adesina, demonstrating partisan sycophancy in an Op-Ed published in The Nation newspaper, wrote: “If President Buhari hadn’t exercised the restraint and tolerance of a father, at a time that even hitherto respected people instigated the protesters to carry on (and they promptly went underground when anarchy ensued), we would have been talking of something else in the country.”

But the clearest mirror for this cast of characters is the US military general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, whose response to the recent US elections, which are being undermined by President Donald Trump, reassured the citizens of the burden of public service in a nation at the threat of dictatorship. He said, “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual.”

If Donald Trump were a President in a country with institutions as weak as the ones under Buhari, he would’ve also been enabled by the Godwin Emefieles, the Garba Abubakars, the Muhammed Babandedes and the Tukur Buratais. Most of the dictators we’ve witnessed would’ve been tamed by General Milley-type patriotism. But Nigerians must pay attention to the distance these ring kissers are likely to cover in proving their worth to His Majesty, the President.