Okello Oculli
9 November 2007
analysis
Nairobi — Etteh's fall came at an enormous cost to the image of the lower chamber. The greatest damage came from television footage of unending episodes of flying punches in the chamber by people who are supposed to be honourable.
By the time a member, Dr Aminu Safana from Katsina State, collapsed and died in hospital, widespread ridicule and contempt for the House of Representatives had turned to revulsion. Interests adept at using the media were quick to keep the spotlight focused on Etteh, blaming the death primarily on her refusal to step down from her exalted throne. With her departure, there is a rush to cut losses with nobody questioning the role of the police when manslaughter is committed in the hallowed chambers of a legislature.
The anti-Etteh league it calls itself the Integrity Group -- has backed away from claiming the chairmanships of strategic committees for which it fought her. It is presumed that the group had been driven by the determination to fix "Madam Speaker' and her supporters for portraying it as a bunch of self-seekers driven by hunger for seats from which they would grab chunks of funds in President Umaru Yar'Adua's budget.
The presidency has tried to have the House exercise its right to elect its own leaders without interference from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party. Yar'Adua is even said to be angry at the party's lack of manners. However, an opposition columnist sees the President as Emperor Nero, the despot who played a musical instrument as Rome burnt, because fire too must be allowed to enjoy its version of the "rule of law".
As the drama peaked and euphoria exploded over the election of a new Speaker, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar (now in court demanding the cancellation of the election of Umaru Yar'Adua as president of Nigeria) has criticised politicians who seek office for purposes other than serving the public good.
Of particular interest was the following answer to a question: "There was somebody, a former governor who asked me to forgive him. I told him, look, I have forgiven you, but you know those people you have killed, it is between you and them "
Editors did not consider the statement as deserving of a headline. His characterisation of the Yar'Adua regime as a continuation of the Obasanjo administration made it to a separate news item in the same edition of the paper. That interview lost headline glamour to a beautiful photograph of Mrs Theresa Nkoyo Ibori, the wife of the former Governor of Delta State, James Ibori. She has dual British and Nigerian citizenship and was arrested on Friday November 2, 2007 at Heathrow Airport, London, as she prepared to board a Lagos-bound flight.
Her husband is being probed over 5.2 billion Naira worth of assets frozen in a High Court in London.
According to Michael Ujingbedion, a press officer attached to her husband), "utterly embarrassed British Authorities have now resorted to humiliating a law- abiding British citizen" after failing to find evidence of crime committed by Mr Ibori.
Ujingbedion asserted that the harassed lady "owns properties and has lived in London for decades", without blemish.
When the anti-corruption agency in Nigeria attempted to conduct further investigations on Mr Ibori's assets in the country, the newly elected leadership of Delta State obtained a court injunction to stop Ibori's arrest.
Mr Ibori is of special interest because he is believed to have contributed considerable sums of money to Yar'Adua's election campaign.
A glossy magazine published before the new president was sworn in had photographs of his campaign managers and key strategists. The loud hint was that they were ministerial material.
The arrival of the new Speaker, Demeji Bankole, has been met with mixed cheers. Hungry hunters of former President Olosegun Obasanjo's head are jumping with joy. They claim that he invented and imposed Mrs Etteh on the House of Representatives. Her fall was, therefore, the moment of freedom from his evil grip.
It is also assumed that Bankole's coming from the same Ogun State will be used to justify his exclusion from heading the Board of Trustees of PDP from where, it is claimed, he can punish party members who have joined hands with the opposition to humiliate both Etteh and the PDP leadership. Others are not so sure.
The 35-year-old new speaker and Obasanjo hail from Abeokuta town in Ogun State as does Wole Soyinka, the Noble Prize winner for literature, musician Fela Kuti who Nigerians wish was still alive, Chief Ernest Shonekan who ruled Nigeria for several months before being booted out by Gen Sani Abacha and Chief Moshood Abiola. Abiola won the 1993 presidential elections that the military annulled. As fate would have it, President Obasanjo benefited from the anger and violent protests the cancellation provoked.
Nigerian politics is often described as "abracadabra".
The presidency has vigorously protested the sudden nomination of George Jalaoye, the man PDP members were ordered to vote for to replace Mrs Etteh. The reason given was that he came from Osun State like her. The State should not lose the hallowed seat in the drama of her deposition, was the logic.
In confirmation of its assertiveness, the House rebelled against this injunction by giving 340 votes to Bankole and a laughable 20 to Jalaoye. Could the wily foxes of PDP have steered the excitable youth in the House of Representatives towards Obasanjo's real choice by throwing a dummy candidate at them?
The month of October ended with two other interesting tales of leadership. One was the case of Mr Ayo Ositelu, the Executive Secretary of Ejigbo Local Government. That title means that he was not elected to that post. He was appointed to serve as Lagos State waited to conduct local government elections. He has apparently pleasantly shocked his community by constructing tarmac roads that all previous governments failed to do as vast sums had been "chopped" (embezzled).
Mr Ositelu is, interestingly enough, been the former elected chairman of the very same Ejigbo local government. He too had failed. What does he attribute his new miracle powers to?
I did not get the kind of cooperation I needed from my fellow public office holders because of the infighting, treachery, enmity, jealousy, incompetence and what have you that normally disturb a mind that wants to work," he says. This says a lot for 'DEMOCRACY NIGERIANA' and its virtues.
Then there was the case of David Mark, President of the Senate. He hauled all 109 members of the Senate to hold a "retreat" (or attend a school on governance) as well as go to the communities that live along the tangle of creeks and mangrove forests that have seen the explosive effects of the mix of guns, oil and the economy.
I had once travelled from Yenagoa to Akassa in Bayelsa State. This is what some thirty Senators also did. One group went to Akwa Ibom State, the other to Gelta State. They came face to face with what some told television viewers was "poverty in the middle of plenty," meaning they came from parts of Nigeria that enjoy the lion's share of Nigeria's oil wealth while these folks live in huts made from palm leaves.
A Senator discovered that some communities perch on planks in the air to drop their toilet burdens into the same water below from which they draw what to cook with.
The shock and contrition was timed to prepare the legislators for more sympathetic allocation of budget funds for the 2008 race to redemption development.
The genius in David Mark's political safari lies in the fact that Nigeria's military and civilian rulers tasted oil revenues that started flowing in torrents after 1973 when OPEC fought and won higher prices for oil in the international market. They rushed to change the formula for sharing earnings from natural resources from 50 per cent share for the owners to less than two per cent to the 13 per cent offered by Abacha.
Tired of shouting at other Nigerians to "love their neighbours in the Niger Delta as they love themselves," some people in the oil-rich region turned to prophet Kalashnikov from Russia.
The sound of guns is what brought political wizard David Mark and his fellow senators to the creeks.
Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Network Project.
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