By Farooq A. Kperogi Twitter: @farooqkperogi I refused to jump on the bandwagon of ridiculing IGP Ibrahim Kpotun Idris over his “tran...
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
I refused to jump on the bandwagon of ridiculing IGP Ibrahim
Kpotun Idris over his “transmission” speech mishap in Kano the other day,
although I was tempted to intervene by the intentional lies of people who said
the video was “doctored” and by the ignorance of people who said the IGP’s flub
provides evidence of his illiteracy. The
viral video was clearly only edited to shorten it so that it’s easily shareable
on social media; It wasn’t doctored. And Idris was evidently experiencing what
speech-language pathologists call aphasia, which is a symptom of a bigger
problem.
But that’s not my worry. My worry is that, like his predecessor,
IGP Idris has abdicated his position as Inspector General of the Police; he is
now the Inspector General for the President. In my April 18, 2015 column titled
“People President Buhari Must Fire to Show he Means Business,” I mentioned
former IGP Suleiman Abba as the number 2 person that should be fired forthwith.
But I prefaced my suggestions with this forewarning: “My
only caveat is that if [Buhari] will merely replace them with people who will
replicate their notoriety, unprofessionalism, and toxic partisanship in his
government, then there is no point reinventing the wheel. The same people will
change loyalty and render the exact services they rendered to Jonathan—with, of
course, the same results. And we all know what the results are.
“If Buhari is prepared to be a real change agent, to be the
catalyst for Nigeria’s structural and systemic makeover, to be the trendsetter
for future generation of transaction-oriented leaders, he should get rid of the
people listed below and tell their replacements never to repeat their mistakes:”
When I read my November 29, 2014 column titled, “Suleiman Abba: Inspector General for the President (IGP),” I was unnerved by the eeriness
of the similarities between Idris and Abba. They both owe their loyalties not
to the nation or the police but to the presidents who appointed them. Here is
an excerpt from the column:
“Let’s stop the pretense. We have no Inspector General of
Police in Nigeria. What we have is an Inspector General for the President. It’s
still IGP, but we know what the ‘P’ in the initialism actually stands for.
“IGP Suleiman Abba will certainly gown down in the annals as
the most openly politically partisan police chief Nigeria has ever had. In the
ongoing political tension between President Goodluck Jonathan and Speaker of
the House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal, Abba has carried on as if he is no
more than an appendage of the president’s office. But it isn’t his overzealously undisguised partisanship
in and of itself that is unusual; it’s the bewilderingly tasteless showiness
with which he is doing it.
“From instructing his men and women to forcibly deny members
of the House of Representatives entry into their chambers, to initially
spurning the invitation of the House before grudgingly accepting it, to
refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Speaker when he appeared before the
House, Abba has stepped outside the bounds of decency and conventional
policing. He has redefined his role as not the chief law enforcement officer of
the nation but as a protector of the president and a tormentor of his
opponents.
“These days it’s hard to tell the IGP apart from the
People’s Democratic Party’s hacks and spin doctors. In fact, he seems to be
doing a better job at defending the PDP and the President than the people who
are paid to do so. Any Inspector General of Police who outdoes hacks and spin-doctors
in political propaganda is beneath contempt.
“IGP Abba’s reason for refusing to recognize the Speaker is
particularly disingenuous. He said since the legality of the Speaker’s position
is the subject of legal disputation consequent upon his defection to the All
Progressives’ Congress, it would be ‘sub judice’ to address him as the Speaker.
How convenient! Well, actually, Mr. Abba, the opposite holds true: by refusing
to recognize the legality of the Speaker’s position, you’re prejudging the
outcome of the court thereby interfering with due process.
“A careful, non-partisan Inspector General of Police who is
concerned with not being seen as doing or saying anything that would be
misunderstood as biasing ongoing court processes would steer clear of the
partisan bickering between the Speaker and the President by recognizing the
Speaker until the courts declare that he is no longer Speaker by virtue of his
defection to another political party—that is, if the courts have the power to
do that….
“It doesn’t take a lawyer to know that IGP Abba is
unmistakably on the wrong side of the law for refusing to recognize Aminu
Tambuwal as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But even a
self-appointed Inspector General for the President has an obligation to obey
the law.”
Only the time, personalities, and specificity of facts have
changed; everything else has remained the same. Like Abba, Idris is still disrespectful
of the National Assembly in the service of protecting the presidency. Well,
while Abba did grudgingly appear before the House of Representatives in 2014,
Idris has, as of the time of writing this column, refused to.
Because he knows where the president’s real interest lies in
the conflict between crop farmers and cattle herders, he “disobeyed” the
president’s directive to relocate to Benue State to contain the bloodletting in
the state. The fact that he hasn’t been punished after this—and even after
publicly contradicting the presidency’s claim that he had been issued a query—proves
beyond all shadows of doubt that the “directive” to relocate to Benue was a charade.
And Idris knows this only too well.
One would have thought that Idris would learn from the
mistakes of Abba—or that Buhari would work to curb Idris’ embarrassingly excessive
personal loyalty to him because, you know, government outlasts people in the
corridors of power and societies develop only when they build and nurture institutions,
not when people in positions of responsibility worship incumbent power wielders.
No comments
Share your thoughts and opinions here. I read and appreciate all comments posted here. But I implore you to be respectful and professional. Trolls will be removed and toxic comments will be deleted.