Fellow Nigerians, it has been a week of serious fireworks and heavy
bombardment against one of our own on social media. The brouhaha erupted
over what should have been a simple migration of Nuhu Ribadu from his
erstwhile political Party, APC, to PDP, a Party most of his fans turned
attackers consider to represent a complete opposite of the politics that
Ribadu professes as well as a total abandonment of his avowed
principles.
As much as I tried not to dabble into what I considered a
personal decision, I was forced at a stage to state some facts on
Twitter. I intend to expand the content of that intervention today.
The fury expressed against Nuhu was certainly borne out of acute
frustration by those who looked upon him as a saint in a terribly
polluted environment. How they arrived at the deification of this
gentleman is worth exploring. For those who may not know him well, let
me sketch, as much as I can, a vivid picture of a man we all know as
Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.
Nuhu was a serving police officer whose ascendancy came when he was
appointed by the then President, Olusegun Obasanjo, as Chairman of the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The Agency was
empowered to arrest, detain and prosecute economic saboteurs and all
manner of criminals seeking to ruin the State or individual through
stealing or obtaining by false pretence. Nuhu wielded enormous powers
and used it to the fullest. He courted the media and became one of the
most famous celebrities in the process. Nigerians found him a fearless
Angel who was ready, able and willing to take on the cankerworm of
corruption ravaging our country with total impunity. Many of his
admirers could not be bothered if he was guilty of human rights abuses
and/or extra judicial prosecution of his war against corrupt Nigerians.
It even seemed they loved and preferred any kangaroo justice that could
be employed to devastate those they saw as enemies of progress.
Naturally, Nuhu stepped on very powerful toes. The more he talked,
lashed at and threatened to deal with criminals, the more he exposed
himself to danger. I remember warning him on this page in 2007 about the
obstacles that would make his mission impossible. He appeared to me
like an employee who took his job more seriously than the employer. I do
not know of any Mafia nation bigger than Nigeria at this time and age
and I tried to paint the lurid picture for him to see how clearly he was
heading for a cul-de-sac and how the snakes imbued with power in
Nigeria were going to bite him mercilessly.
How on earth did he expect to fight those who funded the Presidential
campaigns of his own bosses? He had granted too many interviews using
expletives against the godfathers of Nigerian politics. I knew it was
only a matter of time before the chickens would come home to roost and
the cookie would start to crumble. But Nuhu and his handlers disagreed
with me. He was probably inspired by his sense of self-righteousness and
proselytising mission. I made a few predictions which all came to pass
with almost mathematical precision, the chief of which was that he was
going to be turned from being the hunter to the hunted. One day, he was
suddenly removed from office, demoted from the Nigeria Police Force,
after enjoying some sporadic promotions that left many of his old
course-mates, and even seniors, very stupefied. The situation was so bad
that he fled Nigeria and settled for voluntary exile in Dubai.
As a veteran of exile myself, I knew how difficult it was going to be
for him. What exile inflicts on you is similar to what you experience in
solitary confinement. The mental torture you encounter is unimaginable.
There is nothing worse than a once active and itinerant man being
rendered not only invalid but near incommunicado. The worst even is for
such a vibrant man, already used to enjoying public attention and
adulation to suddenly pale into irrelevance and insignificance. Sooner
or later, this change of fortune and circumstance was going to take its
toll and it actually did. Nuhu was forced to eat the humble pie and
actually needed no persuasion to establish a channel of dialogue with
the Jonathan administration. I was not privy to their negotiations but
Nuhu was able to return home. He had his rank restored to him and he
started looking good again.
One thing must have led to the other and Nuhu soon took a plunge into
the murky ocean of politics in our country. How he navigated his journey
and meandered his way to the political Party known then as ACN remains
his personal secret. But like the rest of us, I believe Nuhu must have
been influenced and inspired by the Obama miracle in America. Many of us
were fooled into believing that our personal accomplishments and
extensive popularity were the ingredients needed to galvanise our people
into voting for a new set of leaders. But Nigeria was not yet ripe
enough to produce the likes of Obama, David Cameron and other such
youthful international politicians; bright, young, charismatic, famous,
visionary and so on.
In reality, the options before any of us then were few and restrictive.
The first was to go ultra-conservative and join the Republicans of
Nigeria, PDP. But no serious progressive would commit such hara-kiri. It
has never been in the nature of the Nigerian Conservatives, that PDP
typifies, to throw up inspirational candidates. That is one of the
reasons Chief MKO Abiola contested on the platform of SDP rather NRC.
The Nigerian Conservatives often over-rely on the use of brute force and
constantly live under the delusion that any candidate they field would
always win even if that candidate is a dog. It explains the reason
Abiola was so underrated and a less influential personality in Alhaji
Bashir Tofa was fielded and was expected to defeat one of Africa’s
greatest icons.
The second option was to join a Party that had succeeded in carving out
its own empire in the South West of Nigeria. Even if there appeared to
be no marked difference of personality and principle between PDP and
ACN, the latter was still manageable and malleable. The PDP as a Party
of too many powerful people would be more difficult to re-orientate.
Their power derives from too much wealth and access to it; too many
offices to share and its availability in Nigeria and far-flung places;
old age and its attendant obligatory demand for respect or even
subservience. Nuhu must have taken some of those indices into
consideration. But that decision was not going to be as simply rewarding
as he must have thought. Many reasons conspired against him. Some of
the people he had tried for high-level corruption when he was the boss
of EFCC were now in the same Party with him.
It is usually said that “show me your friends and I would tell who you
are” became a slogan that haunted Nuhu regularly. On several occasions
he had no choice but to deny some his own former explosive statements
about some of the leaders of his new Party and his equity and goodwill
began to nose-dive and diminish. Despite that, he managed to get the
ticket of ACN, not without creating some rancorous dissent from some top
Party members who felt he was shoved above them.
He paid me a visit a day after he picked up that ticket and we thought
we could work together to make the impossible possible. But he had a
major hurdle he didn’t know how to cross. That is a story for another
day. But a seed of mistrust was planted when his Party decided to
support Dr Goodluck Jonathan for the Presidential race. Only the
Governor of Osun State, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola refused to support such
misadventure. I believe Nuhu never recovered from the shock of that
chicanery.
The other option would have been to try a Party that did not carry as
much baggage of liabilities like the foremost two, PDP and ACN. That was
the option I took when I joined the Labour Party which I thought could
be built into a workers’ Party and give Nigeria a semblance of a welfare
state like England before realising that my optimism had been misplaced
and chose the National Conscience Party. Truth is it would always be
difficult to have more than two strong Parties at the centre and the
other fragments at the local level. It must have dawned on Nuhu that his
Presidential ambition would have no wings to fly in the new
amalgamation of ACN, CPC, a faction of PDP, and others, with the
avuncular presence of General Muhammadu Buhari, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar,
Alhaji Rabiu Kwankwaso, Dr Abubakar Saraki and a possible last
minute-joiner, Waziri Aminu Tambuwal. One of those men will certainly
emerge sooner than later as the Presidential candidate of APC.
As if that was not bad enough, Nuhu could also not guaranty a
gubernatorial ticket in his home state of Adamawa and this must have
been the last straw that broke his camel’s back. As a democrat he must
have known that imposition of candidates was already tearing the ACN
apart and that it would no longer be tolerated or condoned in an
enlarged APC. He must have seen that it would be difficult for him to be
imposed on APC in the same manner that he was foisted on ACN in 2011.
If this was going to be denied as a major reason for jumping ship, the
manner he hurriedly picked up a nomination form as a gubernatorial
aspirant of the PDP so soon after he joined his new Party gave fillip to
that suspicion. What is not known is how easy it would be for him to
get that ticket without throwing PDP Adamawa into total confusion,
commotion and disarray.
The other informed view is that Nuhu abandoned APC because he’s not
convinced it can pull the stunt of defeating an incumbent President in a
country where power is everything. Such doomsday scenario would
certainly scare anyone who has spent most of his adult life in public
service. By next year, it would have been a total of about nine years
since he’s been out of government job. Realistically, life would have
been too difficult to bear for an average person. Our system is such
that it stultifies and strangulates members of opposition. In this
season of political confusion, it is easy for most people to give up
under the alibi that there is no difference between PDP and APC. While I
respect Nuhu’s right to choose either of the two, I believe he should
have realised how costly choosing PDP would be to his humongous
reputation as the Nemesis of the Corrupt.
While it is always easy to move from the right to the left, it is not
usually simple to move from left to right. It is generally believed that
PDP is very bad and APC is bad but with flashes of hope from within.
Even Biblically, it is better for a bad man Saul to become Paul rather
than for Paul to change to Saul. Nuhu’s metamorphosis needs to be
situated within Nigerian contemporary history. Most of those who chose
to swing from left to right don’t have sweet stories to tell. The people
complaining about his move are doing so because they saw him rightly or
wrongly as a Messiah. And to whom much is given, much is also expected.
Such is the dilemma of a change agent.
The solution to this breaking of people’s heart and dashing their hopes
for me is easy. Nuhu is a technocrat who could have opted to work under
Jonathan without being a member of PDP. Politics has destroyed too many
of our finest brands. Examples abound of those who chose the power of
service over the service of power. It is difficult to know if Dr Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, Dr Olusegun Aganga and their ilk
are card-carrying members of PDP because of their suavity but Nuhu would
now be subjected to the whims and caprices of those tough guys in PDP.
This is the tragedy. Despite objections to his appointment as Chairman
of the Petroleum Revenue Taskforce by President Jonathan, many still saw
that it was consistent his natural role as an anti-corruption crusader.
But this time, it seems this defection is tougher to accept.
I pray his sojourn in PDP would be a miraculous exception. I sincerely pray he’s right and the rest of us are totally wrong.
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