For too long, we have had those who call themselves our leaders go out there in front of the whole world to shame us and our country. Not only would they do so gleefully, they return to beat their puny chests expecting decent citizens to congratulate them for a job well done! The latest in this line of mental Lilliputians is no other than Senator Ike Ekweremadu, the Deputy Senate President and Chairman, Senate Committee on Constitutional Review.
On Thursday, 3 December 2009, he addressed newsmen in Abuja on his return from Washington DC, United States, where he had led members of the Senate Committee on an interactive session with the US Council on Foreign Relations. According to him, when the issue of President Umaru Yar’Adua’s health came up during their discussion, he took time to explain to his hosts that the Nigerian Constitution makes no provision for how long a President can stay away from the country before losing his job. Thus, in his judgment, President Yar’Adua can spend one year abroad and as far as we have the Vice-President acting in his place, there is no problem. Senator Ekweremadu believes that because we have a system that is running, “even if the President is not there, things will move normally”.
Nigerians need to tell him that such unpatriotic, uninformed, self-serving and callous statement is a disgrace to his office and to Nigeria. Indeed, if this man respects his office, his country and her people, he would credit us with a little more intelligence than he thinks we have. But the joke is on him. All he needs is education and we are happy to give it to him free of charge.
First, we need to point out that beginning his defence of presidential absenteeism with a claim that the Constitution makes no provision for how long a President can stay out of the country before he can lose his job smacks of sheer desperation. Mr Ekweremadu, a lawyer by training, ought to know that constitutions do not only contain the things actually written in them, but things that can reasonably be implied or construed by things written in them.
For instance, why would we need the Constitution to state explicitly how long the President can stay out of the country before he loses his job when by the structure of the Constitution, the nature of the job as expressed in the Constitution and the rules governing the President’s availability or otherwise for the job (again, as expressed in the Constitution), it is obvious that this is a job he practically cannot do from outside the country? Of course, we can begin here to detail some of the tasks our Constitution sets out for a President, suffice it to say it does not envisage for these serious duties to be performed by an absentee President.
Indeed, it is precisely because the Constitution does not envisage for the job to be done by an absentee President that it makes provisions for the Vice-president to immediately step in to act with full powers as Acting Vice-President when a sitting President feels temporarily unavailable. All that is required is for the President to follow the simple dictates of section 145 which states: “Whenever the President transmits to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he is proceeding on vacation or that he is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary such functions shall be discharged by the Vice-President as Acting President”.
But rather than our roving senator drawing the attention of the distinguished members of the Council on Foreign Affairs to this provision, he waxed lyrical about Nigeria having a “good” system which runs perfectly even when the President is not there, because the Vice-President would simply step in and act. Of course, what he was not saying is that the President who ordinarily should ensure this by activating the provisions of section 145 did not do so, thus leaving the country in limbo as the Vice-President pretends to be in charge without constitutional powers to act for the President as a constitutional Acting President.
Evidently, our President prefers to plunge the country into uncertainty most likely under the misconception that he may actually permanently lose the office if he activates section 145! It was so bad that he couldn’t delegate even the mere reading of the Budget on the floor of the National Assembly to the Vice-President. As a result, for the first time in our national history, such an important presentation was made by an assistant to the President, Mohammed Abba-Aji. But even then, the supplementary budget already passed by the National Assembly is yet to receive presidential assent. Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan cannot do it, because he is not Acting President as required under section 145. Indeed, we can imagine what effect all this can have on national security if we were to confront a situation now that requires the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to give orders, considering he is in charge of the Armed Forces operationally as well!
From the foregoing analysis, we can see that the principle of systemic functionality the senator is putting forth as support for his position is nothing but a white lie. However, the senator proposed some other variegated principles to support his jaundiced reasoning. In a seemingly mastery of the dark arts of doublespeak and selectivity, he proposed three others. The first was the supposedly implied sanctity of the mandate given Yar’Adua; the second was a false principle of cultural uniqueness and the third was an attempt at a comparative analysis of situations based on history. We need to analyse the senator’s views on each of these in more detail to get a better idea of the folly of his position.
Senator Ekweremadu’s mandate principle in support of his thesis was expressed thus: "When we talk about a mandate given to the President, we must treat it with caution. It is flimsy to say someone is ill and so he should resign or lose his office. It is a mandate given to him by millions of Nigerians. So, for somebody to surrender it, something serious must have happened." Now, discounting the well-known and overwhelmingly acknowledged fact that the President is exercising a stolen or at best a flawed mandate (which the President himself has severally acknowledged), could the Honourable Senator explain to us whether such mandate, if indeed given or granted, was so given to Yar’Adua to govern Nigeria from abroad? In other words, following the principle of legitimate expectations, did Nigerians vote in the President expecting him to run our national affairs for one year from the syringed comfort of his hospital bed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia? Could the senator himself, even where he is not holding an executive position, leave his office for one year and expect his constituents to usher him back with garlands of flowers?
On cultural uniqueness, this was how he said he expressed this to the distinguished members of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Interestingly, the matter also came up during the discussion with the Council on Foreign Relations. They looked forward to a specific answer from me, but I took time to explain to them the issues concerning life and death in Africa. For us, life is sacrosanct and, we deal with life very respectfully”. Again, the vacuity in the reasoning is writ-large. What is so unique about how we treat life and death in Africa nay Nigeria? Isn’t this the same country where political assassinations are the order of the day while the police run around like headless chickens, collaborating with armed robbers and engaging indiscriminately in extra-judicial killings? Isn’t this the same country where soldiers and policemen march into communities, mowing down everyone and everything in sight without repercussions? Isn’t this the same country where people are dispatched to the great beyond during elections for no other reason than for attempting to exercise their right to vote? Of course, the “specific answer” expected from him as a foremost lawmaker was the position of the law with regard to the situation. But rather than address this, he went on perorating about the sanctity of life! Maybe he thought he impressed his hosts, but all he has done is to expose himself as one of those being used to subvert the Constitution. The fact would not be lost on the Americans that this was the same man, who on the invitation of the Democratic Party to its Convention last year, talked glibly about working towards deepening democratic practices in Nigeria. Now they know his idea of democracy is Potemkin democracy.
However, the most laughable of our senator’s effort at educating the Americans was when he delved into history and a comparative analysis of how presidential illnesses are handled worldwide, especially with his examples of the United States and the old Soviet Union. Apart from the fact that his examples of President Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin are almost a century old and clearly out of date, he took quite some liberty with his account as he danced to his own tuneless music. Yes, in Wilson’s time, the United States was yet to pass the 25th Amendment which deals with presidential incapacity, but even then Wilson’s illness, which was a stroke he suffered on 3rd of October 1919, did not incapacitate him to the extent of making it impossible for him to function for the rest of his second term up to 1921. Obviously, he was very self-conscious of the stroke, but after a few weeks, he went on performing his duties, including attending cabinet meetings. The point is Wilson did not stay away in a foreign country or get sealed off in a hospital somewhere. He was right there in the White House doing his job as he had always done. He left the White House in 1921 and still went on to have a reasonably active life, including becoming the President of American Historical Association until his death in 1924.
What Ekweremadu ought to have taken note of is how, since the passage of the 25th Amendment, American Presidents who found themselves temporarily incapacitated acted to hand over power temporarily to their Vice-Presidents without fuss. Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 reads: “Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President”. Anyone can see that this is the American version of our own section 145. The history lesson our dear senator ought to have been learning is how this provision has been activated by sitting Presidents when they have to, so as to allow for the smooth running of the system. For instance, on 13 July, 1985, before undergoing surgery to remove cancerous polyps from his colon, Ronald Reagan transmitted a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill and President pro tempore of the Senate, Strom Thurmond declaring his incapacity. For the next eight hours, Vice-President George H Bush was Acting President in line with the Constitution. On 29 June 2002, President George W Bush invoked this provision to make Dick Cheney Acting President in similar circumstances. So, clearly, American Presidents have not made themselves saboteurs of their system. It works perfectly when a President is ill. The question our dear senator should have addressed was why Yar’Adua did not activate section 145 in the same circumstances.
As for his Lenin, the account he gave is simply a fairy tale. A month before Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922 the Soviet leadership had already begun making arrangements to replace him with his own active support. This was the basis of the creation of the most powerful government and party post in old Soviet Union, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a post created for and occupied by Josef Stalin from the 3rd of April 1922 as Lenin retired to Gorki where he was till his death. Even though he remained active writing his Lenin Testament in Gorki and was usually consulted by Stalin, Lenin did not try to hang on when it was obvious that he was too ill for the day-to-day running of the Soviet government.
We are quite sure that Senator Ekweremadu’s history lecture did not impress his hosts nor did they buy his gobbledegook of effective presidential leadership by absenteeism. Maybe he thinks that the fact that they listened to him attentively meant they accepted his views; but someone needs to tell him to sober up. He wasn’t addressing kindergartens in the US or Abuja. He was talking to people who know far better than to listen to a senator who knows nothing about the Constitution he swore to protect. Now, let him go take a good shower; the stench from his comments still stinks to high heavens.
Kennedy Emetulu
Tosin Awotesu
Emeka Enechi
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