Politics and its disguises, by Rotimi Fasan

2026-03-25 - 01:34

Nigerians spent last weekend celebrating Eid el Fitri. As is to be expected in these times of heightened political activities, ahead of the party primaries and the emergence of candidates for various positions in next year’s general election, Nigerian politicians, it is emerging, used the period to strategise for the battles ahead. Religious festivals, conferment of chieftaincy titles, burials for the old and elderly and house warming ceremonies have in the past served as disguises for political gatherings. This was especially the case in the long years of military rule when political activities were prohibited. President Bola Tinubu, probably still basking in the euphoria of his successful state visit to the Uk, was in Lagos for the holiday. He spent the time receiving visitors, many of whom had accompanied him on his UK visit and had only stopped by to sit in the warm aura of power and belonging while paying the president sallah homage. It was not long ago that Daura, the sleepy hometown of President Muhammadu Buhari, was the preferred destination for such yearly pilgrimages. President Tinubu was among those acolytes who made these ceremonial trips to Buhari in those years when he steered the levers of power. But today, the centre has moved and Tinubu is the new bride in town. His phones still ring loud and clear unlike the phones of some other people, former presidents and heads of states- to limit it to that select group of Nigerians. Five of them are still alive, and it is safe to say that their phones no longer ring. At least not with as much ardour as when they called the shots as the temporary landlord of Dodan Barrack or Aso Villa. One of them, officially in his last year as an octogenarian, is retired having torn his party membership card into shreds. At the centre of current wheeling and dealing for power as a promoter of a major presidential candidate, he is certainly not tired. A major highlight of Tinubu’s Eid el Fitri holiday was spent receiving governors of the APC-led government who gathered in the Bourdillon Road, Ikoyi residence, of the President. Amid the apparent merry-making and backslapping, the loud munching and swigging of bottles under camera lights, as would be expected of people who had been restrained under the strict gastronomic regime of the previous 30 days of abstinence, they created time for work. After abandoning the streets of Abuja for a royal handshake in faraway London and a ride in upgraded wheelbarrows called carriages, as their detractors have alleged, it would be a great disservice to Nigerians for them to be found merely picking their teeth after another boring postprandial speech, while Borno and other parts of the terror-ravaged North burn. It would not have been proper for them to assemble again in Lagos for another round of carousing with nothing to show for it. If another politician could boast about his readiness to rule from Kaduna or perhaps anywhere else in the world, these too are politicians and they could partake in state affairs on the side of the loud gourmandising at Bourdillon. They took time off to work out the modalities for the establishment of proto-national police departments, the so-called state police. Rather than constant political griping about insecurity while doing nothing to end the misery of those affected by it or, in fact, actively undermining effort to end insecurity, those opposed to state police or playing politics with it have a lot to do. Not the least of these are some Northern political and religious leaders themselves. They are quick to heap blames for insecurity on the president or the APC where all they do themselves is to sit back and watch how their complaints set the political space on fire or turn conversations about the establishment of state police into raucous arguments about identity, ethnicity or religion. Is it not ironic that of the governors supportive of the talks for state police at the Lagos meeting, Sokoto and Borno, the respective epicentres of the banditry and insurgency variants of Northern Nigeria terrorism, stood out in their opposition to the idea? Babagana Zulum has often gone beyond the call of duty in the defence of his people but his and other Northern Nigeria politicians’ opposition to the creation of state police show them up as hypocrites. Their opposition to the idea of state police has less to do with the management of crime within their states and a lot more to do with sustaining the unfair advantage that a federalised police system has conferred on some non-state actors of Northern extraction or affiliation. Like the so-called herders and other suspected Fulani terrorists from Niger, Mali and other parts of the Sahel region. Yet, we are told that the terrorists are not Nigerians. Why then are Nigerians afraid that their activities would be curtailed? What form of corrupt usage would state police units be put to that our so-called federal police as presently constituted has not been subjected to? If there would be any corruption of the system, the difference will only be in terms of the victims of such corrupt use. Why should a crime committed in Kano, Ile-Ife or Uromi be taken to Abuja for investigation for no apparent reason than to subvert the course of justice? Why should criminals apprehended in Ikeja be taken to Abuja and set free? These are the questions opponents of state police won’t answer. At any rate, state, regional or local authority police is nothing new in Nigeria. It existed in this country until the military incursion of January 1966, when a so-called Unification Decree 34 was promulgated in May of that year to unitarise the country. Today the chickens of that decision are coming home to roost and fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction to deflect blame being sent where it belongs. And while the APC group in Lagos was brainstorming about state police, their counterparts in the ADC/NNPP coalition were in Kano planning how to wrest power from them. It was an annual religious gathering of Rabiu Kwankwanso’s Kwakwansiya Movement that was momentarily transformed into an alliance of convenience with the past master of bend-bend politics, the one somebody called a packaged fraud, starring. So much is being made of the crowd that attended this meet. It has been described as ‘organic’ among other dainty superlatives. The funny thing is how much song and dance is being made of the meeting by some Igbo commentators among other Obidients. In their desperate grasp for the presidency by all means possible, they have forgotten everything about their so-called structure of criminality. Now they appear to see a way forward, perhaps we would hear fewer laments about the danger of a one-party state. Thank God!