IMPEACHMENT: WHAT TO BLAME FOR NYAKO’S TRAVAILS Category: Opinion Published on Wednesday, 09 July 2014 05:00 Written by Timawus Mathias timmathias64@yahoo Hits: 160 It has been three weeks since the Adamawa State political crisis worsened. Today it is fever pitch, a point where something has to give. At the time of writing this column yesterday, speculations were rife that Governor of the State, Murtala Nyako would resign from his position. Happenings in the last three weeks are very well known. The State Legislature had voted by 19 against 5 members to serve the Governor notice of charges described as gross misconduct against the Governor and his Deputy Barrister Bala James Ngilari. From then till this day, the process became dramatic as both Governor and Deputy could not be served. Both of them left the State and the Clerk of the State Assembly swore to an affidavit in court to establish his inability to serve the notice. Adamawa State has been under a prolonged political and now a constitutional crisis arising mainly from bickering within ruling Peoples Democratic Party over control of the State between Governor Murtala Nyako and then National Party Chairman, Bamanga Muhammad Tukur. It is indeed laughable that the crisis engulfed all three arms of Government, the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary. The Executive was estranged from his political party the PDP, which brought it to office. The Legislative had seemed to cross carpet to the APC with Governor Murtala Nyako, but somehow back stepped from the expectation. The 3 non-PDP members’ CPC tickets all of a sudden let it be known that they were now left with no option than to join the PDP, and did so in a grand ceremony. From that day, each day saw the Legislature moving notch by notch up to the current check mate. In many ways, Governor Murtala Nyako cuts a sympathetic picture. Resign or impeached, he would be recorded poorly by history, more painfully so because from the President to the Local Government Councillor, there does not seem to me any one that is capable of surviving a fault finding inquisition. Also, Governor Nyako and the legislators have parleyed for all of these seven years, the period during which all the alleged acts of gross misconduct supposedly took place, and as Governor Nyako himself pointed out ruefully during the week, were these not the same Legislators that publicly gave him a vote of confidence, praising his administration, early this year? If this was tenable then, what has gone amiss in the relationship? But the situation on ground does not buy Governor Nyako sympathy. There is hardly an infrastructure that offers any indication that there is a working Government in Adamawa State, unlike its counterparts of Bauchi, Gombe, Taraba or even Borno and Yobe, in the sub-region. Infrastructure is decayed, roads both intra and inter township are extremely deplorable. Indeed, in all of 7 years, there is no record of official commissioning of projects that one can count in the fingers of one hand to the administration’s credit. Worse still, it seems Adamawa State is no longer solvent, since the immediate cause of the crisis is the deduction without notice, of workers’ salaries for the month of May, to the tune of N148m, which forced a civil service demonstration. The preliminary investigative report of the House Committee on Salaries and the implementation of the budget painted a shocking picture. For more than 6 months, government had maintained negative balances on all its accounts, mostly with only commercial bank, in deficit of a couple of billions. The details if not disproved, imply that indeed Adamawa State is financially distressed, hence the inability to return the deductions as demanded by the House of Assembly. The Service itself had been under pent up frustrations over being rendered impotent through these past 7 years, with Government opting to use project units it created, special assistants, and consulting agencies. All these nevertheless could not have brought down the Administration and Governor Murtala Nyako would have been sitting pretty as Governor, but for his conflict with the party that brought him into office and his hard, rebellious posture against President Goodluck Jonathan. Without a deep look, one can conclude that Governor Murtala is the architect of his current travails. Trace the root cause to the weak institutions of democratic rule. Nyako came to power riding the back of a contraption that had replaced the desired institution of internal democracy. In that contraption, you did not win or lose an election because you were good, credible and popular. You won or lost because a consensus of influencers so agreed. Thus in office, you have to play up to the system that made you, so to speak, particularly if as a beneficiary, you also applied the system to global benefits. That system for instance, denied Prof. Jubril Aminu a ticket to return to the Senate in 2011, because Nyako sitting on its crest, led a consensus that conferred the seat on Bello Tukur, not because Bello Tukur was good, credible, and popular, but because the internal consensus rather than the conscious choice of the people based on those character traits determined who made and indeed won the ticket. As a beneficiary, you can thus be a victim! Simply put, Nyako’s current political crisis is premised on his attempt to pilot the ship of state against the direction his benefactors, the influencers wished. He failed to distinguish the importance of post 2015 Adamawa against post 2015 Nigeria as it related to his hold on power. He rode the back of the tiger, and in just one swoop, might end up inside its stomach. Books can, and will be written on how a man of Nyako’s credentials, presented with a golden opportunity to write his name in gold, chose to do so in graphite. There are fundamental questions to be answered, not only for beleaguered Adamawa State which for years has been a carcass for vultures, its elite, and its denizens, the maggots, but for Nigeria as well. Is the democracy sustainable, in which the people who confer political power do not determine who they are made to choose but a consensus of elite? Is this not the reason, the public treasury is pillaged to douse the hunger of starved voters just to extract an endorsement from them? For the final decision to remove Murtala Nyako if the impeachment comes through would have been taken by just 19 people, who for clandestine reasons tolerated Nyako for all these years, even as the masses suffered under the yoke of his rule? In any case, in spite of elections, has it not been a handful of judges that determined who really took State power in Nigeria? Is it right to accept it so, and call it a democracy?
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 08:33:32 +0000
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