_By Garba Shehu_
Last week, the Nigeria’s senate majority leader reintroduced
anti-sexual harassment legislation to parliament, following a serious
exposé by the BBC of a sex for grades scandal at the University of
Lagos.
The bill had been tabled before – in 2016 – but it was not passed:
some members of our party, working with the opposition, then stronger in
numbers than today, blocked it.
This time around, there has been no such attempt by the opposition
Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to scupper the legislation. We cannot
tell whether they remain opposed to it, for they have been too busy to
let the 200 million citizens of Nigeria know. Instead, last week –
whilst this matter was in the Senate, and the first Federal Budget
following our February General Election, was being tabled before the
House – the opposition’s full attention was elsewhere: on the affairs
of the President, who we were told by the internet, was planning to
marry in secret to one of his cabinet ministers.
The interminable nonsense of fake news is hardly unique to Nigeria. In
the United States, Britain – indeed across much of the democratic
world – we see waves of falsehoods and untruths peddled across digital
and mainstream media. It has led to journalists and the press to become
less trusted than almost any other profession or estate. Yet elsewhere,
whether the fake facts emanate from governments or oppositions, neither
have sought to abdicate their unique responsibilities in the act of
governance.
In Nigeria, the opposition is close to reneging completely on the
compact it holds with the voters. Every modern democracy exists for its
checks and balances. Voters may elect a government to govern but they
also elect an opposition – to oppose, to scrutinise, and to hold the
majority to account. In the absence of either weight or counterweight,
the scales of democracy become imbalanced. This cannot continue for long
without the full functioning of governance being affected.
Whether citizens voted for President Buhari and the All Progressives
Congress (APC), or for the opposition’s presidential candidate and his
People’s Democratic Party (PDP), no one voted for failure. They may
have voted differently on policy and personality, but regardless of a
voter’s choice of candidate and party, for their vote they expect
responsibility. No voter expected, nor wanted, the opposition somehow to
simply go missing. But that, effectively, is what they have done.
Immediately after the February election that saw President Buhari
re-elected to a second four-year term, and his APC secure a workable
majority both in the Senate and House, the PDP went to court to
challenge the result.
The world over election losers tend towards “lawfare” once they have
lost the campaign battle in the field. None can begrudge the PDP their
day in court: yet it was never in doubt that they would fail to persuade
the judiciary to overturn President Buhari’s 4 million votes and 14
percent margin of victory over his opponent.
“Biased judges!” screamed the opposition. Perhaps. Judges do tend to
be biased – towards the facts. Yet those, it would seem, matter no
longer to the opposition at all – for last week they opened their next
salvo in lawfare by taking their exact same, fatally flawed case to
Nigeria’s Supreme Court. We must sincerely hope the opposition have
the wherewithal to appreciate they will fail once more, given the facts
and the math remain the same.
The opposition’s over-excretions are leaving a mess for the elected
government to clean up. These do not just extend to the fact that even
the most serious, and well-intentioned anti-sexual harassment
legislation needs scrutiny, or the fact that the opposition yelled
“corruption, padding!” at the Federal Budget – even before it had
been tabled. More importantly, it leaves a stain on the terms of
acceptable debate.
The median age of our 200 million population is 18 years old. Over 100
million Nigerians have access to the internet, and to cell phones. Many
will, of course, see the opposition’s fake news and failure to hold
the government to account fully and sanely for what it is: dereliction
of duty. But there will be those who do not.
Nigeria is leading the fight in Africa against terrorists claiming to be
adherents of Islam. This battle is being won – but not without cost. Our
fight matters not just to our country, or West Africa – but to the whole
world. We are defeating the terrorists both through military and through
educative means. We hold up to the terrorists the inalienable truth that
society is better when there is reasoned debate, the exchange of views,
argument without harm – and that it is through this process of consent
which leads to unity.
Without that process working as it should, not only is good governance
threatened but it imperils the principle of our system of governance –
based on scrutiny of the executive based on facts – and makes it out
to be a sham. It imperils the principle of governance by consent which
is the firewall against impressionable young people being swayed towards
terrorists, whom it emboldens. Nigeria’s opposition is missing. We
need them back.
_GARBA SHEHU IS SENIOR SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT (MEDIA &
PUBLICITY)_