By Festus Adedayo
The poor governance of the last one year is apparently getting at President Bola Tinubu. He needs our collective pity. It is making him depressed, enough to enter into what lawyers call forum-shopping. Today, Aso Rock is clutching at straws. Its case is akin to that of the proverbial man inside raging waters which have overwhelmed him. The tidal wave is angry and is threatening to envelope the non-initiate, the Ogberi who jumped into the Kudeti River assuming it was a mere steady flow of run-off water. To overcome the anger of Kudeti, Tinubu is throwing tantrums, accusations and all-what-ought-nots as straws to salvage his drowning.
Last Thursday, the president met Northern leaders, the leadership of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. As things later turned out, the meeting was aimed at concretizing, in the minds of Nigerians, the suit instituted by the Federal Government against the 36 state governors at the Supreme Court. Specifically, Tinubu wanted the leaders to pressurize their state governors to account for their responsibilities. Fantastic. Like a grumpy school boy boxed to a corner, the president told the Northern elders that, while he was doing his utmost to raise the nation’s revenue, sub-national governments must make the needs of the locals the centerpiece of their governance.
“We are running a constitutional democracy. I will appeal to you to summon the governors. I am doing my very best to enhance the revenue base of the country. They must equally be sympathetic, and they must urgently consider the needs of the local people. People reside in the local communities. That is where they work, farm, and live. If the local governments are not effective in delivering services; as leaders, we must not hang on to the numbers. We have 774 local government areas, but are they truly effective? Do they solve problems for Nigerians? Do they coordinate development programming with the state and federal governments?” he asked, throwing rhetoric into the debate.
The president also asked for accountability in the performance of the 774 local governments. “Maybe we should look at recalibrating. What was good four years ago may not be good today. When we want the votes, we go to the locals; when we get the votes, we move to and focus on Abuja,” he said pleadingly.
Since 1999, Nigerians have confronted sub-national governments who they accuse of performing beneath their optimal level. They also, in fact, accuse them of tampering with the stupendous cash that goes into their tills. Heads of those governments have even been jailed for filching their people’s patrimony. So, Tinubu’s cry-of-the-matricidal-wife (ekun ap’okoje) is not novel.
Same last week, the FG instituted a legal action against the 36 governors at the Supreme Court. In it, it alleged misconduct in the administration of Local Government Areas. Filed by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, the suit seeks full autonomy for all local government areas in the country. It also specifically prayed the court to issue an order prohibiting governors from embarking on unilateral, arbitrary and unlawful dissolution of democratically elected local government leaders. In the same vein, it asks for an order that will permit funds standing to the credits of local governments to be directly channeled to them from the federation account. Another request was for the Supreme Court to stop the governors from constituting caretaker committees to run the affairs of local governments because this is against the constitutionally recognized and guaranteed democratic system.
On the surface, we must commend this federal administration for this yeoman role. It goes without saying that governors are alleged to have literally asphyxiated the 774 councils. As an Ogun State former council chairman confessed recently, council bosses are even, in some cases, made to swear oaths to the various vindictive deities never to reveal the dirty details of governors’ heists.
However, we should tarry awhile and look at the intendments of the Lagos Boy. It should interest us that Tinubu, on this road to Tarsus, has morphed from Saul to Paul. This was the same man who fought Olusegun Obasanjo to the hilt in defending his rights to a sizeable portion of the patrimony of the local governments of Lagos State. When such a man suddenly becomes an apostate of that conviction, society should be wary of him. My major hunch is that the Lagos Boy wants to decimate the 36 state governors, elevate local governments and build a new outpost of command for himself. His gambit could be to castrate the stiff-necked states, project and promote the Superman in his conjured 774 new pseudo-centres of power. With humongous money coming to the councils, the 774 LGs would be his battle axe to fight the governors. More importantly, the councils would be vulnerable to federal blackmail. Whatever the newly curated Leviathan asks the new kids on the block to do, including becoming his poster-boys for the 2027 election, they will glibly do. Borrowing from that ancient proverbial quip, the Osanyin deity will thus become the slave.
It goes without saying that from 1999 to date, all Nigerian presidents have had issues with governors and had sought one way or the other to cut them to size over the issue of financial autonomy of local councils. We ordinarily should clap for a president who is poised to use the law to neutralize our enemy governors who have wasted our sub-national funds without any visible impacts. But, let us tarry awhile and ask ourselves how safe our cherished democratic government will be after the conquest of Napoleon. Does Napoleon, the Leviathan, have the pedigree of a people’s fight as the one he just entered into, without self-motive? Lest it turn out to be the proverbial case of the Iwofa who was mandated to take a thirsty horse to the riverside. When this happens, the Yoruba, in their infinite wisdom, say money (the Iwofa) is going after money (the horse). The Iwofa is actually not equivalent to slavery. It is a system of pawnship or peonage, otherwise known as debt-slavery. Extracted from two Yoruba words, iwo (act of entering into) and efa (six), in traditional Yoruba society, when a person owes money, he could volunteer his son as an Iwofa, ‘a recurrent six-day service’ agreement with the person he owes, to cancel out the debt.
In this rash race to demonize the sub-national governments and their heads and hand the states and local governments over to the Leviathan, we must remember that this cherished object we call democracy is incompatible with the rule of one man. In our rush to throw away what we see as useless bathwater, we may be flinging away our precious baby as well. Adolf Hitler began from the same harmless way, you remember?
