Do Nigerians Ever Resign From Office?—Kanayo Esinulo

There seem to be straightforward explanations. First, Nigeria has so much wealth to be stolen, misappropriated or laundered – with minimal risk. In a country where corruption attracts little or no punishment, resignation from office after exposed wrong-doing is usually considered a cowardly act. The other explanation is that most public office holders in Nigeria represent a clique of power-wielders which is always available to advise against resignation because, as one of them puts it, “we put him there, we determine when he leaves. He stays there!” While the first explanation may be simplistic and a hackneyed tune, it somehow leads us to the second, and why a local government chairman, for instance, would own a chain of houses and other properties few months into his tenure. Instead of resigning, a public office holder in Nigeria would prefer to stay put and fight it out – long after decency demands that he quit.

We have had several instances of public officers telling Nigerians to their faces: “I am going nowhere. I am here to stay.” Even in the few cases that the anti-graft agencies – Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, ICPC – have pressed charges against some, the prosecution is pursued with initial fanfare, woven around deliberate media visibility. But after the first and second outings, the intensity of the case begins to wane. In other words, after the razzmatazz, the matter is slowed down and quietly dropped. Often, the media would respond with deafening silence, and the matter dies naturally. Today, no one remembers the corruption charges brought against Obasanjo’s first Internal Affairs Minister, Sunday Afolabi and his collaborators. Chief Afolabi’s death sealed that and his co-accused became automatic free men. Nearer to us in time, the charges against Senator Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello and the former Health Minister, Professor Adenike Grange, is gradually going the same way. It will soon be history. Recently, the media started entertaining us once again with the trial of Chief Bode George, the loquacious Lagos ‘militician’ who loves to define politics as war. Every thinking Nigerian knows how the trial would end – gradual disappearance from the media and, ultimately, from our consciousness. This is Nigeria, after all – a country where crime and all kinds of violation of our laws attract little or no punishment.

If this were to be a country where office holders are held accountable for bad and shameful public policies, their crimes are disclosed and there is no political interference in the judicial process, a good number of them would have long been out of office or serving jail terms. Almost two years into the life of this go-slow administration of Umar Yar’Adua, his Minister of Transportation, Mrs. Diezani Allison-Madueke, is still in office. On assumption of office as a Minister, madam appropriately identified the Lagos-Benin Expressway as veritable death trap and wondered openly how any government could have allowed such a strategic highway to degenerate to such a sorry state. Eighteen months into her tenure as a Minister, that road is still as “shamefully bad” as she met it – if not worse. It now takes a day and half to reach Port-Harcourt, Aba, and two days to get to Uyo and Calabar. What she correctly identified as a priority federal project has remained as it was, benefiting only from her occasional rhetoric.

In my opinion, also, the leadership of the Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, should have since given way to a new team with a new vision and a new approach. Its present leaders cannot take the service anywhere. What has happened, in this case, is that an establishment that generated so much hope has been infected by the virus of “checking motor particulars”. It has joined the queue of the policemen, traffic wardens, vehicle inspection officers, etc that are all in the business of checking “documents”.

There is yet one more reason why Nigerian roads would continue to be bad and unusable to our policy makers: our ministers, commissioners, permanent secretaries, council chairmen, etc. rarely travel long distances by road. They fly, all the time. Shouldn’t our ministers, particularly the ones in-charge of Works and Transportation, be made to make trips on land? No flying! If our Honourable Minister of Transportation would come down from her high horse and start using the Lagos-Benin Highway as frequently as some of us do, she would understand the mood of the people better.

Resignation is a rare commodity here in Africa . It should, therefore, be of interest to us here that the President of the most powerful economy on the continent, Thabo Mbeki, resigned without much fuss when it was exposed that he, somehow, tried to influence the judiciary over a case involving his former deputy. In less than 48 hours, Mbeki addressed the people of South Africa on radio and television, thanked them for giving him the opportunity to serve, and then resigned, gloriously. It can’t happen here. Nigerian politicians have not matured to that level of respect for established laws and procedures.

We must, therefore, begin to strengthen our democratic institutions and avoid the lawlessness that often governs our politics. South Africa was able to witness a smooth transition from Mbeki to the new, albeit temporary, helmsman because there are structures and procedures in place to check executive excesses and rascality. Today, in that country, resignation is not a shameful option. Rather, it is considered honourable to do, in the interest of decency and discipline. If it were in Nigeria , the Emperor would have gotten a good number of people politically injured and properly humiliated for daring to suggest that he should resign for merely whispering to a High Court Judge how a particular case should go. After all, is he not the leader of a country with the largest concentration of black people on earth? Who will save Nigeria ?