(Opinion) Senate: Repeating Buhari’s costly mistake?

BOLA BOLAWOLE

There is no denying the fact that the Eighth Senate is a legislative chamber of controversies and scandals. Morning, they say, reveals how the day shall be. For the country’s upper legislative chamber, this saying is apt indeed; starting, as it were, on a note of intrigues, controversies, conflicts, and scandals – and it has laboured hard to remain so ever since.

Senator Bukola Saraki, who later became Senate President, rode on the wings of subterfuge and open defiance of his party to achieve his vaunted ambition. His desperation to assume high office broke all protocols and beat existing records in political debauchery. The schism he this wise created in the Senate as well as in his political party of convenience at the moment, the All Progressives Congress, still yawns. Despite his denials, the facts as they can clearly be seen by a discerning public is that Saraki bargained away the commanding height bestowed on his party by the electorate just for him to become Senate President, allowing his old party but now the opposition, the Peoples Democratic Party, to cart away the very important Deputy Senate Presidency. It is a clear case of a man who could have taken the whole morsel settling for half bread.

The coup master-minded by Saraki in the Senate rubbed off on the House of Representatives where an existing understanding was thrown into a spin. In the end, the party arrangement also got torpedoed in the House, with the APC rebels of the lower chamber also striking a demeaning bargain with PDP to achieve the goal of thumbing their nose at the very party that brought them to power.

Whereas the capitulation of the APC in the House was not as disastrous as that in the Senate, and whereas the House had since tried to save the face of its party leaders with some tiny concessions, Saraki adamantly refused to budge; in addition to the two top Senate posts, he also seized the other principal offices in further defiance of his party. Total control, possibly for a seamless execution of an agenda which may have begun to unfold, appears to be the goal. We will soon know if it is true as is being alleged in some quarters that the Senate leadership was deliberately positioned by some interests to checkmate the anti-graft war of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Could that also be the reason why the Senate is angling to silence the (social) media with a legislation it pretends is directed at curtailing the excesses of internet publications? As if the Senate itself is not the very citadel of monumental excesses crippling the entire country!

The Senate President has corruption charges hanging around his neck like an albatross at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. In saner climes, he would have resigned from office to devote time to clear his name; instead, he has invested time and resources trying to stop the trial.

Well, only those who have a name try to clear it. Nigerians are agreed that the National Assembly is one of the major headaches they have in terms of the humongous perks they allot themselves. In so-called oversight functions, legislators also collude with contractors, civil servants, and Ministers to manipulate the budget system in such a way that trillions of Naira voted yearly finds its way majorly into private pockets. That way, the entire country has been raped beyond belief. If all our leaders inflict on us are insults but refrain from stealing us blind, we shall gladly award unto them medals for meritorious service!

There is anger in the land. I am not surprised that the Senators do not know it. It is evidence that they are cut off from the very people they pretend to represent. In actual fact, they represent no one but their own pockets. The poverty in the land beggars belief. As the level of opulence of the thieving, tiny class of rulers is obscene, so also is the depth of deprivation of the masses alarming.

But mark my word: Very soon, these insensitive Senators will have something worse than insults to contend with! As it has been said and proven, those who banish discussions from the open, like the misguided Senators are trying to do, drive them into the cellars where revolutions are made. It will not be long before the long-suffering Nigerian people are forced to reach out and take their destiny in their own hands. Could that be what the Senators are proactively planning towards with the effort to cripple social media, seeing how devastatingly effective it was during the Arab Spring? Are they already projecting into the future and is this anti-social media law in the making a class thing?

Even if it is, it will fail! Thank God, social media is not a Nigerian phenomenon but a global movement which no law in Nigeria, however obnoxious, can arrest or truncate. Nigeria has in its statute books so many laws gathering dust; the Senate’s anti-social media bill, even if it becomes law, which is doubtful, will similarly become redundant. It will be defied even if efforts are made to enforce it. If journalists could defy Buhari’s draconian Decree 4 of 1984 which made the publication of the truth a crime, they will also defy the Senate’s anti-social media law because the same ignoble tread runs through both.

Whereas Buhari’s own law aims to punish publications that embarrass public officers, the Senate’s own version seeks to punish those that insult the same public officers. Two Guardian editors, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, chose to go to jail rather than bow to Buhari’s draconian media gag law. It is instructive to note that when Buhari was toppled from power, the gag law was one of the many crimes alleged against his administration. Even in 1984, the Nigerian media boasted of so many sound and proud professionals that could not be cowed by military dictators; since that time, the media has grown in leaps and bounds. I have no doubt in my mind that the jesters who babble at the National Assembly and arrogate to themselves an air of importance that they do not possess are no match for today’s Nigerian media.

Let them note, however, that we are under no illusions that the anti-social media law will begin and end with the social media; clearly, it is the first step in a wider affront to the vibrant Nigerian media as a whole.  We shall therefore suffer no amnesia in interrogating the obnoxious bill and its renegade sponsors as such. But to think that these were the same people who lauded the same social media a while ago when ex-President Goodluck Jonathan\PDP were at the receiving end and the “Change” Senators of today and their party, APC, were the beneficiaries!

The social media played no mean role in bringing APC and many of the pro anti-social media bill Senators into power.  What happens if the table turns again in future? More importantly, methinks that rather than chasing shadows, the Senate at this time has questions to answer concerning the failure of its oversight functions in the unravelling US$2.1 billion arms scandal.

([email protected] 0803 251 0193)