A Keynote Address presented to the National Association of Philosophy in Port Harcourt, on November 2, 2023.
By Rev. Fr. John Odey
I wish to offer my sincere thanks to all the members of the National Association of Philosophy for inviting me to deliver the keynote address to this gathering on a theme that touches deeply on our nation and on our very being – Philosophy, Values and Good Governance. In a special way, I wish to thank Prof. Aloy Ihuah, a classmate in St. Augustine’s Major Seminary, Jos. I do not need to be told that he is the person who made this impressive association to know that there is one John Odey that can be entrusted with delivering the keynote address to a gathering of intellectuals of this standing. We saw ourselves last in 1984 when we finished our studies in Jos. That I am here today to deliver this keynote address through his recommendation is a resounding testimony of how we have continued to cherish ourselves as classmates. For both of us, it is a glorious reunion.
In a country like Nigeria where the ethnic and the religious groups to which a person belongs, and not the contents of his character, play a dominant role in the way other people assess who he is and whatever he does, it is difficult to give a keynote address in a conference of this nature without causing some ripples and raising some dust. At this particular time when ethnicity, religion, politics and the judiciary have so badly charged and divided us that one can hardly come to a conference of this nature with an open mind, saying the truth may look like a declaration of war. But truth is not war and it has never caused any war. What I am trying to say here is that while I appreciate the honour given to me to present this keynote address I also pray that you appreciate my predicament in trying to give a brief but true account of the current situation of governance in Nigeria to people who are badly polarized by ethnic, religious and political differences.
The 2023 Elections in Nigeria have come and gone. But their ripple and devastating effects will be here with us for a long time to cast a very dark shadow on Nigeria as a whole and on our judicial system in particular. We saw for the first time in the political history of Nigeria when a man brazenly told Nigerians that he wanted to become the president because it is his turn. We saw for the first time in the history of political elections in Nigeria when the result of the presidential election was announced in the dead of the night when people were sleeping. We saw for the first time the new and very dangerous dimension that was introduced into political elections. In a country that fought three years bloody war to be one; in a country where it is claimed that our unity is non-negotiable, members of a particular ethnic group, I call them the endangered species of the Nigerian polity, were asked to vacate a particular state and go home because they have no right being there.
We saw for the first time in the history of political elections in Nigeria how the chief perpetrator and the prime beneficiary of the savagery that passed for presidential election and the man whose role ought to have been that of an arbitrator colluded and told those who were brazenly swindled to go to court. When they went to the appeal court, the presidential election tribunal judges, who had been planted by the master swindlers to do their bidding, sold their integrity, destroyed democracy, brought shame to the judiciary, put revolting question marks on the legal profession and plunged Nigeria into an unprecedented political turmoil. The aggrieved went to court as they were ordered to and the human beings they met in the court as the presiding judges ended up turning justice into wormwood, the judiciary into the enemy of the common man and the legal profession into an object of mockery and a threshold of consternation.
We thought that this enthronement of criminality and an invitation to anarchy would end in the Appeal Court but we were mistaken. It did not end there. On October 26, 2023 the Judges of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, through their judgment, tore to shreds the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by upholding the earlier ruling of the appeal court. We are back to square one. In the year 2001, in his book, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis, Karl Maier, an American journalist, declared that “Nigeria is the land of no tomorrow.” Twenty-two years later, we are seeing this statement, which must have been regarded by some Nigerians as an unwarranted doomsday prophecy when it was made, becoming a reality. My sympathy goes to the younger generation of Nigerians.
All that happened during and after the 2023 elections so far have compelled Nigeria to keep dancing on the brink of a disaster waiting to happen. And only a dishonest Nigerian can claim that he/she does not know that what happened have very grave, destructive and long-lasting implications for the values we cherish and for good governance. To substantiate this claim and to enable us weigh its validity vis-à-vis what happened in this year’s elections, permit me to cite what I said in the two books I wrote about the 2003 political elections. The first of the two books is called: This Madness Called Election 2003. In that book, knowing that integrity and honour mean nothing for most of our politicians and that they can sacrifice both to get what they want without misgivings, I drew public attention to what would happen if the injustice of that election was upheld. I said:
“There is so much bitterness in the land as a result of the election malpractices. The good people of Nigeria want peace. But there will never be peace until truth and justice are allowed to prevail. If we allow President Obasanjo and his party to go on and rule us on the basis of the elections, which we never had, our children and grandchildren will reap a harvest of social, political and economic disaster, our children will live to curse the day we allowed injustice on the largest scale to prevail in this land.”
How I wished I have been proven wrong! Instead of considering this patriotic observation, I was harassed by the members of the State Security Services (SSS). The harassment they unleashed on me for writing that book is recounted in the second book which I published three months later with the title: After the Madness Called Election 2003. In spite of the harassment, I did not mitigate my denouncement of what had happened in the second book. In it I wrote:
“What is at stake is the fact that we, the common Nigerians, are being educated by our leaders to believe that democracy has neither principles nor rules and regulations to guide its practice. The danger is that we are being made to believe that we are not worth a dime in our leaders’ scale of value. The tragedy of it all is that our leaders, after introducing lawlessness as a political dogma which every one of us who wishes to live in Nigeria has to embrace, turned round to cast aspersions on those who are the victims of their excesses. Lastly, what has endangered the survival of this and other democracies in Nigeria is the wrongful belief that people who are elected by no one can be enthroned without qualms once they have been able to conquer and silence us through the illegal deployment of the army and the police to compel us to submission.
“The boiling issue is that the president and his men have introduced a very treacherous dimension into election rigging. They have turned political elections into a full-blown war against the people who do not agree with them. And in this war, all you need in order to conquer are instruments of terror. You need guns, the army and the police. If the number of the army and the policemen you have is inadequate, you can create your own army and the police simply by placing order for more military and police uniforms. When those uniforms arrive, you put them on a good number of political hoodlums, give them very dangerous guns, and let them loose on the people in the name of peacekeepers.
“As far as this new trend in elections is concerned, the president and his men have made it clear to us that working hard as a leader, keeping electoral promises to the people, performing well in office, building up goodwill among the people and so forth are no longer good enough to make the people elect you again. Instead of wasting your time trying to work hard, keep electoral promises, perform well in office and build goodwill among the people, all you need is to seize the party structure by appointing those who will do your bidding from the cradle to the top, from the wards to the national level. At stake are the pervasion of justice and the subversion of the people’s will. And if there is any Nigerian who does not yet understand that the only solution to violent protests and possible disintegration of the country is the practice of good governance and the enthronement of justice, that person must be naïve.”
Once more, I said all of the above twenty years ago. How I wished again I have been proven wrong! It is unfortunate that everything about the 2023 elections proved me right. The 2007 political elections were twice as bad as those of 2003. Then, in 2023, somebody just had the temerity to tell Nigerians that it is his turn to rule Nigeria and he got what he wanted by hook, crook and savagery and ordered the Supreme Court to tell Nigerians who have been yearning for a change to keep their mouths shut. While our mouths are shut, his supporters are certainly celebrating because of what is called their landslide victory in the Nigerian political parlance. But the other side of their victory is that they may not know how deep the grave they have dug for Nigeria is. It is a bottomless pit. We can call it a political Armageddon.
Those of us who do not like the fact that Nigeria has been reduced to a criminal enterprise may have no alternative since the Supreme Court has spoken. But as powerless and helpless as Nigerians may be, what is clear to them is that no Supreme Court has the right to destroy the legal foundation of a country. But we have to obey, remain calm, suffer, lament and sometimes die in silence because those controlling the levers of power and the judiciary are absolutely in charge of every bit of the situation. They have the police, the army, the Department of State Services (DSS), the public media houses, and the deadly political thugs. They control the nation’s treasury and so have all the money needed to buy the conscience of all of the above.
But it is most unfortunate that they do not spare any thought for the repercussions of their actions. What will future elections look like now that the savagery that passed for 2023 presidential election has been approved and legitimized by the Supreme Court? Since the people’s votes no longer count, will there continue to be any need for the four-year ritual called political election? And if there is, will people abandon whatever they do to survive the hunger and the despair imposed on them by our tyrannical leaders to come out to cast the votes they know will not count? If the army, the police and the DSS have decided to divert their allegiance to the nation to unscrupulous election riggers, will that not lead to some kind of fierce dictatorship that will do nobody any good? Granted that the judgement of the Supreme Court is in conformity with the nation’s constitutional provision, is it not time Nigerians think of amending a constitution that gives one man the right to ride roughshod over a nation of more than 225 million people?
What lesson do our revered judges want us to learn in cases where the so-called legal technicality has been twisted to the point that it has become a glaring legal absurdity? One instance is enough to establish this claim. The law of the land says, among other things, that whoever shall become the president of Nigeria must score 25 percent votes in Abuja, the Federal Capital. Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party scored the 25 percent votes. Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress did not score the 25 percent. It is the law of karma that people will reap whatever seed they plant. Does it ever occur to the people responsible for the current dismal state of our nation that their children will also live to reap the seed they are sowing today? We have always claimed that the future belongs to the young ones. Why is it that people who have grown old and expired in mind and body have decided to destroy the present and the future of our younger generation?
Talking about values and good governance in Nigeria at this troubled time is a herculean task that demands courage, determination, and patriotic zeal. But the members of this conference are not here on a picnic. We are here to ask necessary questions as to why Nigeria should be in the current mess and to try to provide necessary answers to those questions with the aim of finding a way forward.
About twenty years ago, a conference similar to this was held in Bigard Memorial Seminary Enugu, with the theme: Philosophy, Democracy and Responsible Governance in Africa. It was Msgr. Theophilus Okere who gave the keynote address. After he had lamented over the self-inflicted leadership woes tormenting the whole of African continent, he concluded his address by challenging African philosophers to do something. He said: “We have blamed Kant and Hegel for their racist anthropology. Now if they are wrong about us, what is right about us especially in the light of this ugly human African condition? Our philosophers have questions to answer.”
I believe that I am addressing a substantial segment of the intellectual cream and concerned Nigerians in this conference. For that reason, permit me to say, like Okere, that all of us have questions to answer about the current state of our nation. In its true meaning, democracy is a system of governance that allows people the right and the freedom to choose those to be their leaders. But most of our politicians see it from a different perspective. For this reason, as far as governance is concerned, the worst form of corruption is election rigging. It is the fulcrum around which every other crime committed against the people in the name of leadership revolves. In a nation where election rigging is non-existent or at least minimal, the man who is inclined to be a dictator, to siphon public money into his personal account or to give every plum job and top level appointment in government to his kinsmen will be compelled to do the needful each time he remembers the next election and that the people will vote him out if he does not change his evil ways.
Nigeria became an independent country on October 1, 1960. Barely four years later election rigging strangled the beautiful dreams of the founding fathers of the nation. It is on record that the immediate cause of the January 15, 1966 military coup in Nigeria which eventually escalated to the Nigeria/ Biafra war was the December 1964 Federal Election Crisis in the Old Western Nigeria and the rigging of the Western Nigeria Parliamentary Elections in October 1965. Since then Nigeria has been teetering from one election rigging to the other.
This year, Nigeria is 63 years an independent nation. A fool at 40 is said to be a fool forever. How do we classify a fool at 63? Would it be wrong to say that a fool at 63 is a living dead who is doomed to twist and turn in his grave with palpable but irredeemable regrets? Nigeria is where it is today because some greedy, selfish and myopic persons who planted themselves as political behemoths have jettisoned the cherished values enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and in the perfunctory National Pledge, such as truth, justice, honesty, unity, loyalty, patriotism, equal opportunity for all and obedience to the law of the land, in favour of ethnic cliquism, religious bigotry and mind-boggling spate of nepotism.
Permit me to conclude this address with my imaginary projection of what it will take to bring about good governance in Nigeria. In 2004, President Olusegun Obasanjo gave national award to many Nigerians, including Prof. Chinua Achebe. Achebe declined the award and gave his reasons. In 2011 President Goodluck Jonathan gave national award to 365 Nigerians including Chinua Achebe who again declined the award and gave his reasons, the summary of which was that national award should not be given to people like a party cake that gets to everybody present when insecurity and other problems were making life a hell for common Nigerians. On September 17, 2012, President Jonathan gave another national award to 149 Nigerians. On September 30, 2012, I wrote an article with the title, National Award Again: Is President Jonathan Under A Spell? in my column with The Voice newspaper. Believing that President Jonathan is a good man who was determined to restore Nigeria to her former glory but could not be allowed by those we call political cabals in our midst, it is in that article that I said what I call my imaginary projection here. I wrote:
By giving such award at this time when the nation is on the brink of extinction because the Federal Government is as helpless as a cripple in the face of intimidating insecurity raises many questions about how wrongly our leaders have placed the nation’s priorities. Nigeria is going. It is dying. Like a wise president that he is, and based on the hindsight of the anger which such national award generated last year, the thinking of most Nigerians is that our president should have put the conferment of national award this year in the cooler and then deal with the herculean insecurity problem first.
I have also severally told people that the man who will begin the process of bringing Nigeria back from the precipice must be brave enough to distance himself from the trappings of power, affluence and false security. Like a real gallant soldier of his country, like a truly loving father of his country, he must be prepared to lay his life honourably for that country if the need arises. He may well begin with a symbolic action that will prove to the people that a no-nonsense man has come to put things in order and most likely compel the people to give him the chance to save the country. For instance, instead of spending billions of our money organizing the installation of the new president and instead of telling the presidential speech writer to steal the best statements from some of the world’s greatest statesmen and arrange them in such a way that they would make great impact on the ears of gullible and suffering and smiling Nigerians, he may decide not to waste our money and to write no long speech. In the alternative, he may tell people to dig his grave wherever he would like to be buried.
Having dug the grave, on the day of the swearing in, he should take all those who are interested in the welfare of this country to that grave. Standing by the grave, and in political parlance, after “all other protocols” must have been observed, he should address those present in the following or similar words:
“Fellow country men and women, I thank you for electing me as the president of this our great country. For me, today is not a day of long and beautiful inaugural address. The spate of insecurity and the other problems bedevilling the country make such a luxury which we cannot afford today. It is a time for sober reflection and action. I have set the pace for the type of action I am calling for by preparing my grave here as the first and foremost thing I will do as the president of Nigeria. You may wonder why I have decided to do a thing like this which certainly looks bizarre. The reason is that anybody who wants to rule Nigeria and to correct the many ills bedevilling the country should be prepared to die any moment. This grave should serve as a proof to you all that I am prepared to do what is right without fear or favour and that I am prepared to give my life in the process to ensure a better future for generations yet unborn if the need arises. I want to make the following one pledge and one request:
“The Pledge: As the president of this country, I am not above the law of the land. I will therefore respect both the letter and the spirit of our constitution. If I break any of the laws of the land, make me to pay for it accordingly. Similarly, under my administration, no Nigerian, no matter how powerful, rich or influential he may be, will break the law of the land and go free. That is why this grave is here waiting for me to go in.
“The Request: Should I try to do what is right and use my position as the president of Nigeria to compel other Nigerians to do what is right and then get killed in the process, I ask that you do me the favour of letting the world know about that in my epitaph. You will do me a great favour if you will be kind enough to write on the plaque that will adorn my grave, this grave here, that “Here lies the remains of Mr. X who was killed because as the president of Nigeria he brooked no nonsense in order to put an end to the many ills bedevilling his country, Nigeria.”
My imaginary projection ends here. I must admit that the problem with this projected symbolic action is that those who have taken cover under ethnic cliquism and religion, organized a robbery syndicate, and have been stealing Nigeria dry cannot give good people who would think of doing something like this the chance to rule the country. This leaves Nigerians who have been clamouring for a positive change at the mercy of despair. But despair is not a philosophy of life. It is a philosophy of death.
In other words, now that one man’s ambition has turned Nigeria into everything that a nation should not be; now that the Supreme Court has destroyed the judicial system, to please one man out of 225 million citizens, by letting Nigerians know that there is no need studying law, we should study only technicalities; now that the fear of one man has become the beginning of wisdom in Nigeria because he threatened to cause chaos and anarchy if he was not allowed to rule Nigeria for not scoring 25 percent votes in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, as clearly stated by the law; now that it has become very clear that nothing good is allowed to work in Nigeria; now that our corrupt, greedy and selfish political leaders in cahoots with the judiciary allow only bad things to work and they work against good people, against justice, against truth, against honesty, against hard work, against patriotism, against competence, against our youths and against ordinary Nigerians, where do we go from here? What will be the fate of our children and generations after them? I shudder in trepidation and sorrow that our country has been reduced to a criminal enterprise.
When the Supreme Court of Nigeria validated electoral corruption, which ranks as the worst form of corruption in a democratic system of government, as it did on October 26, 2023, Nigeria stands finished. We therefore have every good reason to say indeed there was a country. When the citizens of a country get to a point where they cannot summon the courage to rise up in unison and call evil by its name and refuse to go along with it; when the citizens of a country get to a point where they cannot say this is democracy and this evil cannot stand, they have become slaves of democracy. Must Nigerians allow this criminality to hold? How long are we prepared to live in the shadow of electoral savagery and judicial corruption in our country? Can this Conference of Nigerian Philosophers offer any solution?
I thank everybody for listening and pray for the success of this conference.
