Nwabueze And The Causes Of Peril—Wale Adebanwi

You will ordinarily expect a man with such a clear, broad and deep understanding of the law and social forces to avoid actions and statements that show fundamental disdain for the principles of the law, at one end and elementary misunderstanding of reminiscences, at another end. Reminiscences should, at least, contain remaining senses. Reminiscences are a review of the past that are informed by the acquired wisdom that time furnishes. So when a man of Nwabueze’s calibre (and not to forget, “timber”) reviews his past political engagements and Nigeria’s odious recent past, the public has a right to expect him to verbally reflect a measure of deep reflection.

One could hardly approach the legal icon’s recent interview with the Lagos tabloid, SUN, with an open mind, even if one were not a “headline reader”. “I wrote IBB’s ‘step-aside’ speech”, screams the SUN. Nwabueze even had more to say that showed that he was unrepentant about a phase of his public life about which he should be penitent. It rankled more where the advocate attempted to wash with an egalitarian brush the craven and shallow motives that informed the war that General Ibrahim Babangida waged against his fatherland, particularly in the last five years of his (mis-) rule.

How could any professor of law openly admit that he wrote that pathetic speech where Babangida, after exhausting all his tricks, sealed the democratic fate of his fatherland, trivialised his treasonous voiding of a presidential election and handed the power he violently hijacked to an unelected civilian swarm headed by Chief Ernest Shonekan? Professor Adebayo Williams had appropriately dismissed the “personal sacrifice” that Nwabueze wrote into the “step aside” speech for IBB as a “peevish and perverse personalisation of national embarrassment”.

The man says IBB is a “good man”. That’s a personal evaluation and, ordinarily, not a public concern. We have heard that from several people who are close to the ex-tyrant. Babangida, no doubt, has a genius for managing personal relationships. The old man also says IBB is “an intelligent man”. Again, there is no problem with that. Indeed, this writer too has had occasion in journalistic essays, to sum up both attributes in describing IBB as one with a “talismanic character”. But for Nwabueze to admit that IBB was a “victim of ambition” and yet conclude that the man was unlike President Olusegun Obasanjo in self-delusion is worse than disappointing.

This is the crux of the matter: Nwabueze, like many members of the Nigerian elite, was, by his disclosures in this interview, presenting himself as one who likes to make a separate personal peace with a collective threat. The manner in which he accepted the appointment to the cabinet as Education Minister in the last months of an inglorious regime - which he trivialised as an “ambush” - left much to be desired. By the time Nwabueze joined the IBB regime as Education Secretary, the tyrant had become the biggest threat to the corporate and continued existence of Nigeria. But the legal scholar hopped into a wagon driven by a man who had shown his total disdain for the rule of law and the democratic wishes of Nigerians. Babangida, like the similarly politically-condemned Ota-firm-er, Obasanjo - who Nwabueze rightly lampoons – had a sit-tight agenda which was frustrated only by the collective resolve of Nigerians. In regard of the recent Supreme Court judgment, our legal icon says “it is a very bad thing to bring political considerations into legal matters”. We ask him: what did IBB do in that infantile and shameful speech on why he annulled the June 12 election?

Therefore, for Nwabueze to celebrate himself not for helping, at a critical point, to right the wrongs of that ill-fated regime, but for writing the flawed speech of a departing autocrat is a reflection of the kind of political elite that Nigeria has nurtured. In a way, it is also part of the explanation for Nigeria’s current circumstances. In condemning the recent judgment of the Supreme Court on the presidential election, Nwabueze failed to realise that his - and others’ - actions and inactions in 1993 were part of the socio-political totality that led to the emergence of Obasanjo and created the conditions for the manner in which the man picked the presidency from our collective pocket and kept it in Malam Umar Yar’Adua’s. Nwabueze cannot be granted selective political morality; because in the end, such selective political morality destroys the integrity of the system and trivialises social reformation.

Gladly, Nwabueze struck a right cord where he stated, towards the end of the interview, that Nigeria does not “have the right people [in the leadership], but I don’t think it is an insoluble problem. One day the right leader will emerge”. Indeed! Any country that has a political elite - notwithstanding the erudition of its leading members - that makes temporary, personal peace with collective public threats cannot but be permanently imperilled. Let the professor leave the edifice that he wrote about for now; let him just spend the rest of his life to commit himself irrevocably, both in his actions and reflections, only to the pillars he venerates in his writings.