BY DAN AGBESE
The centre did not quite fall out in Ondo State. Governor Rotimi Akeredolu has done the right thing even if reluctantly. He persuaded himself to end the needless crisis and take another medical leave and very reluctantly leave the state in the hands of the deputy governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, as acting governor.
The State House of Assembly has formally confirmed him in that position. This was the eventuality the governor had risked his health to fight. I join the people of Ondo State in heaving a huge sigh of relief.
While the crisis lasted, the political tension was so thick you could easily slice it with a kitchen knife.
It paralysed governance in the state. Neither the governor nor his deputy was in charge. The crisis should not have arisen because the framers of the constitution, aware of the mortality of all those who occupy that office, made provisions for saving the exalted political office if the health of the number one citizen is challenged. It did because as we like to say, rather sheepishly, this is Nigeria, where deliberate confusion about our system is the norm.
The facts are not contestable. Akeredolu is ill. He had been on a six-month medical leave before. He was rushed home when his allies suspected there were moves in the State House of Assembly to declare him unfit to continue to hold the office of governor.
He rushed home to fight to save his job. He precipitated a needless constitutional crisis. It is not his fault that he is ill. It is the burden we all bear as mortals. The devil or the wicked intent on doing their worst to him can easily take the blame for his illness.
He knows that illnesses are no respecters of persons or their positions in the society. Illnesses are bad for all men and women but worse for people serving in high pressure political offices. They impair the capacity of men and women to fully discharge their official or personal responsibilities.
The possibility of making wrong decisions is always a present danger when illness holds a leader by the heels. It is good to be a governor; it is good to remain a governor, but it is unwise to do so when an illness becomes the enemy. Akeredolu’s first duty is to himself and his family.
That simple duty is to defeat his illness and remain alive in or outside the government house. It would not be a great honour for him to cling to power and, God forbid, die in office. He has ruled the state for more than seven years. Whatever good he intended to do had been done.
It is childish of him to cling to power and prevent the constitutional change provided for in the constitution.
It is no brainer to say that outside the pressure cooker of his public office, he can fight and possibly defeat his illness and return to serve out his remaining days in his second term in office. But as often happens, his hangers-on, the men and women who feed fat on his remaining in office, must have dissuaded him from stepping aside. He should not have allowed it.
“It is childish of him to cling to power and prevent the constitutional change provided for in the constitution”
The governor is also a very senior lawyer and former President of the Nigerian Bar Association. He knows the law and knows that respect for the law and the rule of law is the cardinal principle of democratic governance.
He is not unaware of section 189 and its sub-sections of the constitution that deal with the removal of a state governor from office by the State House of Assembly on the grounds of ill-health if they are satisfied through appropriate medical examination and report that his capacity to discharge the duties of his office has headed south.
Relying on section 144 of the Constitution as it affects the president facing a similar health challenge, Akeredolu in 2010 advised the then ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua not to hang on to power when it had become clear to friends and foes alike that his doing so would be at the expense of the country itself.
That he failed to take the sane advice he offered another tells you that we learn neither from history nor from ourselves.
In both cases, the steps to be taken by the legislature, national and state, to deal with the ill health of a president or a state governor are clearly spelt out in the extant sub-sections of sections 144 and 189 respectively. But in both cases, politics trumped the supreme law of the land.
In the case of the late president, the Senate chose to skirt around the relevant sub-sections and invoked an extra-constitutional provision strange to the constitution, called the doctrine of necessity, to declare Yar’Adua unfit to continue to hold the office of president and hand the reins of power to Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan in an acting capacity.
In the case of Ondo State, the House of Assembly simply danced around it and refused to do what the constitution expected the honourable members to do.
Political offices, like illnesses, are stressful. There comes a time when the holders of such offices should be saved from themselves for their own sake, for the sake of constitutional government and for the sake of the country and parts thereof. The constitution has made that abundantly clear. It is incumbent on our lawmakers to enforce those provisions. Power is sweet but its taste changes with the intervention of an illness. It is common sense.
I have often argued here and elsewhere that we have to choose between running a constitutional government and running a government in which our political leaders are beholden more to politics and political interests than to the constitution and the rule of law.
So far, we have done poorly in adhering to and running governments of laws, not of men, at the three tiers of government. Lawlessness is anathema to a constitutional government.
The Senate embarrassed itself and the nation when it chose to look for what is in its sokoto in Sokoto. It could have sought medical advice on Yar’Adua’s health challenge as provided for in the constitution. Instead, it chose to enact a law designed expressly for the purposes of wresting power from the powerful cabal surrounding the president and who had decided that it was in their interest to become his proxies.
It solved the immediate problem then, but it did nothing for our constitutional government. If each time the legislature finds itself unable to respond legally to a constitutional challenge it resorts to an extra-constitutional resolution to solve the problem, it insults the constitution as the supreme law in our constitutional form of democratic government.
The Ondo case has perhaps headed into history where, whatever might happen to Akeredolu during his medical leave, it will become a reference point in running our hybrid democracy. But we have not seen the last of its type.
Similar and other challenges to the rule of law will crop up again sooner than later. Politics will advise the legislature against doing what is right and proper to protect our system and nurture democracy in our country.
A constitutional government is a difficult form of government. But we chose it as our form of government. The least we can do is to respect its best practices within the ambits of the nuances of democracy and advance, rather than hinder the full flowering of the government of the people, by the people for the people.
