Jonathan May Cause Coup D’etat – Babarabe Musa

And remember the type of constitution we have, which has established executive president, executive governor, and executive local government chairmen. The executive is so powerful and protected by the constitution that once you have him, you either hope or despair. He is so powerful, that is even the justification for the faulty impeachment, because if a leader is so powerful, the only way you can check him is to remove him constitutionally if he misuses that power. That’s why in spite of the way it is implemented, this impeachment clause in 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is just right. It might be dangerously being misused, but I think it is just right because the executive is too powerful.

Look, the President of Nigeria can decide everything and there is nothing anybody can do. In fact, even this constitutional provision for impeachment cannot apply to the President of Nigeria. It can apply to the governors, yes, but for the President, it is very, very difficult. Unless we have a situation, even if we have a situation bordering on civil war, unless the military intervenes effectively, there cannot be impeachment. If the military for instance gives ultimatum to the government that something should be done, I think with the situation in Nigeria today, it will be done, but otherwise it cannot.

Look at how powerful the President is. The President today can order simultaneously the impeachment of every governor in this country, including PDP governors and opposition governors, and it will be done because the President is powerful. With power under the constitution and with control of resources of the country, he can do it.

But where you said the elders don’t have the resources and the powers, what about the governors who are supposed to be the chief security officers of their states, the House of Assembly members, the senators, the House of Reps members who are currently in power and from northern region. Are they also handicapped?

You know, let us even talk about the North for the sake of making clear issues not because of this mindset. Look, these northern leaders are more articulate than their southern counterparts ideologically because for a very long time they have been rooted in the system which existed for probably 1,000 years before that system came to the South. Look at this sarauta (kingship). It existed for 1,000 years or even more before colonialism and it covers the whole of the North, irrespective of religion.

But in the South when did it emerge? Yes, we know in Benin and Oyo Empires it emerged, but the power for instance of a chief, an Oba, Obi or whatever you can call it in the South-West, was not more than the power of a village head in the North, and that is reflected even today.

Can you compare the power for instance of Emir of Kano with this constitutional arrangement in this country? Can you compare it by any imagination with any Oba or whatever you call it in the South-West? I know that the psychology or rather the ethics of power in the North and the South-West and the Benin Kingdom look the same, but it is not the same. It looks the same only in the sense that for instance, in the case of the Yoruba Empire the Oba was called Kabiyesi. In the North he is called the equivalent to the Oba, that is, the Emir was called Sarki Yanka, Ranki Shadede (You head hunter, may you live forever).

It is virtually the same in Yorubaland, maybe to some extent even in Benin, because I experienced it in Benin one time. When I was on duty there, I was attending a Federal Government institution, where I was a member of the board. One day we arrived and found that everybody had shaved his hair, because something connected with Oba required everybody to do that. Look at how primitive that was! In spite of this, from the time Nigeria was colonised by British, from 1904 till today, there is some similarity between the sarauta in the South and sarauta in the North; it was just similarity, but not in essence.

So, you can see these northern elders grew up from a system of repression for 1,000 years before that emerged in the South and it means the northern elders, particularly those who rose from the emirate system, are more capable of organising themselves on class basis with their equivalents in the South.

But why is it that all these attributes you’ve mentioned have not been brought to the fore by these leaders who are in government to contain the activities of Boko Haram? Rather there are allegations in some quarters that they have a hand in how Boko Haram emerged?