These are not the happiest of times for the suspended Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele. The Delta State-born banker has had his tenure cut short by an executive action of President Bola Tinubu which suspended him from office pending the completion of the investigations into some of his activities as the Nigeria’s banking regulation czar. Soon after he was stripped of his official garb, Emefiele was arrested by the Department of State Services (DSS) for suspected corruption and terrorism offences.
As Emefiele endures his ordeals, not a few persons have I read or heard gloat over his misfortunes, describing them as well earned. The contradiction in that thinking becomes glaring when it is considered that many who today mock the erstwhile CBN helsman backed his naira redesign policy which they saw as a masterstroke in a grand design to stop Tinubu’s presidential ambition.
Away from that, my major concern is the implication of Emefiele’s removal to our quest to build a working and prosperous nation. Not a few persons have observed the seeming afront which this removal is to the laws of the land. Section 11 of the CBN Act provides that the CBN governor can be removed by the president only if the removal is “supported by two-third majority of the Senate.” Obviously, this condition precedent was not fulfilled before Emefiele’s removal; the president acted using executive fiat.
In an obvious attempt to circumvent the law, the federal government had chosen the word “suspension” in carrying out the act in order to deflate the inevitable impression that it has unilaterally sacked the CBN governor. The intention was to project the action as mere temporary halting of Emefiele’s official powers to pave way for seamless investigations into his alleged wrongdoings.
But recent history tells us that this is only a familiar strategy for permanently easing out anyone who became unwanted but whose tenure is legally secured. Nine years ago, President Goodluck Jonathan employed exactly this tactic to effect the removal of Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as the CBN governor. More recently, President Muhammadu Buhari implemented the same rule book when, in January 2019, he “suspended” the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Walter Onnoghen, contrary to section 292 of the Constitution which mandates that such removal must be upon the recommendation of the National Judicial Council (NJC) and supported by two-third majority of the Senate.
In the midst of all this, it is curious that we have largely failed to ask the fundamental question as to why such unceremonious exit has become recurring for persons occupying such very sensitive positions. Common sense ought to make us worry that all is not normal with our nation building process when certain persons who are supposed to be some of the most crucial agents of this process constantly end up its villains. It ought to worry discerning minds that this iterative drama has not been limited to the office of the CBN governor; it has also persistently recurred around the office of the EFCC chairman, a very key actor in the nation’s quest to tame the monster of corruption that has kept her where she is unfortunately today. Nuhu Ribadu suffered this fate, his successor Farida Waziiri was similarly dismissed in what the Jonathan government described as being in the “national interest”. Her successor Ibrahim Larmode was eased out in the same unceremonious pattern, while the next in line, Ibrahim Magu had his own dismissal even preceded by DSS arrest and detention. Now the latest victim Abdulrasheed Bawa is yet to know where his ordeal may lead him to having also been arrested and detained.
The heads of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have also not been spared of this repeated drama of unceremonious and/or infamous ending of tenure. Bello Lafiaji, a former chairman of NDLEA, was even convicted and jailed for 16 years until the Court of Appeal came to his rescue. One of his successors, Muhammad Abdala, was also subjected to a probe following allegations of infractions that trailed his time in office. Even the office of the head of the Nigerian Customs Service, another very crucial institution in the nation building process, has had its own unsavoury experience with inglorious tenure termination. Not many Nigerians would have forgotten the travails of Abdullahi Dikko, a former Comptroller General of Customs, who was also accused and tried for corruption. The case of IGP Tafa Balogun, the nation’s once number one crime fighter, was an epoch-making episode of its own.
One becomes particularly worried when the circumstances of some of these unceremonious removals are considered. Sanusi was sacked by Jonathan not long after he raised the alarm about missing $20bn in oil revenue and in the process of which he clashed with then petroleum minister, Diezani Madueke (who by the way has been facing corruption probe and now has her properties worth billions of naira confiscated to the federal government). Ribadu’s dismissal came after he apparently stepped on toes of powerful individuals (read an insider account by Segun Adeniyi – POWER, POLITICS AND DEATH and an account by a close friend of Ribadu, Wole Soyinka – POWER, HYDROPUS AND OTHER TOXIC MUTATIONS). For Emefiele, his “suspension” is believed to have followed from the naira redesign pandemonium which purportedly set him against the camp of then APC candidate Bola Tinubu in the bulid-up to the presidential election.
While no one can so confidently exonerate these dismissed public servants of any wrongdoings, the apparent selective “justice” cannot go unnoticed in a nation where corruption and abuse of office are a daily norm lived by everyone, starting from the number one man in Aso Rock to the least civil servant in the local government system. The offices targeted are very sensitive ones, whose occupiers exercise enormous and sensitive powers that can censure or nurture all the mountainous evils holding back our nation, depending on how they choose to exercise the powers. In the case of Emefiele and Sanusi, their office is such that enabled them to detect many of the fiscal evils committed at the highest levels of government and then choose to impede or allow them. This is why the law does not leave the powers to remove a CBN governor wholly in the hands of an executive head. But twice our executive heads have circumvented this law and some of us are apparently still believing that all is well. There is an increasing realisation that such security of office may also be required for the head of the nation’s main graft-fighting agency, the EFCC, hence the current bill before the National Assembly seeking to amend the enabling law to subject the president’s power of removal of the chairman to the approval of the legislature.
Following the testimonies of Adeniyi and those of Ribadu (as reported by Soyinka), I have a strong feeling that there is some form of double jeopardy around persons who occupy these sensitive positions over the years. They may have found themselves in an impossible situation where a decision to be upright and a decision to compromise both come with unsavoury consequences. In other words, it’s a case of if you insist on doing the right thing, you will step on toes and pay dearly, and if, on the other hand, you decide to dine with the devil, your fate will not be any better.
Be that as it may, it is only reasonable that if we really want to build the nation of our dreams, we must insist always on the rule of law. We must never approve any form of afront to the law by whomsoever and under whatever circumstances, no matter how much it may suit our proclivity at the time. This is a principle that should remain uncompromisable. Those who, because of electoral sentiments, supported Emefiele and Buhari’s disobedience to the Supreme Court judgment ordering reversal of the policy on new naira notes should know that the evil we support today can come back to haunt us tomorrow. There will be many Supreme Court judgments to be similarly disobeyed tomorrow. Those who are gloating over Emefiele’s unconstitutional removal should also take note. Not a few times have I heard people suggest that Jonathan did disservice to himself and the nation by failing to remove Jega as the INEC chairman before the 2015 elections. Those who nurture this sort of thinking should know that the president has no such executive fiat; if they are wishing that Jonathan should have circumvented the law to unilaterally sack Jega (in the same way he did to Sanusi), then they should also know that they are simply wishing for a precedent to be set such that any future president can choose to scheme the INEC chairman out of the way and appoint someone that will do his bidding once an election is approaching.
A nation is built by building and strengthening institutions including one like the CBN that is so crucial for managing the resources of the nation and taming corrupt practices and economic sabotage. Disobeying the laws that regulate an institution is the shortest route to composing the Requiem of such institution. As we think about how to build our nation, let’s never fail to also think of how not to build it.
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, Nigeria.
