Last Friday, August 15, Nigerian leader Bola Ahmed Tinubu departed for the TICAD9 conference in Japan. Channels TV reported on his interaction with the Loyalty Line at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport.
Tinubu’s Airbus ACJ330-200 can typically accommodate 250 to 400 passengers, but may be configured to carry fewer, just like the US president’s Boeing 747 is configured for far fewer than the hundreds it accommodates in commercial operations.
As Tinubu departed for Dubai, enroute Tokyo, with one NAN correspondent. This is contrary to what obtains in the US, after which we modelled our constitution in theory, where the president travels with a press corps of 13 journalists, most of whose organisations pay their expenses.
In Nigeria, the mass media has not applied for, let alone fought for, the right to report presidential travel. This is partly because no media organisation can afford it, which is exceedingly convenient for any leadership that has no intention of being accountable. The presidency should ideally provide seats and hotel accommodation for journalists, as it has the capacity, but those reporters would then be relegated to the status of the NAN correspondent.
On Friday, Mr Tinubu lacked the vigour or conviction of a president. I wondered if he was embarrassed that both Nigerians and foreigners could see through his situation: that while nobody can stop him from buying lorry loads of foreign exchange and heading forth, there really are no victories for him in foreign lands; that the challenge is Nigeria and in Nigeria.
On the morning of his departure, they may have made available a few local mainstream newspapers, most of which now print only a few copies, for his amusement.
Apart from one lonely entry, Vanguard, none was reporting the big story: that Justice Phuong Ngo of the Canada’s Federal Court on Thursday declared Nigeria’s two major political parties to be “terrorist organisations,” having engaged in conduct that amounts to terrorism and subversion of democratic institutions under Canadian law.
The parties are, of course, the PDP and Tinubu’s beloved APC.
If only Douglas Egharevba, on the day he decided to seek judicial review after his asylum application was turned down by Canada’s Immigration Appeal Division, had not been so determined! If he had only chosen to retreat to the wealth and wonders of the PDP and APC in their own land, where they can manufacture and manipulate, none of this would have happened.
Egharevba, a former member first of the PDP and then the APC, took advantage of the provision of the law to seek to change his rejection, causing the Canadian judicial system to take a fine-tooth comb to the history and practice of power in Nigeria in the Fourth Republic.
In the process, it unearthed what Nigerian voters, the mass media and election monitors have reported of both parties since 1999: political violence, assassinations, ballot stuffing, electoral manipulation, and intimidation of voters and opposition supporters, actions that fit the Canadian definition of terrorism.
The PDP, predictably, was blazing with anger and arrogance on Thursday night as the story broke, emerging on Friday to describe the verdict as “misinformed, biased, and lacking evidence” as if the court had been asked about PDP logic or Nigerian law.
The ruling APC was so apoplectic that spokesman Ajibola Basiru laughably labeled Justice Ngo, a judge interpreting Canadian law, as an “ignoramus” and a “racist,” while mislabeling the APC as “a credible democratic political organisation.”
Blaming Egharevba, and clearly out of his depth, Basiru dismissed the court as lacking the jurisdiction “to determine the status of a Nigerian recognised political party, not to talk of declaring it as a terrorist organisation.”
Nigerians lack the reach to do international damage to the reputation of our ruthless political parties and politicians, but we have indeed been saying it for two decades: the PDP and APC have no character and never play by the rules.
The mass media, along with local and international election observers from around the world, have described the excesses of first one party and then the other, that they are both driven only by the desire to win.
Rarely, if ever, has either the PDP or the APC won power in a free and fair contest, and voters are treated to the evils cited in the court: political violence, assassinations, ballot stuffing, electoral manipulation, and intimidation of voters and opposition supporters by both parties at every election.
Neither the PDP nor the APC is innocent of the use of bribery, vote-buying, ballot box snatching, deployment of the security agencies, and the use of INEC and the courts to determine electoral outcomes for themselves.
In 2023, a prominent office-seeker openly announced that he had studied the “anthropology” of power acquisition in Nigeria, enunciating this philosophy of how to guarantee electoral victory: “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. It is not served in a-la-carte. It is what we are doing. It is being determined to do it at all cost. Fight for it! Grab it, snatch it, and run with it.”
That was Tinubu, whose chilling philosophy gave him presidential victory.
He may have been speaking figuratively, but he was also speaking literally.
For years, our political lexicon did not have a clear characterisation of our elections, but Tinubu provided it: “Do it at all cost. Grab it, snatch it, and run with it.”
While perhaps normal enough in Nigeria, in Egharevba, it fell to Justice Pho to interpret it in local law.
Not PDP law, not APC law, and not even Nigerian law, where the Supreme Court would have provided APC law or found a “grab-it, snatch-it and run-with-it” loophole, but Canadian law.
The judge did not have the leeway to send the matter to Aso Rock for its extra-legal wizardry.
Canadian law, he affirmed, provides that although Egharevba may never have personally engaged in acts that would be considered acts of terrorism or subversion against a democratic government, institution, or process, he had indeed been a member of two political parties that fit the description of terrorist organisations.
In Nigeria, Egharevba enjoyed the games his political parties played with utter ruthlessness but lost in a society with higher values.
It is a shame that Nigeria is routinely embarrassed abroad like this, but every day, Nigerians are hurt, embarrassed and cheated when politicians and political parties ignore the law.
The Canadian court decision is a reminder that a crime, while it may be convenient for the criminal, can ripple not simply far and wide, but may bite back somehow.
Consider how Nigerian officials routinely treat Nigeria shabbily, only to head abroad with their families to enjoy the same opportunities they limit at home.
And yes, in a few days, Tinubu will fly about 36 hours and nearly 18,000 kilometres from Japan to Brazil before returning to this “grab-it, snatch-it” terrorist terrain.
His Loyalty Line, some of whom prescribe a “spiritual solution” to Nigeria but cannot obtain Canadian visas, will shamelessly sing his praises at the airport as Nigerians cry for security.
In the end, Canada seems to be saying that Nigerian leadership cannot fight terrorism because Nigerian leadership is terrorism.
