Stolen mace and the desecration of democracy By Ayo Olukotun

Nigerian democracy advances in fits and starts, a feeble step forward, a lull, then a huge step backwards into infamy. As President Muhammadu Buhari was projecting Nigeria on the world stage, at the 25th Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the United Kingdom, a handful of thugs on a reprehensible assignment invaded the hallowed, upper chambers of the National Assembly, and made away with the Mace, the ancient symbol of legislative authority and imprimatur.


The shocking news reverberated across the nation and the globe, sending out dark images of a blighted national space, where every conceivable invention is presumably bastardised on the altar of a gruelling jostle for power and supremacy.

Painfully, the show of shame was observed by visiting Ghanaian parliamentarians who had come to see what lessons they might take home from Africa’s giant, regarding proper legislative proceedings and the practice of democracy.

But the giant, unaware of its status and role modelling potential was locked in degeneracy, desperate power mongers had frontally assaulted and carted away, daringly and in broad daylight, the most potent symbol of legislative authority. At the heart of the unfolding tragedy is Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, a die-hard member of the All Progressives Congress, along with nine other senators of the Buhari Support Group, whose outspoken opposition to the Senate’s effort to reorder the schedule for the 2019 elections, had led to his suspension from the august body.

Omo-Agege, who is legally challenging his suspension, had shown up on the floor of the Senate that fateful Wednesday, and was fingered by his colleagues as the mastermind of the heinous act.

In an update of the messy act of brigandage, Omo-Agege denied his involvement in the dastardly act, even as the police claimed to have recovered the stolen Mace under a flyover in Abuja, through stop and search techniques. Preliminarily, it should be said that Nigerians would have been happier and feel less diminished, had the zeal of the police after the event, been directed at preventing the outrage from being perpetrated.

But our security always gets wiser after the horse has bolted from the stable, leaving us to wonder what has happened to intelligence gathering and proactive law enforcement.
To be sure, this is not the first time in the Fourth Republic, when a Mace had been ‘kidnapped’. Allusion is often made to the early years of the Fourth National Assembly, when Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, in an attempt to prevent his impeachment as the Senate President took away the Mace to the cosy ambience of the Ogbunike Cave in his home state, as it was claimed, so that the Senate could not sit to decide the matter. At that point however, the Senate was on vacation, and the hasty attempt to reconvene it had the ring of outlawry and unseemly desperation. So, even if the nuances are broadly similar, there was far less outrage at that time than the current threat to our democracy.

In saying this, one does not hold brief for the current Senate which has often been justly criticised for sinning more than sinned against. It took off in a thicket of controversy and moral questions about the election that produced its principal officers; several of its members have cases of alleged corruption with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Code of Conduct Tribunal.

It operates under the cloud of appropriating to itself, like its predecessors, jumbo pay and official largesse that boggle the mind. Even the grounds on which it suspended Omo-Agege are tenuous and smack of the abuse of a majority power. Nonetheless, nothing justifies or even extenuates the absurdity and low handed tactic of invading Senate chambers, not just to disrupt proceedings but to forcibly make away with the Mace. It is a matter for regret that our politics is not just bound to anomie but our politicians continue to wallow in the cheapest and degraded kind of stratagems that would give them marginal victory over their opponents.

At this point however, this writer asks the readers to indulge the digression of a short take.

Buhari, for whatever reasons appeared to have opened hot showers on himself by his provocative London speech, which claimed that Nigerian youths are for the most part uneducated and love freebies. Of course, there is a ring of truth in the assertion, but it is an altogether inappropriate remark for someone marketing his country at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London. It would have been better if his speech writers had left out that part of the speech, or if Buhari himself had edited out that portion.

To illustrate the point, if most Nigerian youths are not educated or poorly educated, is that not the fault of the nation’s decision-makers who have not put in place policies, auspices and modalities that will enable most of our youths to get affordable and qualitative education? In other words, the joke, if a joke it is, is on the oldies especially policymakers rather than on the youths. As to their love for freebies and free services, is this not a national syndrome rather than a problem of the youths?

In a nation were senators take home, at a minimum, N13m per month in a country barely out of recession, it is difficult to see how the nation’s youths, however we define it, can be called to account for the squandermania  and banditry of the political elite.

For many years, Distinguished Prof Akin Mabogunje had been talking about the “awoof” economy and its unhappy consequences for a nation determined to develop. I am not sure anyone in the policy circles has taken his wisdom to heart, and so, free riders as well as “take the money and run” billionaires continue to mushroom in the interstices of a weakly policed political economy.

This has nothing to do with the youths, and Buhari’s political password of “killing corruption before it kills Nigeria”, in spite of his efforts, has returned to haunt him because corruption is alive and well, flourishing just below the table of a putative anti-corruption policy. Unsurprisingly, the youths have been firing canisters left, right and centre, on social media in particular at Buhari for making those remarks.

The words cannot be taken back, but a public relations clarification can be made to dilute their impact in an election season.

To return to the initial discourse, it is the hope of all Nigerians that the ugly drama of the stolen Mace is not a sign of things to come, as political competition intensifies. The brinkmanship and fight to the finish mentality of our politicians have often doomed our country to election cycles reeking with fear, apprehension and uncertainty.

There is hardly any election in the last decade without its harvest of deaths, arson, and temporarily displaced persons relocating to their native states. Considering that the invasion of the National Assembly is an offshoot of the growing competition between the pro-Buhari and anti-Buhari groups, it will be necessary to de-escalate the tenor and ramifications of the evolving conflict.

Not just that, security at the National Assembly which appears to have been compromised or terribly violated in this case must be restored and sanitised, with the perpetrators of the treason brought to book.

Colluding officials must be fished out and dealt with; at a minimum, security institutions must not be politicised in the countdown to the onset of electoral struggle.