It is election season in Turkey; in about eighteen days or so the Turks will go to the polls to elect a new prime minister – or retain the old one, Ahmet Davutoglu – for the next four years. They will also vote on an amendment to the country’s constitution which will transform it from a parliamentary democracy into a powerful presidential system. However, this transformation requires approval by 2/3rd of the country’s 550-member legislature, i.e. 367 members, to pass without a referendum or 330 with.
Leading the battle by the ruling party to retain power and change the constitution is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s ceremonial but powerful president and leader of the party, the so-called “mildly Islamist” Justice and Development Party (AKP). Erdogan has been in power since 2002 when AKP first came to power on a wave of popular disaffection with militant secularism championed by the military which had dominated the country’s politics since it first changed in 1924 from a Sultanate into a Republic under the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Erdogan has been campaigning for his AKP to win 400 of the legislative seats and, thus, to become its most powerful elected president in recent times.
The election in that country should interest Nigerians for a number of reasons. First, along with Iran, Turkey has, by some estimates, about the same Muslim population as Nigeria – around 75 million. The ratios of this number for the three countries differ – about 50% for Nigeria, 99.7 for Iran and 98.6 for Turkey – but the numbers are big making the three almost jointly sixth in the Muslim world, after Indonesia (about 205 million and a ratio of 88.1%), Pakistan (178.1m:96.4%), India (177.29m:14.6%) Bangladesh (148.61m:90.4%) and Egypt (80.02m:94.7%).
Second, as a country that straddles Eastern Europe and western Asia in space, it is of strategic importance to the world both geographically and religious wise.
Third, for at least the last decade after AKP came to power in Turkey, the country has provided one more proof that Islam and democracy are not necessarily incompatible as some Westerners and secularists and even some radical Islamists would have the world believe. Under AKP the country has transformed into a thriving plural democracy and prospered economically into one of the most advanced in the world.
Last but by no means least of all, since at least 1998 Turkey has established its presence in Nigeria as one of the biggest outside forces for development in our education and health sectors. Today its 16 non-denominational Nigeria-Turkish international primary and secondary schools spread across Nigeria in Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos, Kano, Ogun and Yobe states – and with plans for more – are among the very best in the country. So also are its Nile University, which is part of a global network of 26 universities in America, Europe, Asia and Turkey, and its state of the art Nizamiye Hospital, both based in Abuja.
The inspiration behind these institutions is the Gulen Movement, after its founder, Fethullah Gulen, the world renowned 74-year old Turkish Islamic scholar, author and poet, who has lived in self-exile in Philadelphia, America, for decades to escape persecution from the secular civilian and military regimes that had dominated Turkish politics and society up until 2002.
The Gulen Movement, which has since renamed itself the Hismet Movement, after its founder’s pronouncement that it was rather presumptuous to have had it named after himself, has meant different things to different people. It sees itself as a social and spiritual movement which completely eschews politics but which lays emphasis on religious dialogue and even more so on education, inspired, it says, by Prophet Muhammad’s (Peace be upon him) saying that “The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of a martyr” and the fact that the Arabic word “ilm” (education) is, according to experts, the second most used word in the Holy Qur’an, after Allah.
Others see the movement differently. Even though it has no formal leadership or sheikhs or structure and even though it has no ceremonies or procedures for initiation into its membership, many, including militant secularists in Turkey, see its members as closet radical Islamists who secretly want to establish an Islamic State of Turkey.
On the other hand, radical Islamists accuse it of being too open to Western ideas and creeds. It therefore, in their eyes, poses a grave danger to the Islamic renaissance in Turkey which has since trumped Ataturk’s century of secularism.
Whatever the movement is, its alliance with AKP in 2002 in their opposition to military dominance of the country’s politics and society was universally acknowledged as probably the single greatest factor in AKP’s triumph.
Sadly, that alliance has gone sour, at least since 2013, so sour that today Erdogan sees the Hismet Movement, whose members believe he has reneged on his commitment to consolidating plural democracy and transparency in Turkey and has, instead, become too self-serving, as the single biggest obstacle to his dream of becoming an imperial president.
Such is the bitterness with which he views the movement that he now calls its members terrorists and has embarked on a campaign of seeking the shutting down of their institutions wherever they exist, by labelling them as fronts for terrorism. The most recent was his call last week on the authorities on the neighbouring Muslim Albania during a visit there last week to close down the movement’s schools in the country, a call that was promptly rebuffed. Before then his country’s diplomats in our neighbouring Benin Republic had tried the same gambit with predictably the same result.
Hismet Movement is not the only one at the receiving end of Erdogan’s anger against any opposition to his dream. The media and opposition parties in the country also are. Yet, he and his party remain favourites to win the forthcoming election by a wide margin, if not by the margin he desires to turn his country into an imperial presidency under his leadership.
In the likely event that he does win, the Nigerian authorities should expect his diplomats to come calling sooner or later with pleas to shut down the Turkish-Nigerian institutions in our country because, of course, they are “fronts” for terrorism.
Good thing is, Nigerians and their leaders are simply too smart to fall for such a harebrained gambit.
Re: The eighth Senate rollercoaster
Sir,
Your write up on above subject matter in today’s The Nation (May 13) makes an interesting reading to the extent of your emphasising merit in filling elective offices. You said and I quote ‘Nigerians voted APC for change and not to carry on with the discredited ways of the PDP. This party introduced and popularised zoning in Nigeria’s politics’. I beg to disagree. Shehu Shagari’s NPN made use of zoning. Hence, we had Shagari as president from the north, Chief Alex Ekwueme from the east as VP, Chief Akinloye from the west as NPN party chairman, Senator Joseph Wayas as senate president from the minority tribes of south east, Dr Olusola Saraki from northern minority tribes as senate leader.
What PDP did in respect of zoning is in line with section 14(3) of the amended 1999 Constitution of Nigeria which emphasises federal character in all appointments whether elective or otherwise. Without zoning, the North with its “numerical” strength will dominate the headship of our bi-cameral legislature to the disadvantage of the south. In Nigeria where the fear of ethnic, religious and political domination of one group over the other is very ripe, merit alone cannot be a factor in filling elective positions.
In one breath you said outsiders should not meddle into the internal affairs of the legislature but in another breath you recommended Senator George Akume for the president seat. Reason? You want a united North as your write up shows.
Nigerians should adhere strictly to the provisions of our 1999 constitution.
Chief Anthony Akpomiemie
