Secondus and our neo-colonial mentality

I have problems with this. On September 4, the national chairman of PDP, Prince Uche Secondus, gave out copies of letters he wrote to the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The Punch informed us about the letters in a screaming front page banner headline in its issue of September 5: “PDP writes UK, German leaders, says Buhari abusing rule of law.”

The paper reported the story on page 2 with relevant quotations from the letters to the two world leaders. I have read the story and the quotations a couple of times to try and make some sense of their purpose and import. They were obviously intended to let the world know that Buhari is allegedly taking our country down an unwanted path inimical to liberal democracy. Better to remain the alarm before rather than after the fact.

Secondus offered a litany of complaints but they boiled down to two: the president’s alleged misuse of the EFCC to hound opposition politicians and his “brazen attacks on the rule of law.” He urged the two leaders to prevail on him to abandon the path of authoritarianism because “..his antecedents and current flirtation with dictatorship should not be allowed to reverse the gains of liberal democracy to which the PDP and the UK are committed.”

APC rose to the president’s defence and asserted that “the administration respects the rights of Nigerians and would not do anything to the contrary.” Amen to that.

I am worried about the import of the letters. On the face of it, I concede that Secondus, as the leader of the second biggest party and one that had ruled the country for 16 years, has a duty to let the nation and the rest of the world know when things are going wrong in our country. Still, my take is that the letters were actually childish in intent. Nigeria is a sovereign nation. The rest of the world accepts that it is sovereign enough to look after itself. We do not need to run to other world leaders, and ask them to chide our leaders and stop them from oppressing us. If we cannot stop them, no one else can.

The feeling, and this is what must have motivated the PDP leader to write his letters, that this country has some big ogas outside whose clout could be summoned occasionally to force our leaders to behave properly is both childish and reflect on neo-colonialist mentality. Fifty-eight years of independence is long enough to make this country believe in itself. The truth, in case the PDP leader missed it, is that no country, no matter how powerful, would take it upon itself to mind our own shop and reduce our leaders to mere shop attendants. When we make outlandish requests such as are contained in the letters, the addresses are amused by our childishness.  President Goodluck Jonathan once reportedly told President Barack Obama to fix Africa by first fixing Nigeria. It is always to other leaders we take cases of poor leadership and failure. Ha!

If things are going wrong in our country for whatever reasons, I believe it is our duty and responsibility as citizens to stop them from getting worse. Our laws empower us, as citizens, to throw out leaders we believe are not serving our interests as a nation and as a people. Our national legislature was put there to check the excesses of the executive and stop incipient dictatorship from gaining a foothold. Our judiciary was put there to ensure oppressive laws are promptly entombed in waste paper baskets. As you can see, we have a far greater clout than May and Merkel to pull the president back from allegedly taking us down the path that is strange and hostile to our liberal democracy.

The problem is that we are unwilling to use this clout to our national benefit. The Nigerian president is about the most powerful president in a democracy in the world. He does not derive his immense powers from the constitution but from his own whims and caprices. They are extra-constitutional powers. Armed with these grabbed powers, he can afford to do anything to us and our nation. And we applaud him. We have managed to convince ourselves that the president is so wise and omniscient that he can do no wrong. When the exercise of his powers rubs us the wrong way, we cry to other world leaders like overgrown babies.

It did not begin with Buhari. And it will not end with him. We were witnesses to the virtual rampage under Obasanjo who assumed the right to choose which court judgements to obey and which to cynically ignore. The subordination of the rule of law to whatever the man at the top determines to be the national or security interest has lived with us for much of our political history. We applauded the generals who made a virtue of the egregious abuse of our human rights. They ousted the right of the individual to cry to the courts for justice. We excused it because after all it was a dictatorship with its own rules of engagement, as it were.

The problem is that this is a country of self. We do not struggle for a better country. We struggle for fatter individual bank accounts. It is the ruler who makes that possible, transforming an Ajegunle man into a Banana Island resident in the time it takes to say miracle. There is nothing more pleasing than for a man to see bank managers ministering to his every whim. We have a half-hearted approach to every effort made to make our country great. Individuals accumulate stupendous wealth but our nation progressively sinks into the cesspool of poverty.

We seem to be amused by the paradox of an oil-rich nation struggling for a seat with Bangladesh in the club of the wretched nations of the earth. Our long and disturbing history of self-sabotage is self-affirming. Neither May nor Merkel can do anything about that, no matter how often we cry to them under this and other federal administrations. If Nigerians cannot fix Nigeria 58 years after independence no one else can. If our oil wealth can benefit the few at the expense of the many, no other world leader has the magic wand to turn it around.

Ah yes, the president can do no wrong.