Democracy in Nigeria: Many Rivers to cross, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Pa Abraham Adesanya, it was, who argued that not all that is legal is expedient. No one can argue against the right of a Nigerian president to declare a state of emergency in any part of the country where the government has reason to suspect clear and present threats to public order and security. In recently declaring a state of emergency in Rivers State, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appears to have met this minimum constitutional requirement. Thought in truth, in a democracy, the framing of the powers to declare an emergency are clearly biased in favour of the president – for obvious reasons. In this case, President Tinubu indicated an escalation in the incidence of pipeline vandalism (despite considerable doubt as to what really happened to the pipeline in question) and a festering political crisis in Rivers State as justifications for his action. Crises of any sort occur along a continuum from their nascency to when they become acute. And so, while there may be Nigerians who believe that none of the president’s justifications meet the constitutional (and hence, legal) criteria for the imposition of a state of emergency, none can argue in such matters that the tipping point of a crisis comprises a set of circumstances that can be anticipated in advance and are easily recognisable as they occur.

Join the Premium Times WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You.

Open in WhatsApp

Therefore, one test of expediency in such cases is to be better safe than sorry. But not in search of safety enough as the Senate did to substitute voice acclaim for the constitutional requirement of an assenting vote of two-thirds of its members for the government’s declaration. Still, this threat could have been met earlier, long before Governor Siminalayi Fubara responded to his administration’s lack of political influence in the state house of assembly by demolishing it on 13 December, 2023. At least, so the argument from the pacifist camp goes. Arguably, President Tinubu had considerable influence in the matter, given that a key (if not the lead) actor in the Rivers State imbroglio is a serving minister in his cabinet. Undoubtedly, to have impressed on the minister the need for restraint may have gone some way in dousing the tension in the state. Alas, none of these happened.

Besides, hindsight is all 20/20 visioning. When sometime in August 2020, then-Governor Obaseki of Edo State removed the roof of the state house of assembly, he was also responding to a loss of influence in the assembly. There may have been a similar opportunity for the then-federal government to impress on a key player in that drama, too, the need for restraint. Irrespective of how these challenges are framed, nothing can remove the present threat to our democracy from governors at the sub-national level trying to advance their rule by hobbling their respective parliaments and local government authorities. If the idea that political “decisions should be made at the lowest level possible, with higher levels of authority intervening only if needed” has any meaning at all, it is to stress the importance for the evolution of a strong democratic culture in Nigeria of people-based political praxis at the state and local government levels.

Unfortunately for any effort at unravelling these nuances much of President Tinubu’s actions in respect of the declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State has taken place in a legal grey space. The Nigerian Bar Association, for one, does not believe that an emergency declaration in any part of the country inherently dissolves the institutions of government there. While this is a constitutional question, and hence a legal one, too, it is as much a question around the expediency of the conduct of our government. The suitability of our policymakers’ conduct in this case must be in the degree to which they advance the cause of democracy in the land.

If we are clear that a state governor’s assault on the local parliament undermines the checks and balances that democracy thrives on, and is thus, by extension a violation of the popular right to self-rule, the same case may be made against the gratuitous denial to the people of any constituent part of our republic of their right to choose who their leaders are in elections that are not just free and fair, but conducted with predictable regularity.

When the federal government suspends democratically elected officials, does it undermine democratic principles? Does it disenfranchise the electorate? Yes. Yes. Especially when the legal justification for actions along this line are hoarier than the early morning harmattan haze. In the end, concern is not with the impunity that Nigerians have come to associate with successive governments (especially the military variety’s) abuse of power. No. What is worrisome is the erosion of public trust in governance that these engender.

As with the crisis in Rivers State that the Tinubu government responded to with the declaration of a state of emergency, the consequence for our democracy (recall that “nascent” still is the popular qualifier for it) of the trajectory described by the erosion of popular trust in the institutions of the state increasingly resembles the descent of Ernest Hemmingway’s Jake Barnes’ (“The Sun Also Rises”) into bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.