MARCEL MBAMALULast Friday, former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, resigned from parliament. He had learned of the damning report of the House of Commons Privileges Committee, which investigated a Covid-era parties he organized at Downing Street.
The same events led to his resignation as Prime Minister in 2022, and also cut short his attempt at a comeback in 2023. Experts forecast that his time in British politics is over. Like Johnson, another British prime minster, Gordon Brown, was consumed by his own actions.
In April 2010, Prime Minister Brown had called a Labour Party supporter bigoted for questioning him about the economy and immigration. Brown’s voice was picked up by a Sky News microphone (he didn’t know it was still there), as he asked his aides about the woman who had hounded him with questions during a campaign. He later apologized to the woman, yet his party (Labour) lost 91 seats in the 2010 elections, forcing him out of office as Prime Minster.
Political comments and actions are key to political success in sane societies. United States’ Donald Trump and Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon are a few of former leaders currently grappling with the outcomes of their words and actions while in office. Is Nigeria such a society?
Last week too, a viral video showed the immediate past governor of Kaduna, Nasir el Rufai, making incendiary religious comments against a section of the state he governed for eight years. El Rufai superintended over one of the worst security conditions of any state in Nigeria.
Under his watch, Kaduna was a hotbed of religious and ethnic tensions, communal clashes, terror attacks and farmer-herdsmen clashes, which together claimed at least 8,000 lives and displaced tens of thousands more between 2015 and 2023.
In the areas most affected, healthcare, education, food security and social stability all crumbled.
READ ALSO: The Unraveling Of Nasir El-Rufai And Festus Keyamo
The new Kaduna State government is yet to comment on the video, which experts say is credible. Civil society groups, religious leaders as well as the citizens of Southern Kaduna, where at least 70% of the incidents occurred, have since said that El-Rufai’s latest religious outbursts vindicate them. Critics have always alleged that El-Rufai gave tacit support to the masterminds of the unbelievable carnage.
It is being projected that El-Rufai would perform a key role in Tinubu’s government, being one of Tinubu’s major backers.
In 2019, El-Rufai, speaking on the Nigerian Television Authority, threatened that international observers and foreign nations who attempted to intervene in Nigeria’s elections would return home in body bags. He had also made highly divisive comments in 2012 when he described Nigeria as consisting of two countries, the north and the south with disparate credentials that extoled the north and vilified the south.
Former President Buhari was also noted for making incendiary comments in the past, and getting away with them. He was quoted to have threatened that baboons and monkeys would soak in blood if the 2015 presidential elections were rigged. Echoes of forming a parallel government also flowed from many APC stalwarts between 2012 and 2014, before Buhari came to power. In October 2017, the president of the World Bank, Mr Jim Yong Kim, commented on the request of President Buhari to the World Bank to concentrate the majority its projects in the north of Nigeria.
Many political office holders and seekers have contravened section 97 of the 2022 Electoral Act by making highly divisive comments for political gains. Yet, many of them contested and curiously won elections. To deal with their unpopularity, such politicians routinely order the closure of schools and markets during campaign visits to misgoverned citizens. As witnessed in many states, women are forcibly clad in custom political attires, together with school pupils. They line the roadsides, cheering to an endless trail of the latest, black-tinted, noiseless, slow-moving fleet of Toyota SUVs (alias jeeps) as they trudge to the venues of political campaigns.
It is at least expected of Tinubu to curtail the excesses of political office holders in terms of divisive comments. El-Rufai typifies those in this class, and he is set to take up a major role in Tinubu’s government. It is such impunity that begets the wide variety of lawlessness from motorists, law enforcement agents, the Nigerian courts and the general public.
As aptly noted by the Roman philosopher, Marcus Cicero: “The hope of impunity is the greatest inducement to do wrong”. This is Nigeria’s utmost undoing, and President Tinubu alluded to this in his plea for national healing just after being declared winner of the 2023 presidential elections.
Will he follow his words with action?
Dr Mbamalu is a veteran journalist and publisher
Dr. Marcel Mbamalu is a communication scholar, journalist and entrepreneur. He holds a Ph.D in Mass Communication from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and is the Chief Executive Officer Newstide Publications, the publishers of Prime Business Africa.
A seasoned journalist, he horned his journalism skills at The Guardian Newspaper, rising to the position of News Editor at the flagship of the Nigerian press. He has garnered multidisciplinary experience in marketing communication, public relations and media research, helping clients to deliver bespoke campaigns within Nigeria and across Africa.
He has built an expansive network in the media and has served as a media trainer for World Health Organisation (WHO) at various times in Northeast Nigeria. He has attended numerous media trainings, including the Bloomberg Financial Journalism Training and Reuters/AfDB training on Effective Coverage of Infrastructural Development of Africa.
A versatile media expert, he won the Jefferson Fellowship in 2023 as the sole Africa representative on the program. Dr Mbamalu was part of a global media team that covered the 2020 United State’s Presidential election. As Africa's sole representative in the 2023 Jefferson Fellowships, Dr Mbamalu was selected to tour the United States and Asia (Japan and Hong Kong) as part of a 12-man global team of journalists on a travel grant to report on inclusion, income gaps and migration issues between the US and Asia.
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