Obi Nwakanma
6 April 2008
Lagos — LAST week, Governor Ikedi Ohakim of Imo State raised a heartfelt lament about what he felt were the downsides of political office. Occupying political office is no tea party he said.
Well, of course, we know that already from the old cliché about uneasy heads and crowns and all that quite old stuff.
It is just that some might feel that the glamour of the crown alone on that uneasy head is enough compensation. Just place the crown there, let the head be uneasy all it wants! Well, there again, Ikedi Ohakim said tut tut!
What is often seen as the glamour of such powerful offices, as the office of the governor, might indeed not be glamour at all. Well, we know that too, again from the old cliché about many things that glitter not being gold.
Well, some might also say, heck, whatever it is, let it glitter. The glitter is all! We are after all, in the age of bling. And all that glitters may just be enough bling-bling to blindside the unwary and the adversary, and to compensate for whatever quality of the metal or stone. Let it be pure glass, let it even be the globules of anguish, but let it glitter all it wants.
There are those who may find in Ikedi Ohakim's anguished cry a certain wisdom and empathy, and there will certainly yet be the skeptical ones who would say, if the office is too hard for you, and if tries your soul too much, just let it go. Just resign.
It is afterall like "ofe-Owerre" - it does not come easy. But we must look at the import of governor Ohakim's statements, and attempt to discern from it certain truths, and certain aspects of the reality that frame and attend power and the exercise of power in Nigeria particularly.
Perhaps it might yield some perspectives on the uses or even misuses of power, and reveal the structures of authority that allow such uses or misuses, and the implications of the attendant demands on the integrity of public office.
Ohakim reveals to us - not that we do not already suspect - that once one is sworn into an office like the one he currently occupies, he or even she, becomes the target of mendicants, landlubbers, cats in three-piece suits and some bling.
Selling all kinds of scams; women sending text messages accompanied by their birthday suites and proclaiming eternal love, possibly a quickie just for the test; pastors and spiritualists, like the old prophets of Baal calling down "Holy ghost fire" to capture the governor and make him amenable to the wishes of whomever consults them.
The intrigues are endless. There may also be death threats. There is the pressure on marital and family life both by the demands of official work and by the pressures of many lovely paramours offering undying love in a feeding bottle.
Well, even that is also quite an old thing: Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of Lord Melbourne was after all known to have sent her pubic hair in a pouch as keepsake to Lord Byron, and so also did Countess Guiccioli, who it is said, mounted hers "in a brooch of brilliants," no less!
Talk about things that glitter. But then, Byron was a dissolute poet, with an old title of course, and some inheritance. Not the governor of Imo state. But it is the same principle: there is always something alluring and beguiling about the extraordinary life - either of power or of the imagination.
So, Ikedi Ohakim comes to a reality known down history, for most men seek power for that pure juice of attaining the impossible dream of immortality, and some merely to experience the extreme high mastery over things.
A most intriguing part of Ohakim's statement, however, is about countering the prayers and intrigues of the women and the spiritualists with an equally zestful regime of prayers. But perhaps it is now important to say that Ohakim's method may work only in a short order.
The solution is in the re-ordering and reconstituting of the true nature of the executive position. Clearly the power associated with the executive branch of government, in which everybody believes that the president or governor has the absolute power of government, obscures the true fact, that there are indeed two other equally powerful institutions of government sharing the same with the executive branch: the Legislature and the Judiciary.
It is an unfortunate fact of our inheritance from a history of military dictatorships, lasting most of our postcolonial life, that we have come to see, and perhaps by some quirk of inefficient constitution making, the concentration of the absolute meaning of governance embodied in the executive authority. This is wrong and must be corrected.
I have said that there are three basic dimensions of authority government: the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary.
There is also a fourth dimension which ought to constitute an even more powerful order of the shadow authority: the people. We the people. It is the basic weakness and disorganization of the rest of these sectors of political power that has made it impossible to check, and even protect the integrity of the executive branch of government.
The Judiciary is understandably the most conservative part of that trinity of powers, basically because it functions by whatever laws constitute it.
But the Legislative arm, which ought to exert an even far greater control of the government by its functions, is usually inchoate, and it does seem like this generation of parliamentarians, particularly in the state Assemblies have scant understanding of their roles in power.
It is disheartening to see the quality of individuals often sent to parliament in the states- many of whom fit into Ohakim's remonstrations against politicians who go into politics "for politics sake" rather than as a means of higher service.
We thus have often elected an Assembly of individuals with varying talents; with suspect intellectual preparation for the lawmaking process and its concomitant oversight capacity. But by far, the most glaring, weakest link is in the weakness of the people - the civic order: communities, local business interests, guilds and unions, professionals, neighborhood associations, students, in short an organized citizenry which should properly hold every government responsible and put them to task for every act or decisions made on behalf of the people.
The fact is simply this: the governor is under pressure because he has been over-empowered, it beyond the pale of democratic norms.
He is under pressure because people demand direct and illegitimate favors from him. Because he bears the face of absolute authority; a power to do with the state as he wills. But does the governor have such a power? Should he? I do not think so.
The governor of a state for instance does not or ought not award contracts. It is the state's Public Service Commission, properly constituted by the governor, and representing the diverse interests within the state, that establishes the board of tenders, by which all contracts are awarded in the state.
The contract awards systems are also properly to be vetted by the parliament to forestall any illegalities, like the illegality of using executive leans to influence contracts to executive cronies, or to front companies or such things.
An elaborate system was always put in place within the bureaucratic system of the government also to check and verify these processes. But these had been undermined over the years by the nature of executive tyranny inherited by military rule and unfortunately still operative under this gbanjo-democracy. Ohakim's lament ought therefore to call us to order.
The governor's plea is indeed to find ways to reconstitute the meaning of public service. He draws the example of simple, unostentatious living by Indian and other high officials of state in other climes, and laments the expense of the ceremonies of power particularly staged around the executive.
His observation is, in short, spot on. It is often ironic that we in Nigeria want to demonstrate the public grandeur of state in spite of the deep and helpless misery of the people.
It is like wearing fake Rolexes - a sham. Great governments are known and respected, not by the fake grandeur around them, but by the quality of public works associated with them.
But I think the governor should stop preaching these values, and start living and modeling these alternatives to power. That is the only way it would make same: leave the jazz, and do the work governor!
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