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Nigeria: Royal Anarchy in Anambra

Frank Ndu Ndibe

19 September 2007

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opinion

GOVERNOR Peter Obi of Anambra State, meek, gentle and soft-spoken, has caught the national imagination as someone you can under-rate only at your peril. The doggedness with which he prosecuted for three years the battle to recover his gubernatorial mandate in the April 19, 2003 election has made him a national pace-setter. So has his survival of the illegal impeachment been masterminded by the Peoples Democratic Party and the General Olusegun Obasanjo's presidency. His ability to extend his tenure of office beyond May 29, 2007, through a Supreme Court's unanimous pronouncement, has become a landmark case.

When last year he took on monstrous gangs holding Anambra State financially to ransom, he was given little chance to succeed because, among other factors, the criminal organisations had people with extensive connections with Obasanjo as their godfather. But Gov. Obi dealt a mortal blow to the gangs, which were collecting tremendous revenues from the markets, motor parks and sundry public places without returning a kobo to the government. Put succinctly, Obi is a man of acute courage. It cannot be taken away from him. But there is right now an issue threatening the public peace in Anambra State where he has not taken serious action. It is the matter of so-called autonomous communities, a last minute legacy of the misbegotten Chinwoke Mbadinuju regime.

With less than a week to the expiration of its tenure, the regime created what it called autonomous communities. Almost every weekend, a group of people gather in one community or another, installing a traditional ruler in flagrant violation of the laws of the state. They rest their melodrama on the strength of Mbadinuju's eleventh hour action. What you have now in the state is peace of the graveyard, as battles loom on various fronts between those for the status quo and those keen on creating fiefdoms for themselves, between those who want law and order to prevail and those who challenge the law in a brazen manner. The official explanation when Mbadinuju created the autonomous communities and secretly installed monarchs for some of them was that the action was meant to enable any clan or group of families which wanted to have a separate identity by having a traditional ruler to realise their desire, but in reality it was just a device to extort hefty bribes from over-ambitious characters desperate to be seen as igwes, or traditional monarchs.

It was nothing more than a design to defraud private individuals and their communities. The government had admittedly earlier set up a legislative committee to go to communities which wanted to have their own monarchs and make recommendations; the committee was asked to set criteria guiding the creation of new "autonomous communities".

However, when the chips were down, the regime refused to adhere to its own guidelines, which included that the traditional ruler of the existing community from which a new chiefdom would be created must show unwavering support for it. The government did nothing to carve out the so-called communities until five days to its expiration on May 29, 2003.

The sole criterion for granting a community an autonomous status became in reality its ability to offer a N300,000 bribe; and if any person at all wanted to be a traditional ruler, all he needed do was offer an additional N500, 000 gratification. Hence, certificates of recognition were granted to individuals and communities even in the morning of the governor's departure. It was such a mess that a group of families would apply to be included in a particular autonomous community and the application granted only to find itself in another autonomous community because another group of family members had applied to be included in another community. It was thus common to find one village in two or three so-called autonomous communities simultaneously.

Not even the governor knew the number of certificates issued or to whom. Families in the governor's hometown of Uli which wanted to be autonomous communities were compelled to pay the same amounts of money. All that mattered to the departing regime was what they could get out of the people. The certificates in question were worthless. There is no government department in Anambra State today which has a record of, say, the people given certificates as traditional rulers of so-called autonomous communities. The purported certificates were not given any serial numbers, nor were files created for them, nor did they have even duplicate copies.

Mr. Ndibe, a legal consultant, writes from Lagos.

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