From Sodom To Adam

By Wole Soyinka

Edo was the state that I selected the case-study for the rest of the nation during my testimony at the US Congressional hearing on the notorious Nigerian 2007 elections. It was selected because it exemplified, in the most power besotted manner, executive interventionist rigging at the very highest level. Facts and figures had been carefully collated.  Witnesses – including electoral officers – would have no choice but to testify under oath - that even the simplest,  culminating procedural requirements for the announcement of results, as laid down by law,  had been violated, and violated ‘on orders from above’.  The press was heavily represented, as were observers, able to testify that results were not announced where and when such declaration was due.  Edo was a classic case of abuse of power and treasonable conduct, an intervention that only consolidated desperate, state engendered campaign of thuggery.

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For placing these facts, on invitation, before democratic watchdogs abroad, I underwent the now customary barrage from  the scum of the earth, scurrilous lapdogs of the  beneficiaries of a stolen mandate. The state controlled media was thrown open to them  - newsprint, radio and television  -  open field  for the vilest, incoherent utterances that bore all the made-in-Nigeria hallmarks of diseased minds. I received threats and warnings, including a promise to ‘terminate your busybody career if you dare to step inside Edo State’. It was all familiar territory, boring and nauseous,  a tragic infestation of the nation’s retarded political life.  Needless to say, I moved in and out of Edo state at will. I recall my presence at an NGO initiative - a Town Hall meeting for youth empowerment – not long after the manic bilge.  Another visit was for a  book fair. The moral lepers alternating as hit men on hire failed to manifest their existence.

Now, I expect, the predictable question will re-surface  - what can we do to end this shaming cycle of electoral fraud? How, in effect, restore the Nigerian to a state of innocence or – if Oshiomhole will permit – recreate Adam from the decadent legacy of Sodom in which the nation appears so irredeemably mired.  I find that question vexatious.  It is vexatious because the remedies are multiple and obvious. To borrow yet again from the book by which these malfeasants  swear to uphold truth and justice  – the time calls for fire and brimstone! At the basis of all remedies is a simple formula:  make election rigging so costly to the perpetrators that it is not worth their while.  Offer them, not a vision, but a taste of hell. Right here, on earth.

By costly, I do not mean costly in material terms – those who rig elections are confident of recouping expenditure if they win.  If they lose,  their backers are gamblers anyway, and will recoup on other horses fielded for other races at all levels.  Sometimes, challengers are bought off  – we know that sums were proposed to Adam Oshiomhole to abandon his suit – the process has been repeated all over the nation. It was rampant even in elections to the House of Assembly and, perhaps even most notoriously in elections to Senate.  Pausing only to propose that it is time  to criminalize  these efforts to short-circuit a people’s choice, let us re-emphasize that,  in speaking of punitive measures, we do not mean monetary,  though that is necessarily a  part of the process. For instance, if there are means to bankrupt such high-and-mighty felons, make them forfeit their possessions – along similar measures to those that are applied to drug barons - these options should also be pursued.

Awareness comes first, mostly of the cost to the nation in time  and expenditure in pursuit of justice, and the potent dangers of public unrest reaching the explosive point if the trend continues. It has taken, after all,  a year and a half to decide this most instructive case. Several more cases are still pending, and a number under appeal. It is time therefore that we accorded the same expenditure of time – and public funds, temporarily  – to setting up commissions for criminal prosecutions to follow up the work of tribunals, with powers to delve into the actual conspiracies that produced such electoral chicaneries. The guilty would be compelled, for a start, to pay the entire cost of the Tribunal proceedings, including legal and other costs incurred by the vindicated appellants.  All known assets of the guilty will be seized, the costs of both Tribunals and Commissions deducted from the sale of such assets.

For the rest of the children of Sodom - officials, those who connive with electoral criminals and break their oath of office – police officers, military personnel,  returning officers, other staff and  overseers, all the way up to directorate level within the commission – the penalty for any form of aiding and abetting should be imprisonment without the option of fine.

The question that follows will be: how does one expect the lawgivers to pass a law that will punish those who illegally assisted them into their own position in the first place? It is common knowledge that a large proportion of those who sit today in legislative houses, both at federal and state levels, have no business being there. The answer is that we are not looking at a solution that will be effected within the next month or year.

The preliminary  stage  is the  setting up the  commission – or special courts -  for criminal prosecution.  The Tribunals’ case-books are routinely filled with evidence of just who did what, and how, and if some of those miscreants are sitting in any of the Houses, or in any governorship lodge, then obviously the rest is up to the electorate. Indeed, those who oppose any measures for the drastic sanitization of the electoral process should be marked down for the day of reckoning at the next elections. Any member of the civil society who believes that he or she is not required to be part of this corrective exercise has already succumbed to the blackmail of power and impunity, and cannot be considered part of the affected polity. It is up to the people to dislodge, in the most humiliating manner,  the guilty or collaborating, from their undeserved ;positions.

The disillusionment and sense of impotence of the electorate are not to be denied, leading to apathy and  surrender,  that hand-wringing  cant that ‘leaves everything in the hands of God’. Blasphemy!  God has left everything in your hands, so, stop passing the buck.  However, let us also give the devil (of apathy) his due.  The mood of pessimism becomes understandable  when the public sees how Maurice Iwu still struts around  as Chairman of an Electoral Commission that organised the most cynical election ever that the nation has ever undergone, an election that was loudly and continuously decried, even long before the event, as an election ‘designed to fail’.  It is unbelievable that, with all the revelations that began even before balloting, a patent failure in  his assignment, at best, or at worst an accessory to criminality,  has been retained to direct the fortunes of the nation’s democratic aspirations. Such are the uses of impunity. The situation is not only nationally humiliating, it is universally obscene.

The Sodom prize for Electoral Depravity and Decadence however belongs to those implicated in improper and indecent communication between members of the Osun State electoral tribunal and the counsel for one side of the litigation. The world awaits the findings of the NJC over this scandal.  Let us simply remind that body that this episode constitutes a severe erosion of public confidence in the chequered career of the judicial process. There is no precedent  that weighs close to it on an impartial scale. That the self-indicted  tribunal still proceeded to deliver judgment,  merely illustrates the level of impunity that has become the national norm.

Affronts to the most elementary judicial propriety - which depends a faith in justice  foretell the death of a nation. The semblance  of nation vitality  continues, but this is like the sightless thrashings of a beheaded chicken, colliding with one obstacle after another, until its final expiration.  Despite such frenzied motions,  the nation  dies within, deep within its innermost  moral  core, a space of confidence in equity that is now  replaced  with the gangrene of distrust and the accumulation of terminal  rot.

Part of the cleansing of that rot, and its cauterisation, is the ascendancy of truth in such test cases as Edo State. Vindications that come from these cases, however invigorating, are not however sufficient.  They must be consistent, continuous, and transparent.  Gangrene has spread all over the body politic, and we all know the consequences of failure to amputate a gangrenous limb. Pretending that the affected limb is sound, when it is only being propped up on executive crutches, is a death certificate to the body of which it is a part.  Denunciations, however clamorous, intense and principled are ultimately only a part of the curative process. A drastic remedy – known as making examples – is the ultimate remedial act.  We shall leave the NJC and the Supreme Court to continue their work, pausing only to laud the action of those  retired judges and other law officers of integrity who forsook their peaceful retirement to throw their voices behind others’, in denunciation of the violation of the sanctuary of justice.

Postscript:   Amazing nation,  where the Chairman of a justly reviled electoral body  not only walks the streets a free man, but can raise his voice in pontifications  over the US elections, and even  attempts to claim credit for a system that gave the Nigerian people,  in 1983, the most credible election they had ever known.  But why not indeed? The streets  through which Maurice  Iwu cruises to and from his heavily compromised – and fortified -  headquarters are the same streets that have cast Sanni Abacha and company as befitting  bed-fellows,  on the street-naming scroll of  honour, for  Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka etc.

This  gesture, I propose, does not go far enough. Where is Maurice Iwu Avenue? Some people are clearly not doing their job. The Federal Capital territory should be re-named Maurice Iwu Democratic Territory.  Nor must not forget the  Lawrence Anini Boulevard, the Maitatsine Freeway, the Adedibu Dual Carriageway, the Al-Mustapha Esplanade and – who else? –  let’s go international. Where is the Emperor Bokassa  or Macias Nguema  Freeway?  If there are no streets befitting their exemplary rule, we should embark on the construction of  ultra-modern  flyovers of record-breaking elevation, rising  from one entry into Abuja to the furthest exit, and name them after Idi Amin, Mobubu Sese Seko, Charles Taylor etc Expressways.  Then we shall indeed head where many have predicted the nation is bound anyway, and proudly cruise along the shortest way to hell.

Post-Postscript:   I nearly forgot – Congratulations, Adam Oshiomhole, and welcome to the headaches of reconstruction.  Let the state of the Edo commence the daunting task of regaining her lost glory.

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