Still blowing hot and cold

IN Oyo, Governor Seyi Makinde orchestrates a high-octane drama, which name could be “Blowing Hot and Cold” — all to escape doing the right thing.

Yet, right won’t vanish, simply because you buy the illusion you can avoid doing it. You can’t; and no matter how much or how long you fudge, you are condemned to eventually doing the right thing.

With the Supreme Court’s definitive pronouncement that state governors cannot sack elected local government officials, a showdown was imminent on January 28. After the federal attorney-general’s legal advice to the governor, using the apex court’s verdict as ground, the governor found himself in a bind.

The judgment absolutely removed the legal plank of his local governments’ dissolution of 29 May 2019. With the attorney-general’s advice, coupled with a nudge to the Police to do the needful to enforce obedience, the Oyo government was well and truly worsted. It was the triumph of one bully (the police, as part of the federal security architecture); over the other (the governor, that figured he could, with executive whims and caprices, scatter and gather local government, as His Excellency wishes). Not so!

Still, it must be said: good sense prevailed on January 28. The elected chairmen and councillors appeared to have duly resumed their truncated terms. That was far better than frontal confrontation, that could have left everyone bruised.

You were even at a point of commending the Oyo authorities for executive nobility when they emerged with another legal legerdemain — a court injunction to freeze the victorious parties from enjoying the fruits of their victory. Wow, wow, that was the judicial equivalent of a military ambush! Shorn of all its legalistic foam, it’s another stonewalling, hiding behind legal procedures — vexatious, to the elected councillors but hardly a crime, until the court rules one way or another.

But, that trickery has forced Governor Makinde on foxtrot, pushing a charm offensive. The other day, he was reported on a sortie to the Inspector-General of Police. Hear the touring governor: “I came to brief the Inspector-General of Police that this is the situation. We do not want chaos in Oyo State. I am a law-abiding person — hear! hear! — if there is a court judgment, I will obey.”

That was an excellent piece of gubernatorial cant, if ever there was one! After all the empty verbal grandstanding , what was clear was a governor desperately waiting on executive fiat — or put more brazenly, force — to stonewall an extant judgment, while gambling on a future judgment! Crafty, isn’t that?

But only the governor and his co-partisans are taken in. No future judgment can erase the crux: no governor can sack elected chairmen and councillors. So, the cup of compliance will not pass over the errant government. All the governor can do is buy time. But the longer he does that, the longer governance at the grassroots is buried under a thick, dark legitimacy cloud.

Not a few have made a meat of the federal attorney-general throwing the state government into a whirr because of his advisory, which came with the notice to the Police to do the needful. Indeed, the optics of that, in a federal state, is awful.

Still, wouldn’t that be delving into ego, leaving the substance of the matter? If the governor had self-corrected, after doing the wrong thing, would the federal AG have intervened, on a matter as clear as democratic local governments, clearly entrenched in the 1999 Constitution?

And just imagine if the governor had the Police to enforce his clear outlawry, in this case? He probably would have turned up his nose, stamped his foot, and barked: Supreme Court, my foot! Such intransigence arms those dead set against state police.

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