CHIEF (SIR) DON UBANI
(Okwubunka of Asa) Umuiku-Isi-Asa Ukwa-West
E-mail: Ubanidon@yahoo.com
P.M.B. 7048, Aba
Phone: 08035523360
29 – 06 – 2015.

A NATURAL HARVEST OF NEMESIS IN NIGERIA’S EIGHTH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.
SCRIPTED BY CHIEF (SIR) DON UBANI

Any day man learns to appreciate the golden rules of nature is the day the human society will become sanitized, safe and comfortable to live in. There are many of such rules that man would not deny knowledge of except by caving in to pretentious amnesia. The one that would be highlighted in this essay is the first one which instructs, ‘treat others as you wish to be treated’. Can any other injunction be as humanly comprehensively compelling as this?
This reminds us of the Greek goddess of vengeance, called Nemesis. In Greek mythology, Nemesis was always relied upon to met out deserved punishment for any wrong doing. According to the belief system of the Greeks, every action attracts a deserved fate. The knowledge or belief that Nemesis exists in whatever one does, dictates that one should apply some caution in what one does. Nemesis, therefore, is synonymous with retributive justice.
There are countless instances in which Nemesis had given good account of itself. The only inhibition is that man is so hardened that no matter how difficult and frequent a punishment is, he seldom learns a lesson. Cases of politicians who looted public treasuries and had their families ruined many years after leaving office abound. Yet in the immediate past democratic dispensation, looting of public treasury was made a virtue. Those involved knew the fate of those who had looted before them but that did not deter them.
In Nigeria, the People’s Democratic Party, P.D.P., had been in power for sixteen years, starting from 1999 to May 2015. As a human organisation, they had their ups and downs in governance. On March 28, 2015 Nigerians who went to poll decided to vote for a change. They voted, as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission, for General Muhammadu Buhari as against the incumbent Jonathan as President. Thus the All Progressive Congress; A.P.C., emerged victorious in the election. The same wind of change saw A.P.C. produce majority of Senators and members of the House of Representatives. It was, therefore, quickly assumed that the government of A.P.C. at the national level would have no encumbrance, having secured a reasonable majority in the National Assembly. In a forest where the lion and tiger live, who would dare say the forest is unprotected?
Before continuing with this piece, a quick reminder on the configuration of the All Progressive Congress would be necessary. Having been electorally and politically dwarfed for sixteen consecutive years by the People’s Democratic Party, the opposition political Parties; the Action Congress of Nigeria led by Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the All Nigerian People’s Party headed by Dr Ogbonnaya Onu, Convention People’s Party formed by General Muhammadu Buhari, a splinter group of All Progressive Grand Alliance piloted by Owelle Rochas Okorocha and a break-away faction of the People’s Democratic Party with Governors Chibuike Amachi of Rivers State, Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State, Ahmed Abdulfatah of Kwara State, Murtala Nyako of Adamawa State and Aliyu Wamakko of Sokoto, decided to come together and form a mega Party with a common agenda which was to remove Dr. Goodluck Jonathan as President.
Whether they were birds of a feather or not did not matter to them, as long as the only agenda which was Jonathan’s exit from the seat of power made sense to each group. Ironically, the All Nigerian Congress that had long tagged itself a progressive party and had ceaselessly criticized everything in and about the People’s Democratic Party was very willing to betray its Progressive posturing by readily going into an undefined alliance with the five governors of P.D.P. as stated above and many Senators and Federal Representatives from the same P.D.P. Probably out of naivety, Bola Tinubu, who had been confined to regional leadership in the South-West, where he is assumed to be hero-worshipped by his people, under estimated the implication of an unwieldy conglomeration of political groups that had long pursued power or long been in power from sharply different directions. It was also imponderable that Bola Tinubu who from the look of things, had the obsession of asserting leadership and control over the new party failed to tell himself the simple truth that these political dissenters from the People’s Democratic Party had been used to playing the role of political god-fatherism. It would, therefore, amount to extreme simplicity of thought for any politician to assume that they were coming in merely to take instructions from another politician that had not even exceeded their electoral political height. So, right from the foundation-laying of the alliance, the stage was unambiguously set for implosion and cataclysm. No doubt, this is the price of political desperation.
Every politician of note nurses some aspiration. Apart from wining or helping his or her party win an election, he or she is no less interested in the sharing of political positions. The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigerian 1999, as amended, stipulates that, for purposes of equity, justice and fairness, positions in the country shall be distributed in line with federal character principles. Unarguably, there are six geo-political zones in Nigeria; North-central, North-East, North-West, South-East, South-South and South-West.
In the National Assembly, a dominant party has six positions to share amongst its members in either chamber. There are two presiding officers; the President of the Senate and the Speaker in the House of Representatives, respectively. In the same vein, there is a Deputy President of the Senate and the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. In addition, there are four principal Officers; The Majority Leader, Deputy Majority Leader, Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip in either of the chambers. The interesting coincidence here is the relationship between the number of positions in a chamber and the number of geo-political zones in the country. Under normal circumstances, six positions meant for six zones should not constitute any problem being shared as each Zone would simply get one. But this, by the wisdom of the Tinubu-led All Progressive Congress, was not to be.
The legislature has suffered a lot of deprivation and stunted growth in Nigeria. Of the three arms of government; Legislature, Executive and Judiciary, it was only the legislature that was always suspended each time he military had struck in Nigeria. This means that for the twenty-nine years the Nigerian military held sway in the country the legislature was non-existent whereas the Executive and Judiciary were functional. Even when the country returned to a democratic rule in 1999, the legislature faired badly under the domineering influence of President Olesegun Obasanjo who was not prepared to allow the arm any degree of independence, even inter-dependence.
The legislators, it would seem, have since resolved to exercise their inter-dependence, so to say. They now believe that, as a separate arm of government with direct mandate of the electorate, they should be able to determine their internal leadership. This was the Psychological pulse of the federal law-makers when on June 9th, 2015 they had assembled for the eighth National Assembly. Prior to that day, the leadership of the All Progressive Congress had conducted a tele-guided mock election in which Senator Ahmed Ibrahim Lawan, from the North-East was said to have emerged the President of the Senate while Senator George Akume from the North-Central was billed to be the Deputy President of the Senate. For the House of Representatives, the A.P.C ‘internal democracy’ had tipped Hon Femi Gbajabiamila, from South-West as Speaker and Honourable Tahir Monguno, from North-East, as the Deputy Speaker.
It would appear that the leadership of All Progressive Congress failed to take very serious cognizance of the fact that in sharing offices in a party such as theirs, emphasis should not only be placed on Zones but equally on the groups that made up the alliance. In their wild assumption, they ‘forgot’ that the group that came from the People’s Democratic Party was not prepared, in any way, to be ignored. In the calculation of the New P.D.P., since Buhari’s Convention People’s Party had produced the President in the name of General Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Tinubu’s All Nigerian Congress had produced the vice President in the person of Prof Yemi Osinbanjo, it would not be too ambitious a dream if it produced the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Meanwhile, the leadership of the All Progressive Congress, may be still out of inexperience, failed to realize the potential influence of the newly turned but highly experienced and sophisticated P.D.P. in the National Assembly. The P.D.P., being like a lion that had been brutally wounded, gave the impression that it was merely hibernating in the National Assembly. It was only the inexperienced that could conclude that P.D.P. would not have any hand in the leadership that would emerge from the eighth National Assembly. As it turned out to be, Senator Bukola Saraki and Hon Yakubu Dogara, former members of P.D.P., went into alliance with elected members of their former party and the result was victory for them as President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives, respectively. The most worrisome to A.P.C. is the democratic emergence of P.D.P’s Ike Ekweremadu as the Deputy President of the Senate.
Mention must, however, be made of the show of shame put up by Members of the All Progressive Congress on the floor of the House of Representatives on 25th June, 2015. Members of the Party, being divided along the lines of Dogara and Gbajabiamila, had thrown caution and decency to the wind when they declared a free-for-all over appointments of Principal Officers of their party in the House. Infact, it was the most dishonourable occurrence on the floor of the House of since the return of democratic governance in 1999.
In all these developments within the leadership and membership of the All Progressive Congress, there remains a very simple but certainly instructive lesson to be learnt by all and that is ‘that whatever one sows, one reaps’. The All Progressive Congress had, in 2011, sown ‘Tabuwalization’ and have, in 2015, harvested the double portion of ‘Sarikism and Dogarism.’ Who says there is no Nemesis?

Chief (Sir) Don Ubani.

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Well said