Matters Miscellaneous ,By Dan Agbese

And so for the Nigerian nation, it is not raining; it is pouring. Our columnists and editorial writers have a surfeit of issues to deal with. And our country groans, with its concerned citizens wondering what the events of this week portend for what is generously referred to as our nascent democracy.
It is not easy to make sense of what is happening to us. Or rather what they are doing to our patch-patch democracy. Even veteran watchers of the oft-errant behaviour of our politicians would need more than the entrails of a chicken to make some sense of it. It is, however, easy to see that our country is in the vice grip of megalomaniacal power play, the most dangerous political game in the world. It threatens our individual freedom and liberty. When you take these away from the people, you give democracy a hollow ring. And you turn democracy into a government of men, not of laws. The Greek and the Romans who gave the world democracy, warts and all, gave us a form of government in which leaders and the led alike to subject to and respect the rule of law.
The police assault on the hollowed chambers of the national assembly, the first time in our history, came as a big shock to even a nation inured to shocks often delivered by its own big men. Police assault on the legislative branch of government anywhere in the world is considered a serious breach of the doctrine of the separation of powers. The legislative branch does not, at least in theory, exist at the pleasure of the executive branch. We have been told that the police acted on security information that thugs would invade the national assembly that day. We ought to welcome, I think, the fact that the Nigeria Police Force, weighed down by its poor image of incompetence and corruption, acted proactively to save our honourable lawmakers from the hands of thugs. No one is deceived. The official explanation offered by the omniscient presidential acolytes has the offensive smell of fiction dragged out of the sewer.
You could argue that the principal officers of the national assembly should have been put on notice. You could argue that our policemen know the difference between thugs and honourable members of the House of Representatives. You could argue that thugs have never threatened our parliament. You could also argue that if the police were there to arrest thugs, they ought to have paraded some of them by now. But you would lose. This is not about truth or logic; this is about the show of power, raw, naked power. So far, what has gone viral in the social media is the absence of thugs and the presence of honourable members scaling the fence in a courageous display of their constitutional right to carry on their business in their chambers, shredded clothes and all.
Even a little child knows that the assault was directed at one man and one man only, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal. He has been hounded and hunted since he decided that his political interest would best be served in APC rather than in his former party, PDP. Tambuwal, a nice gentleman who seems to me like the right and tolerant face of the next generation of our politicians, forgot, of course, that there is one rule for PDP and one rule for others. Had he decamped from APC to PDP, his police details would still be at his beck and call.
This government has redefined freedom of political association as the freedom to stay with the PDP or join the party. There are enormous advantages in being part of the largest party in Africa, nay, the world. If you have mud in your face, it is instantly cleansed; if you have skeletons rattling in your cupboard, they are silenced. Once you are under the umbrella, you are safe from police harassment and EFCC’s fitful probes of how you came about the stain on your baban riga.
The police raid on and the vandalisation of the data base offices of APC in Lagos added a new dimension to how we manage our democracy. It, certainly, is in the interest of the ruling party, and this has been the pattern of our political behaviour since the second republic, to systematically squash the opposition parties by hook or by crook, but it also amounts to the asphyxiation of political pluralism, the real pillar of democracy. To treat the opposition parties as, in the unguarded statement by the governor Katsina State, Ibrahim Shema, rats and cockroaches to be squashed is to deny us our rights to freely associate with the parties of our choice. So far the police have not told us what they found in the data base offices of APC, if only to prove that their action prevented the party from breaking the law. However jittery the government might about the next general elections, it has no legitimate powers, constitutional or otherwise, to intimidate and destroy the only other political party that can offer us an alternative in the best tradition of political pluralism and the freedom of choice and association.
Then there is the matter of extending the emergency rule in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. The three states are the theatres of war waged on the Nigerian nation by Islamic insurgents. We have been at it for five years now. The three states have been under emergency rule for 18 months. The emergency rule was supposed to give the president some extra-ordinary powers to deal promptly with the insurgency. But see what has happened in the 18 months of emergency rule: Boko Haram now effectively controls 16 local governments in Borno and Adamawa states. The killings and the kidnappings go on daily; they take more and more territories and feel bold enough to fly some strange flags in the areas taken by them. The poor Chibok schoolgirls and other young women captured by Boko Haram have been indoctrinated and turned into suicide bombers, as witness the suicide bombing in Maiduguri this Tuesday in which between 24 and 67 people were killed and many more injured.
The emergency rule has not in any way helped the nation to meet this, the greatest challenge to its corporate existence since the Nigerian civil war. Would another six months of emergency turn the tide against the insurgents who have, to our collective shame, made our gallant armed forces look like a bunch of boy scouts? Not likely.
The emergency rule has degenerated into Jonathan’s signature response to serious problems and national challenges. The government has clearly run out options. Emergency rule is motion, not movement. It is a do-nothing strategy that takes us nowhere near putting an end to the killings by Boko Haram. In any case, it is said that to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is to make wisdom look patently unwise.
I do not believe that our military strategists have run out of options for dealing with this deadly challenge. They do not need the continued emergency rule to come up with the right and pragmatic military strategy that would make Boko Haram history in our country. But it would take more than prayer sessions led by Oritsejafor at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
When Jonathan extended the emergency rule for the third time, the senators approved his request subject to certain conditions. What has the president made of those conditions? If the honourable members of the national assembly rush to approve the extension of emergency rule once more, they would merely legitimize motion at the expense of movement. No nation makes progress or solves its problems by mere motion. We need movement because movement has a defined end and also offers the means of getting there. Motion is no more than a hollow chest beating in the self-delusional belief that one is responding to a given problem.
Add to these, the criminal legislative rascality going on in Ekiti State where the seven PDP members have seized control of the state house of assembly and you need no one to convince you it is time to take out your worry beads. Whatever the prayer warriors may say and whatever the politicians may promise, it should be possible for us to quit deceiving ourselves. This country cannot rise when it is firmly tethered to the milestone of men who see and use power as a macho face of the big man who has arrived.
In the midst of all these difficulties in the political front, there is panic in the economic front. Oil prices are falling in the world market. It means less money would be following into our national coffers. Pretty scary for a country defined by its well-oiled extravagance. The CBN has responded to this dire development by devaluing the Naira. No, don’t bet on some private jet owners becoming former private jet owners any time soon.