Commenting on taking responsibility in his devotional “Show Me Thy Way,” Floyd O. Rittenhouse tells of three drunken men arrested by a traffic officer. In court, the judge asked the drunks who between them was driving. One of them, unsteady on his feet, replied, “We have you there, Judge. We were all in the back seat.” Rittenhouse concludes with this rhetorical qquestion, “How many travelers on the road of life drift and waver because the driver’s seat is empty?”.
Our President Tinubu did something last week that seemed like not wanting to take responsibility for the actions of “all the president’s men”.The anti financial fraud agency EFCC, a court order in hand, had closed the bank accounts of the government of Osun State, where a governorship election will hold shortly. The state government cried blue murder. Tinubu heard and ordered the EFCC to reopen those bank accounts. He said he had not ordered their closure. According to him, it is erroneous to assume because the EFCC is under the Presidency he must have been aware of its action. “While I am yet to be fully apprised of the facts which informed the action of EFCC in approaching the court to obtain the said order freezing the Osun State Government account, I am not in the slightest doubt that the timing of the action of EFCC is inauspicious, and therefore I feel compelled to intervene,” the President said. “Osun State is only a few days away from its gubernatorial election. Therefore, nothing ought to be done to give an impression that the EFCC or indeed any other agency of the federal government is being used to interfere with the election. I am duty-bound to issue a directive on this issue in consonance with the overriding public interest in preserving public confidence and the integrity, credibility, and fairness of our democratic process.”
My take on the president’s decision is one of incredulity. Firstly, he overrode the EFCC’s action not because it was illegal but because of the public anger that greeted it. And that was several days afterwards. Tinubu himself admitted what the EFCC had done was perfectly legal; what was not was the timing. In law, legality isn’t defined or circumscribed by time. Does the law wait for the ‘right’ time to catch a murderer? If the president was convinced about the correctness of the EFCC, the correct thing to have done was not to have unhinged it but allowed the law to take its course. By buckling under complaints the president had shown his hand to be weak and undermined the integrity and power of the EFCC.
Tinubu talked of “overriding public interest” in cancelling the action of the EFCC. Didn’t it also mean that the headship of the commission’s should have been removed? Leaving it in place weakens the effectiveness of the commission’s performance. Also, the president, by putting political correctness above the law, has effectively buried the rule of law. Overriding public interest also means letting legality stay while allowing Osun government to challenge it in the court of law – something already it had promised itself to do. By annulling this process of rule of law Tinubu has also undone the “integrity, credibility and fairness of the democratic process” that he claimed to desire to uphold.
