By Ehichioya Ezomon
What’s happening (happened) in the Kaduna chapter of the All Progressives Congress, and at the Senate of the National Assembly is what warrants the charge of politics being a dirty game. Whereas it should be otherwise: the politicians, and not politics, are dirty!
How do you classify the action of Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State in ordering, and allegedly personally supervising the pulling down of a house belonging to Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi (Kaduna North) because the lawmaker heads a faction of the state APC, which queried and suspended the governor for six months “for anti-party activities”?
Similarly, how do you justify the sacking of Senator Abdullahi Adamu, as chair of the Northern Senators’ Forum, on the strength of his leading some senators to question the Senate reordering of the sequence of elections for 2019?
Let’s give the backgrounds to the plots. The Kaduna State APC has been factionalized from the get-go of the government of Governor el-Rufai, first between the governor and his bloc of the party and that of Senator Shehu Sani (Kaduna Central), and later between el-Rufai’s group and the camp of Senator Hunkuyi.
Meaning there are three factions tugging at the heart and soul of the APC in the state. Flowing from this division, accusations and counter-accusations, queries and counter-queries and suspensions and counter-suspensions have taken the place of advancing good governance, and growth of the party in Kaduna.
The culmination of these political skirmishes was the suspension of Governor el-Rufai by the Senator Hunkuyi APC faction, and el-Rufai’s government’s retaliatory destruction of the lawmaker’s house that served as his group’s secretariat, which opened shop barely a week earlier.
And what reason was advanced by the Kaduna State Urban Planning and Development Agency (KASUPDA) for the leveling of Hunkuyi’s house? According to the Director General of the Kaduna Geographic Information System (KADGIS), Mr. Ibrahim Husseini, the property was removed for “flagrant violations of land use and non-payment of ground rent since 2010.”
Why was it so compelling for the KASUPDA to resort to pulling down the property over indebtedness just after its owner, Senator Hunkuyi, chaperoned its APC faction to query and suspend Governor el-Rufai from the party? Why didn’t the agency seek lawful redress in court or, in the worst-case scenario, seal off the property until the ground rent was settled?
If we are pissed with Governor el-Rufai’s authoritarianism that brooks no impeachment of its absolute power, we should also scoff at the bellipotent display by the Senate, which threatened to deal with the Senator Adamu-headed recalcitrant members for insinuating that the new sequence for the 2019 elections was “directed at an individual.”
But unlike Governor el-Rufai that shoots from the hip, and doesn’t hide his hand in the cookie jar, the Senate has initiated its “punishment for the disgruntled senators” through a proxy – the Northern Senators’ Forum that Senator Adamu chaired until last Wednesday.
However, employing the el-Rufai tactic, the senators suddenly remembered that the Adamu executive had “chopped” the N70 million it inherited coming into office. So, if the former governor of Nasarawa State did not accuse the Senate of directing its reordering of the election sequence at checkmating President Muhammadu Buhari’s aspiration for a second term, the forum would bury the “fraud” from public knowledge?
How about Senator Ali Wakil’s debunking of Adamu’s removal as a collective decision of the Northern Senators, whose letter to the Senate was read by the presiding officer and Senate Deputy President, Dr. Ike Ekweremadu, without publicizing the number of signatories and their names? Doesn’t that smell of forgery, perhaps abetted by the Senate?
To think that in the wake of the destruction of Senator Hunkuyi’s property, the Senate was very vocal in condemning Governor el-Rufai and his APC-led administration’s action, as related by Senator Sani, a professed Nemesis of el-Rufai! This was how Senator Ekweremadu summed up the governor’s exploit at plenary:
“This is not open to debate. We need to condemn this action. I send my sympathies to Hunkuyi. This democracy has no place for tyranny and impunity. If we decide to go on the road of democracy, we must accept some of the things that come with it. One is the rule of law. If we have any grievances, we should use the courts.”
A noteworthy and timely admonition, only that the lawmakers sooner fell into the same trap of employing “tyranny and impunity,” which “democracy has no place for.” Wouldn’t this rank them among the hypocrites, whom Jesus describes as those who give alms (Matt 6:1-4), pray (Matt 6:5-6), and fast (Matt 6:16-18) in public “in order that people may see them”?
Besides, the senators appear to forget the adage: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” which Wikipedia says meshes well with the Golden Rule, or ethic of reciprocity, often stated as “Do unto others as you wish to be done for you.” (See Matt 7:12; Luke 6:31)
All said, it’s clear, even to the most apolitical in the society, that the fights in the Kaduna State chapter of the APC, and the shadow-boxing in the Senate have all, and everything to do with the 2019 elections in less than one year away.
But while pursuing their aspirations, politicians should heed Senator Ekweremadu’s entreaty “not to overheat the polity and imperil our democracy… Our courts can be trusted to deliver justice. We hope this (malicious destruction of property) will not happen again.”
That’s a word being enough for the wise, and especially for politicians to make politics clean rather than dirty!
* Mr. Ehichioya Ezomon, Journalist and Media Consultant, writes from Lagos, Nigeria.