Politics or no politics: When power loses its conscience

Let me be unequivocal. There is politics everywhere in Nigeria today.

Too much of it, sometimes, at the expense of development, with far-reaching consequences for citizens’ existential circumstances.

Practically everything is seen through a political lens, from the mundane, pedestrian, irrelevant and reactionary to the logical and commonsensical, especially where power and the contest for it, the presidency, elections and opposition interests collide.

It is, however, important to state, and not pretend, that every uncomfortable question about power is automatically ‘politics’. For instance, politics does not manufacture court records, create a forfeiture or file Freedom of Information suits in an American federal court.

Indeed, politics certainly does not give anybody, President or pauper, exemption from legitimate public scrutiny.

The hasty invocation of ‘politics’ every time a powerful man’s past is examined is certainly not a defence but a lazy evasion because power without conscience is not merely dangerous; it is a savage weapon.

The facts beyond the politics

For the purposes of this edition of Heartland Dialogue, an instance is the politics surrounding the long-running controversy involving President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the old American drug-related investigation.

The facts, properly stated, are already serious enough without the spins or embellishments of partisan propagandists. Tinubu has never been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking. That distinction matters, and anyone claiming otherwise is either careless or dishonest.

Equally, it is dishonest to pretend that there was no drug-related controversy at all. It is on record that US authorities investigated matters involving accounts associated with Tinubu and that, in 1993, $460,000 was forfeited to the American government in a civil proceeding concerning funds that the US court record described as representing proceeds of narcotics trafficking or as having been involved in prohibited financial transactions. The proceeding was a civil forfeiture matter, not a criminal conviction of Tinubu.

The matter subsequently became a political issue during Nigeria’s election litigations, particularly those arising from the 2023 presidential election.

The respectable and dignified position is, therefore, not, and cannot be, that Tinubu is a convicted drug lord, nor that there was nothing to investigate. I dare say that both are lazy and hollow intellectual shortcuts. Conscience demands that we resist both the cruelty of an unproven accusation and the arrogance of unexamined power.

Now comes the part that should make every serious citizen sit up. Years after the controversy became a political weapon, an American transparency activist, Aaron Greenspan, pursued records from US agencies under the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA.

The litigation has continued through the courts, and the matter has now entered another chapter in which Tinubu’s legal team is seeking to block or restrict the release of records held by the Department of Justice, FBI and DEA.

Quite notably, some Nigerian lawyers agree that the move is well within his legal and legitimate rights and that the development does not, in itself, prove the allegations against the President. In the same breath, the existence of the litigation does not erase the public interest in knowing what those records contain. It is important to clarify that point.

When power must answer to conscience

This is precisely where power must answer to conscience because, when authority possesses the means to shape what the public sees, says and remembers, restraint becomes a moral obligation, not a public-relations strategy or stunt.

This is where Nigerian political culture becomes very embarrassing, particularly in situations where an opposition politician is accused and his enemies demand investigation, prosecution and public disclosure, but when an ally is accused, the same people suddenly discover “political witch-hunt”.

Then the opposition changes places with the government and performs precisely the same double standards and hypocrisy. It is a case of victims at one level and perpetrators at another, the oldest Nigerian political trick where principles are permanent until they become inconvenient.

We, as a people, should reject this twisted tendency outright because when power loses conscience, politics ceases to be the contest of ideas and becomes the weaponisation of institutions against inconvenient people and, inadvertently, inconvenient questions and inconvenient facts.

The stance of HEARTLAND DIALOGUE is that if the allegations are rubbish, expose the rubbish. If the records exonerate the president, release them and let the facts humiliate his accusers. If the records raise legitimate questions, answer them. What Nigeria cannot afford is a permanent fog and confusion in which everybody knows that there is a controversy but nobody is permitted to interrogate it.

Let us be absolutely clear about another thing arising from the fact that the resurfacing of the matter is very well connected to the battle for power in the 2027 election cycle. Let us also be pointed that a presidential election is not a coronation. No one individual ceases to be accountable simply by winning an election.

In fact, the reverse is true. The higher the office, the more exacting the standard. The President of Nigeria represents the country before foreign governments, investors, institutions and citizens. If an unresolved controversy from his past is repeatedly raised, the appropriate response is not to insult the questioner, threaten the journalist, deploy party loyalists or shout “politics” until everyone becomes exhausted.

The appropriate response is to present the evidence.

Power without conscience believes the office is the answer, but power with conscience understands that the office is the burden. Leadership is not demonstrated by controlling the narrative but rather by having the facts withstand the narrative.

Accountability must cut both ways

There is, however, an equally dangerous temptation for political opponents to turn an allegation into a conviction simply for electoral gain. Nigeria has suffered enough from media trials through press conferences, social media and party spokesmen.

The President is entitled to the presumption of innocence, just as every citizen.

The fact that American authorities once pursued a civil forfeiture involving funds associated with Tinubu does not, by any stretch, establish that he trafficked drugs. We must, therefore, demand truth, not propaganda veiled as accountability. Conscience must work both ways: to restrain the powerful from abusing power and to prevent the powerless from abusing truth.

That said, here is one uncomfortable question the Presidency and its defenders cannot escape. If there is nothing in the records that threatens the President’s integrity, why should Nigerians fear the records? That question is not a criminal indictment or opposition politics but the most elementary demand of democratic accountability.

Transparency is not a favour presidents grant the people but part of the price of public office. When a government insists that citizens should trust it while simultaneously fighting over the disclosure of records relevant to a controversy surrounding the President, suspicion naturally grows, not because every suspicion is true but because secrecy creates fertile ground for suspicion.

In this breadth, the truly frightening thing about power without conscience is not merely what it can do to its enemies but what it can persuade itself it is entitled to do.

Beyond partisan absolutism

So, is there politics in the matter? Certainly, there is. But politics should not sterilise facts. If Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Adewale Adebayo, Donald Duke, Sowore, Seyi Makinde or anyone else exploits the controversy for electoral advantage, Nigerians should judge that inherent political opportunism separately. If Tinubu’s lawyers are exercising legitimate legal rights, that too should be acknowledged.

This is not about being anti- or pro-Tinubu, or anti- or pro-opposition, but the bare minimum demanded by a republic that still claims to believe that nobody is above scrutiny and that nobody should be demonised just to satisfy the cynical and emotive antics of undermining persons in power.

Political exploitation or legal procedure should not be a curtain or excuse to mortgage, compromise or sacrifice questions of public interest.

Nigeria deserves something better than partisan absolutism and partisan condemnation. It deserves the documents, the chronology, the legal context and the unvarnished truth. No president should be condemned without evidence, just as no president should be shielded from evidence because he is president.

This is because when power is divorced from conscience, it becomes a savage weapon, and a savage weapon in the hands of politics weaponises ambiguity and threatens liberty, dignity and, indeed, truth itself.

In all, the overriding consideration should be a principle that stands above personalities and partisan camps. Politics or no politics, we must, as a society, focus on the broader question about the character and limits of power.