How nepotism erodes patriotism

IN the last few days since after the former President Chief Olusegun Obasanjo published an open letter to the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, the talking point has been the issue of nepotism in appointments which principally constituted the rationale for that widely celebrated letter.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was a military Head of State when Muhammadu Buhari served as Petroleum minister just before the advent of the Second Republic headed by Alhaji Shehu Shagari.

Shagari was ironically was on December 31st 1983 unseated unconstitutionally by a bunch of military coupists headed by the then Major-general Muhammadu Buhari.

So the letter from Obasanjo is rated highly as coming from a well-considered quarter.

Indeed, a few months back, the wife of Buhari, Hajia Aisha, granted a record breaking interview to the Hausa language service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

I said the interview remains record breaking and this was because although it was in the Hausa language service of the BBC, it was listened to by millions of people who can hardly hear a word in Hausa but most of whom sought the services of interpreters including yours faithfully so as to comprehend the kernel of that award winning interview. The transcript of that interview was also read on Google for hundreds of thousands of times by anxious readers from around the globe.

The interview elicited huge editorial commentaries in leading mainstream and online news media in Nigeria and in such international cities like Washington DC, New York, Berlin, Beijing, Oslo, Paris and London among others.

Cartoonists in Nigeria also had field days celebrating the graphics of the interview and the predictable but shocking response of her husband.

In that interview which also constituted the major news talking point in Nigeria, the wife of the President accused her husband of cronyism and for allowing a cabal within his office to hijack the affairs of the state whilst he watches as a mere spectator.

That interview by Mrs. Buhari brought out a graphic detail of how the Nigerian President rates or categorizes the women folk.

Women have been treated with the short end of the stick in terms of strategic national appointments made by Buhari.

In his response to the interview, President Buhari had dismissed his wife as an interloper in political affairs as it affects his office and asserted that she shouldn’t have jumped her traditional place in the house as a wife and that the position of his wife in his household is limited to the other room.

Putting side-by-side these two strategic media interventions by the erstwhile President who indeed as a senior General in the Nigeria Army to the current President can be said to know Muhammadu Buhari like the back of his palms and also the President’s wife for over thirty years, what stands out clearly like the Northern Star from these interview and letter is that Nepotism, Cronyism remain a huge challenge in the leadership style or otherwise of the current President.

When I sat back and reflected over these interview then and the open letter most recently, what came like fountains of water pouring on me was the probing question of whether President Buhari is a follower of the teachings of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) who propounded the unacceptable theory that a sovereign head of state is permitted to deviate fundamentally from following democratic precepts and the norms, procedures and principles of law and order.

The editors of the book called “The politics book” wrote that Carl Schmitt was a German political theorist and lawyer whose work during the early 20th century established him as leading critic of liberalism and parliamentary democracy.

This widely studied legal analyst, Schmitt it was, who saw the “exception” (Ernstfall in German which means serious case) – unexpected events- as a quintessential characteristics of political life.

He was quoted as sharply disagreeing with the liberal idea that the law is the best guarantor of individual liberty.

Hear him: “While the law is able to provide a framework through which to manage “normal” states of affairs, it was not designed to deal with “exceptional” circumstances such as coup d’ etats, revolutions, or wars”.

This enigmatic but controversial writer Mr. Schmitt unfortunately saw legal theory as too far removed from legal practice and changing social norms.

This early twentieth century academic of considerable interest who was accused of providing the intellectual weapons that Adolf Hitler adopted in implementing his Nazis ideology and the hate-filled ideology that resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews(holocaust), believed that legal theory was unfit to deal with the unexpected turns of history, many of which could threaten the very existence of the state.

In his warped imagination he argued that a President is better able to guard a country’s constitution than a court, and so should necessarily be above the law.

“The ruler should be the ultimate law-maker in exceptional situations”, he says.

Reading through the contents of ex-president Obasanjo’s letter to President Buhari and the transcripts of the BBC’S interview granted by President Buhari’s wife, an observer is left with little or no doubt that much of the accusations of nepotism and cronyism listed out, graphically point towards the direction of a ruler who has accepted the unconstitutional and illogical teachings of this infamous German political theoretician and lawyer talked about a while ago.

I will run through what i call the irregular logic as espoused in the teachings of the German political theorist Mr. Carl Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt states as follows: “the political life of a country always includes exceptional circumstances even as the judgments of the law courts depend on historical precedents, so can only be applied in “normal situations.

He says when an exceptional situation occurs only one person must be able to operate above the law, suspending it and taking all steps necessary to save the state.

Schmitt then concludes that “the only person capable of this is the sovereign. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”.

Going through the whole gamut of this illogicality by the German lawyer aforementioned, the same tendencies are replicated in the actions and inactions that ex-president Obasanjo and the wife of President Buhari accused him (Muhammadu Buhari) of doing. Onwubikoistheheadofthe Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).