Buhari is promoting barbarism | Nairalaw

Abimbola Adelakun

It seems that for President Muhammadu Buhari, there appears to
be one solution to national problem: more of it.

Is Nigeria facing the challenge of financial corruption? The
approach is not to understand corruption as a primal behaviour that
will be inevitably unleashed on any society whose social and
political mechanisms operate with loose nuts and bolts. Instead,
corruption is treated by a further loosening of the system;
undermining the rule of law and staging a public crucifixion of
those labelled corrupt. To solve the problem of corruption, they
thus entangle us in even more corruption.

On Monday, Buhari did it again when he said at an All
Progressives Congress caucus meeting that thugs who snatch ballot
boxes on Election Day do so at the expense of their lives. He said
he had given instructions to the police and the military
authorities to be ruthless with alleged election riggers. In
essence, the President is saying that his method of dealing with a
primitive and criminal behaviour like election rigging is the
equally barbaric summary execution of the alleged riggers without
even a recourse to the judicial process. He invests both the police
and the military personnel with the totalitarian power to locate
crime, pronounce judgment on the supposed criminal and execute
judgment at their discretion. When you listen to the men of the
Nigerian military saying they too are ready to deal with
troublemakers during the elections, you begin to wonder if Nigeria
left 1984.

To be sure, the rhetoric of “do-or-die” is not new in the
Nigerian political system. We were here when, following a
particularly bloody post-election violence enacted by Buhari’s
followers in 2011, he claimed that “dogs and baboons” would once
again be soaked in blood. In 2014, it was the APC national leader,
Bola Tinubu, that pronounced that subversion of the elections would
result in “rig and roast.” Politicians of all hues and sizes have
made similar inflammatory comments; the vocabulary of violence in
Nigeria barely metamorphoses. Recently, a rather desperate
politician, the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, threatened
that foreign election observers could go home in “body bags.”
El-Rufai of all people should know all about body bags; it was
under his watch that 347 Shiites who were massacred by Nigerian
soldiers were mass-buried.

There is the temptation to believe that Buhari’s “ruthless”
comment is driven by his passion for guaranteeing the integrity of
the electoral process, but his history proves otherwise. Lately, in
January, he was in Osun State and at some point, he let it slip
that his party, the APC, managed to maintain their hold on power in
the state through “remote control.” Anyone who witnessed what
passed for election in Osun and is not living in denial will
connect the obvious and understand the President was gloating about
subverting the election in the APC’s favour. As presidential
candidate, Buhari has benefit from underage voting and it is not on
record that he rues the social failures that make cheating possible
and on such scale. Buhari’s asking the police and the military men
to forgo the rules of engagement when dealing with ballot boxes
snatchers cannot therefore be about guaranteeing the veracity of
the electoral process by any means possible. No, it is about power
– the use and abuse of it.

Properly labelled, that is “corruption.”

When his supporters, in the bid to justify the President’s
gaffe, say that those who have no intention to rig have nothing to
fear, they exhibit the extreme of either of two traits: naivete or
dishonesty. First, cases of ballot snatching during elections have
reduced so significantly that even the President’s aides have had
to reach as far back as 10 years ago to find an example to make a
case in his defence. Either Buhari is detached from this reality,
or he was only just reaching. Second, ours is a country where
people have been routinely killed by police and military officers
over negligible amounts of money and ego-rubbing. It is wrong –
morally and legally – for the President to encourage the use of
deadly force against those they suspect to be election riggers
without recourse to the law. What stops those policemen from
gunning down just about anybody they please and labelling them
“ballot box snatchers”? In civilised societies, when a police
officer kills a civilian, even an armed one, they have instituted
processes whereby they walk back on the incident to make sure that
the killing was justified. If the use of deadly force does not pass
the smell test, there are consequences for the officer who applied
it. That is the ideal we should strive for, not construe ourselves
as animals whose lives are so worthless it can be taken on a
whim.

Nigeria is a fragile nation, and we do not need the kind of
barbarism Buhari promotes. Nobody should be deceived that such a
heavy-handed solution will solve the problem of electoral
malpractices. We should not be co-opted into sanctioning excessive
use of power all because Buhari has to appear “tough.” Where was
this “tough” Buhari when herdsmen were rampaging, killing innocent
folk from Benue to Kaduna? Was he not bending over backward to make
one excuse or the other for their actions? Why was this toughness
not extended to cover the cattle rustling, kidnapping and armed
robbery in various parts of Nigeria? I acknowledge that people want
a society where processes work; where elections represent their
unsubverted will. Yes, but we cannot beat a short cut to a
functional society if we cannot reason out solutions to the
perennial problems of electoral malpractice beyond a resort to
violence.

In Nigeria’s history, electoral malpractices such as ballot
box-stuffing, snatching etc are not even new. Documented history of
Nigerian elections as far back as 1964/1965 shows that such
malfeasance was almost a commonplace practice. Rather than
recommend violence as a solution, a more introspective leader will
ask why certain practices recur in the life of the nation, and how
to evolve technological and bureaucratic methods that alleviate
these things. Up till the early 20th century, even the US had
tainted elections. There was violence, “stomach infrastructure” and
open vote-buying. Where would they be today if their presidents had
ordered the use of deadly force as a solution? No, a society should
be able to leave retrogressive thinking behind and evolve into
modernity. In the age of ubiquitous modern technology that can
enable instant transmission of results, Buhari’s “ruthless”
response brings the same mindset that created Nigeria’s problem as
its solution.

Finally, we cannot address the Buhari’s anti-democratic thinking
without also confronting the unscrupulous beings who give an
intellectual and legal cover to such. No thanks to these fellows,
every action and statement that ought to be called out is endlessly
justified through a ridiculous stretch of logic. When Buhari
claimed that the rule of law could be shelved for the supposedly
higher good of fighting corruption, lawyers (some with SAN label)
and supposed public intellectuals were there to justify it. These
folk should know that to be a Buhari supporter, and a Nigerian
should not be mutually exclusive. They should be able to call him
out when he strays from the ideals of democracy and not be all over
the place, selectively digging out aspects of the law that can help
them to justify his faux pas. They should be reminded that election
will come and go, and Buhari will eventually leave that office, but
the precedent they help to set will come back to bite them.
Someday, when they or their loved ones have been ensnared by the
evil they helped birth, history will have it written on their
epitaphs: this one died in the hands of the monster they helped
create.