America’s national Interests, however urgent the executive might assert, remain firmly subsumed beneath the rule of law. Nigeria’s national Interests, by comparison, remain whatever the president or his appointee say they are…
I First came into contact with Lord Acton’s quote, I believe during my father’s spectacularly failed attempt at remediation of my insufficient O’ Level credits, when he sent me to Olivet Baptist Grammar School in Oyo to study for my A ‘Levels, whilst also rewriting my O’ Levels. A story for another day.
How I made an A1 in Government at O’ Levels remains a mystery, but I somehow convinced WAEC I was worthy of an A. So, Government it was, and a couple of other Art subjects for A Level. At some point, Lord Acton’s quote stuck in my head. “Power corrupts… Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Nigeria has proved this declaration beyond even the most liberal of doubts; and Acton’s declaration was a truism for me, until I was schooled by a man with an even heavier burden for Nigeria.
“Power Corrupts!” he said the words quietly, but they were loud in my ears. He argued that the entire quote by Lord Acton could be thus summarized with these two words. The primary purpose of power, he argued, is to corrupt; and that consequently, the madness of the Nigerian environment is directly traceable to the very foundation of the State. The powers of the Nigeria State are not subject to the rule of any law; they are designed to be the diktats of men.
The law was never meant to rule the Nigeria State, rather it is to be ruled by men; we concluded.
The president in his speech at a recent NBA conference wasn’t saying anything we did not know already. What he did was to count aloud the digits of an amputee. For those of you making noise about Rule of Law in knee-jerk reaction, check with your conscience; what did you say when your favorite crooks sat in Bubu’s chair?
As I have watched the Trump Presidential Reality Show, the concept of the rule of law as a bulwark against the rule of men, is being tested out in real time. The president that the architects of the American State, her founding fathers, feared the most, and who the State was originally designed to withstand, is in office!
America’s national Interests, however urgent the executive might assert, remain firmly subsumed beneath the rule of law. Nigeria’s national Interests, by comparison, remain whatever the president or his appointee says they are. Or so they’d love for it to be, and so it would be; if we kept the peace of the graveyard.
The challenge before the Nigerian is to curb the corrosive and corruptive impulses of the State and its functionaries, but the very first step is to constrain the powers of the State by raising institutions, even as we diminish the unaccountable powers of individual functionaries of the government and its agencies.
DF
Excerpt from “Do Not Die In Their War”
