Nigerians must rise against Buhari’s dictatorship, lawlessness — Adegboruwa SAN

* ‘Only Buhari’s security paramount to him’

A lawyer and activist, Mr Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa (SAN),
in this interview with SIMON
UTEBOR of  Punch^[1] , says the regime
of Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) has a hidden agenda to
cow Nigerians through harassment and intimidation

The recent attack on
the court to rearrest Omoyele Sowore by the Department of State
Services has received huge criticisms across the country and
internationally. What do you think about it?

Well, I was challenged as a lawyer, as an activist and as a
democrat to witness the horrific invasion of one of the most sacred
institutions of democracy during my lifetime. It has challenged me
to continue to be a lawyer and I am sure the same thing has
happened to virtually all lawyers.

Of course, the statement made by the Nigerian Bar Association
clearly represents our view that the executive has become totally
lawless. We have experienced this in the past when the same DSS
invaded the hallowed chamber of the National Assembly and it was
condemned. It is now happening to the hallowed chamber of the
judiciary and court of law. So, having invaded the National
Assembly and the court, there is nothing left for us as Nigerians
to continue to hold on to as evidence that we are practising
democracy.

I believe that what we are witnessing now is only a dress
rehearsal of what is yet to come. I believe there is a hidden
agenda; I believe that this regime is up to something that most
Nigerians will not accept. And so, it needs to silence people, put
fear in people, bring laws to regulate people’s speech, and
intimidate and harass them. So, my reaction is that the invasion of
the court by operatives of the DSS when the judge was sitting and
conducting judicial proceedings is a setback for our democratic
experience and it is a return to the dark ages of military
jackboots and dictatorship, which we have overcome in this
country.

We have defeated this before in the past, including the same
leader we have now, and others who were worse than him. I am sure
that Nigerians will defeat this again. It will not thrive. Even
though I am bothered that this is happening, I am not scared; we
believe that in the course of time, Nigerians will overcome this
challenge.

Retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari’s
spokesperson, Garba Shehu, said the DSS does not need to take
instructions from his principal. Do you think the DSS was acting on
its own or following Buhari’s instructions?

I believe that if you look at the antecedents of Major General
Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), it is a case of a leopard that is not
able to change its spots. In 2015, some people tried to dress him
in borrowed robes and described him as a born-again democrat,
packaging him to London, but it did not take so long for people to
truly see him.

On May 29, 2015, when he read a speech in Abuja in which he said
“he belonged to everybody and belonged to no one”; that is what is
playing out now. Buhari has no allegiance to the people of Nigeria;
he does not believe that the rule of law can thrive in this
nation.

That was evidenced by his reaction to the elections in Kogi and
Bayelsa states, when he openly said that those who were
dissatisfied should go to court, knowing the judiciary had been
humiliated, traumatised, bastardised and starved of funds. It was
easy for him to be taunting the people of Nigeria with the lame
duck judiciary, which has been totally crippled by this particular
regime through the disobedience of court orders, invasion of the
houses of judges, and removal of the Chief Justice of the
Federation of Nigeria through unorthodox means and general
profiling of all judges all over Nigeria as a means of scaring
them.

I believe the DSS is directly responsible to the President being
part of the executive. All law enforcement agencies of Nigeria are
part of the executive and the President being the Commander in
Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria should take responsibility for
the actions of any agency of government, especially the DSS. And we
are worried that we are in a democracy where we now relate with the
agency that ordinarily should not be heard.

We have been contending with the military, which has taken over
our lives – Operation Python Dance, Operation Positive
Identification, etc. Virtually, the military has taken over the
lives of Nigerians. As if that is not enough, the DSS has now
become an open terror to us in this country and I hold retired
Major General Buhari directly responsible for the atrocities of the
DSS and other agencies of government that are directly reporting to
him.

An agency that should be working underground, conducting
intelligence like a secret service, should not be seen. It is
totally condemnable and reprehensible.

Buhari’s old habits as military head of state
appears to outweigh any promise he made to Nigerians to be
democratic. What responsibilities do Nigerians have in saving this
democracy?

Well, for me, we have come to a time in our nation when we need
to stand up to tyranny, to oppression and to lawlessness. It is
when the good people sit down, stay aloof and do nothing that evil
can thrive. The best way to get rid of a dictator is to challenge
him and I am calling on Nigerians, in particular, Professor Wole
Soyinka. He cannot afford not to let his voice be heard and he has
a history in this country for challenging impunity and
dictatorship. He should lead a protest openly in Abuja. Nigerians
are waiting and we will support him.

I call on Soyinka to rise up to the occasion on behalf of
Nigerians and declare an open sit-at-home protest as protest
against this regime so that we can shut down every system until
Buhari gets back to respect the rule of law, which people voted for
in 2015 and 2019. If we leave this regime to its antics, we will
get worse.

In the days to come, people will be disappearing on the streets;
in the days to come, media houses will be shut down; in the days to
come, detention centres will be filled up and judges, as predicted
by the Governor of Ondo State (Rotimi Akeredolu), may be arrested
while even sitting in their robes. I think that those who know this
regime have warned us enough. Nigerians should rise up to challenge
the impunity we are currently witnessing but I am specifically
calling on Prof Wole Soyinka to rise up to the occasion, to lead us
– we are waiting. Nigerians are ready to confront this
dictatorship.

With the National Assembly totally pocketed, judiciary totally
traumatised, we now have on our hands a full-blown civilian
dictatorship and we must brace for the challenge.

What term does the law have for a
democratically-elected leader who disobeys court orders and is
operating like a military man?

I believe that if we are all students of history; we know that
when a civilian regime gets to a position when it assumes military
dictatorship, it is marking the end of its days. What I see going
on in Nigeria is that power is gradually slipping off the hands of
Buhari, even though he has never been in control of governance, and
people have questioned whether he even has an understanding of
democratic ethos that we are practising.

But with what is going on currently, we have the conviction that
the days of dictatorship are marked in Nigeria and I believe that
if we all rise up – Nigerian Bar Association, Nigeria Union of
Journalists, Nigerian Guild of Editors, Newspapers Proprietors
Association of Nigeria, National Association of Nigerian Students,
all lovers of democracy, civil society organisations,
non-governmental organisations – and say no, it will be no. We
fought former Head of State, the late General Sani Abacha, in this
country; we fought General Ibrahim Babangida (retd.) in this
country, and so it will not be an exception to have Buhari
terrorising people who voted him into office, locking up people
indefinitely, clamping upon the judiciary and refusing to comply
with orders of courts. I believe the law is enough to take care of
this situation and I call on judges in particular, to wean
themselves of the self-imposed timidity, and rise courageously to
defend our constitution.

No judge should entertain any charge against Sowore in any court
in Nigeria and we are waiting for any judge who will entertain any
subsequent charge from a regime that has refused to obey the order
of a court. We will call on the NBA to blacklist that judge and
remove his name from the history of Nigeria. I believe that we have
got to a stage when we must speak truth to power. I commend and
encourage all judges across Nigeria to stand up and be counted to
be on the side of the people.

Would you describe the actions of this regime under
General Buhari as illegal?

Right from the period when Buhari addressed Nigerians on May 29,
2015, I have had no illusion that he would go through any legal
system of governance. You can see from the history of this regime
how election has taken a back seat – all the elections conducted so
far were marred by violence and inconclusive elections. Anytime the
ruling party was likely to lose, INEC could be forced to declare it
as inconclusive. By the time the result would come out, it would
favour the regime at all costs.

So, what we are witnessing is a situation whereby the executive
under retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari has arrogated all
powers to itself and we now have to contend with a maximum ruler,
who is not operating by the rule of law and does not give a damn
about what the people think about his action.

So, I believe that with what is going on now, those of us who
have been saying that there is nothing in this regime to give us
hope for a better future, have now risen up to defend that view.
So, we can only call upon all Nigerians – in the markets, churches,
mosques, schools, wherever they are – to stand up and be counted to
resist illegality. Enough is enough.

Before his regime, Buhari after losing elections in
the past protested and at some point even called for a revolution
like the one seen in Egypt where lives were lost. How would you
react to this vis-a-vis what is happening to Sowore
now?

You will remember that before the 2015 elections, the All
Progressives Congress, ably led by Lai Mohammed, held the Goodluck
Jonathan administration to a ransom with propaganda and lies on a
daily basis and indeed, Buhari led an open demonstration in Kano
against that particular government. At a particular time, Buhari
led people of his tribe to the late Governor Lam Adeshina in Oyo
State, threatening that they should not implement any law against
herdsmen.

The leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria,
Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, and his wife have been held in detention in
violation of court orders granting them bail. Do you think such
actions taken by the Buhari regime are in the country’s
interest?

I do not think that there is anything that Buhari has embarked
upon that supports national interest, national cohesion. In fact,
like no other regime in the history of this nation, our country has
never been this divided along ethnic, religious and tribal lines.
We have never seen it like this. We have witnessed this regime
dividing our people against themselves, family, husbands and wives,
businesspeople and so on. I don’t think that there is anything
being done that is in the interest of national security. It is the
security of Buhari that is paramount to him, not the security of
Nigerians.

By the account of Amnesty International, over 20,000 people have
lost their lives in the course of terrorism going on in the
North-East, a war he claimed he would lead from the front. But he
has been running to foreign countries and hiding in Aso Rock since
he came to power. There is nothing we have gained in respect of the
battle between herdsmen and farmers other than the slaughtering
people, leading to inflation, closing of borders and causing people
to suffer. So, there is nothing we enjoy from this particular
regime led by Buhari. There is high unemployment rate and factories
are closing down. The darkness we witnessed during the past
administrations in terms of power supply has got worse; power
companies have continued to behave the way they like and they have
not been able to caution them, hence there is no improvement in
power supply at all.

Aviation has collapsed virtually. Air Nigeria that he introduced
later became an object of fraud, which he was not able to manage.
The educational system is in shambles. The road network is
terrible.

Violence has been on the increase in terms of kidnapping to the
extent that divisional police officers who are supposed to protect
lives and property are now paying ransoms to kidnappers.

Talking about border closure, do you support the
shutting down of the country’s borders?

The closure of the borders is totally unreasonable. You don’t
have the capacity to produce anything and then you want to shut
yourself out from outsiders. There is hypocrisy in the closure of
borders because we just signed a trade agreement with other African
nations saying that we would open ourselves up for integration
globally and following that, you closed the borders. Why did you
sign the agreement if you knew you were not going to honour the
agreement?

I think that the border closure is totally senseless and does
not bear any economic sense beyond the propaganda we are being fed
daily that petroleum consumption has gone down. There is no data to
support this.

Like El-Zakzaky and Sowore, a former National
Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.), has been held in
detention in 2015 in defiance of court orders and ECOWAS appellate
court declaring his incarceration as illegal. What do you think
about that?

The case of Dasuki is a loud testimony of the intolerance of
this particular regime and indeed Buhari himself. It has since
transpired that there had been some form of altercation between
them in the past, and that this experience constitutes retaliation.
I don’t think people should use public office to settle personal
scores. If somebody is alleged to be involved in corruption, the
best place to try that allegation is the court of law.

You bring your charges and allow the person to have his day in
court. But you arrested somebody, locked him up, and he was granted
bail. But as he was arrested again and fresh charges were filed.
You accused somebody of being involved in terrorism and that he
wanted to overthrow the government, yet there was no evidence. All
that you saw in his house were guns that were made for farming and
games and because of that, he has been held in custody since
2015.

I believe that there is no pretence from this particular regime
that it is lawless – there is no pretence that the regime totally
constitutes itself into a hindrance to democratic improvement and
engagement. It is only for Nigerians to insist that our
constitution should prevail.

Many Nigerians have argued that the anti-graft war
is targeted at perceived opponents of Buhari. Do you share their
sentiments?

For me, really, one of the major points of support for this
regime has always been a cry against corruption. We had thought
that there was indeed a genuine desire to recover our wealth from
wrong persons and use them for development purposes.

But you cannot fight corruption except through the gateway of
judiciary. The salaries of judges have remained the same; there has
been no funding for the judiciary. So, the general tendency is that
the anti-corruption slogan was just meant to buy and steal the
confidence and support of the people of Nigeria, but there was no
genuine desire to actually fight corruption because if you really
want to fight corruption, you will ensure that money is not in the
hands of people who are in power. But today, this is what is going
in the country: the Niger Delta Development Commission, whose
budget is over N300bn per annum is being run by an interim
management committee contrary to the fact that the Senate had
already screened and approved a particular board, which has not
been allowed to operate at all. So, I believe that if you are
fighting corruption, it should be a total war, especially for those
who are in charge of funds because there is a limit to what you can
trace in the hands of those who are no longer in power. We have
been chasing them since 2015, by now the focus should be on those
who are in power.

As military head of state, Buhari used the National
Security Organisation, which is what DSS was then known, to arrest
and detain people arbitrarily. Do you think that is what he is
re-enacting now?

I believe the current setup of the DSS is probably even worse
than that of the NSO we had in the days of Major Buhari as a
military dictator. The DSS we have now is populated by people from
his tribe, and I believe they are only answerable to him and their
loyalty is to him, not to Nigeria and Nigerians.

The DSS we have now is an agency that will arrest journalists
and keep them in custody for two years without trial and raid the
houses of judges with impunity. I believe generally, Nigeria is
being taken back to the days of dictatorship, when secret
organisations were being made to terrorise people and impose fear
on them as a means of silencing any form of dissent. It means a
hidden agenda is about to unfold and I think that is what is
playing out in terms of the way the DSS has been unleashed on the
people of Nigeria as contrary to its operation as a secret
agency.

Nonetheless, we have had worst situations in history. Adolf
Hitler did everything to eliminate all Jews, it did not work;
Mobutu Sese Seko did everything possible in Zaire, it did not work;
Pieter Botha did everything in South Africa to silence the black
majority, it never worked. Dictatorship has never triumphed over
the people in any history and it will not happen in Nigeria.

Houses of judges were raided by the DSS in 2016; did
you sense that there was danger at that time?

Yes, I have no doubt that the judiciary has always been the
target of this particular regime because immediately Buhari came
into power, he declared openly that judiciary was his headache – he
didn’t believe in due process, he did not believe in rule of law
and that has been demonstrated by his aversion to reforms in the
judicial sector.

So, the invasion of the houses of judges by the DSS was meant to
send a signal to all judicial officers that it could be anybody’s
turn and I believe currently, most judges write their judgments
with the fear of the DSS and other agencies secretly monitoring
their movements, activities, their telephone conversations, and
finances just to ensure that they do the bidding of the
government.

Not only that, the Chief Justice of Nigeria denied the fact that
there was autonomy for the judiciary when he said if there was no
funding for the judiciary, it could not be independent. He said
this at the NBA conference in Lagos in August. He said it again
during the swearing-in of new Senior Advocates of Nigeria in Abuja
in September.

He said the judiciary was not independent and not autonomous
because they went cap in hand to get funds. So, the executive is
using funding as a means of controlling the judiciary and the
reason is very simple: 80 per cent of cases in our courts are meant
to determine the impunity and excesses of the executive. So it is
not in the interest of the Buhari regime to allow the judiciary to
function because an effective judiciary will check lawlessness and
impunity. I am sure that judges themselves, having seen through the
chicanery of this regime, will stand up to defend our people and
constitution.

Hate speech bill, which is believed to be aimed at
insulating public officials from criticisms, is being proposed.
What do you think about it?

I believe that that bill is dead on arrival. There is a judgment
from the ECOWAS court which has been served on the National
Assembly that the bill cannot survive.

Second, the bill cannot stand in the face of our constitution.
Section 39 of our constitution guarantees the freedom of speech to
every Nigerian, to impart ideas and receive ideas without
interference. Section 22 of our constitution allows the media,
especially the mass media, to hold government accountable to the
people. The Freedom of Information Act allows Nigerians to query,
inquire and investigate the activities of government. It is too
late in the day for anybody to dream of any hate speech bill. It
will never work. If and when the National Assembly abandons their
responsibilities to Nigerians to pass such bill, we will go to
court.

The Buhari regime has been accused of favouring the
North in various appointments. Do you have any contrary
views?

I don’t think we need any more evidence other than the
appointments going on at present where most security chiefs are
from a particular section of the country. Look at the recent
appointments of commissioners of police and AIGs; we recorded 13
from the North-West and there was only one from the South-East
region.

I believe that this regime is lopsided and it is not complying
with Section 14 of our constitution which speaks about federal
character in order to reflect and ensure that all sections of this
country are carried along in appointments and infrastructure
development. There is a constitutional violation in terms of
appointments and I believe that this particular regime is based on
nepotism and tribalism, and this has been confirmed by prominent
leaders even in the North. That is unfortunate.

What do you have to say about the police clampdown
on innocent citizens particularly during peaceful
protests?

I believe that the police authorities in Nigeria have continued
to follow the body language of retired Major General Buhari and
have turned our laws upside down. Look at the contradictions in
respect of recruitment and discipline of police officers, and the
war between the Police Service Commission and the Inspector General
of Police.

Things are falling apart with the Nigeria police, and the issue
of bribery, trampling on the rights of people, and issue of
corruption are most rampant in the Nigeria Police Force. It is
happening right in the face of the number one champion of
anti-corruption. I believe the police in Nigeria have not
changed.

If you go to Cross Rivers State, for instance, you will see that
the governor there is doing exactly what Buhari is doing to Sowore
by putting journalists in detention and forcing them to undergo
secret trial against the constitution of our land. I think it’s
unfortunate.

What does the law say about peaceful protest? Is it
compulsory to get permits from the police?

Not at all; Section 39 of our law gives every citizen
unquestioned right to protest. We have tested this in the court in
the case of Dr Arthur Nwankwo, when he was arrested on alleged
sedition. The Court of Appeal said clearly that with the coming to
force of the 1999 Constitution, every Nigerian is entitled to
protest, and various decisions have followed since then up to the
Court of Appeal that Nigerians do not require police permits in
order to express themselves.

Therefore, I urge all Nigerians to speak up through the social
media, traditional media, and protests but they must be peacefully
done. Nobody can be prosecuted for holding a peaceful protest. Our
law permits it, the court has upheld it, and it is illegal for the
police to ask anybody to obtain permit in order to exercise their
constitutional right to protest.

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