Franklin Otorofani, Esquire
 Published June
29th, 2008
 In international law, a state is a geo-political entity
with defined geographical boundaries, (actual or proximate);
a definite population, an effective government and, most
importantly, recognized as such by the international
community.
International recognition is at the heart of a state. A
state is so-called only if it enjoys international
recognition by preponderance of sovereign states of the UN.
A corollary to this is that a state could lose its statehood
if recognition is withdrawn by the international community
through the UN. Currently Taiwan is dealing with the issue
of international recognition due to China’s strident,
sustained objection to its statehood. Though Taiwan is a
country and might even delude itself as having the status of
statehood, it’s not as yet fully recognized as a state by a
preponderance of states. And it’s likely to retain its
quasi-statehood for the foreseeable future as the rapidly
advancing China is in no mood to brook any recognition of
the Republic of Taiwan, considered its renegade province, as
a state. Not even the United States is ready to dare China
and accord Taiwan recognition.
Recognition thus distinguishes a state from a country or for
that matter, a nation. It follows that the ability of a
geo-political entity to engage effectively in international
intercourse depends on its statehood. However, whether a
political/administrative territory is a state, nation,
country, or a dependency, there is always some form of
government in charge of its affairs however designated. In
other words, governance exists regardless of the status of a
people or territory, in international law.
The word ‘governance’ must not be confused with the word
‘government’. While government may be defined as a
collectivity of institutions that presides over the affairs
of a given territorial population, governance itself refers
to the ways and means by which the functions of government
are carried out—the software of government, if you like, in
which government itself can be likened to its hardware in
computer-speak.
In the same vein, the terms ‘government’ and ‘governance’
are different from the term ‘administration’ which, in our
case, is the equivalent of ‘a particular government’ in time
and place. An ‘administration’ therefore, can be viewed as a
time, term, and place-specific government; i.e. government
in place and time—tenure. In other words, an
‘administration’ comprises of a given set of functionaries,
either periodically recruited through a democratic process,
or otherwise imposed through some extra-constitutional
happenstance, as for instance, in a military coup, together
with its own appointees to fill pre-existing and/or
additional slots in the machinery of government.
It’s important to clarify these terms in order to properly
situate the subject matter of this article. While
‘governments’ or ‘administrations’ may come and go
‘governance’ remains a going concern. It is, in essence, an
automated, seamless social process of territorial political
administration. That means governance can and does exist in
the absence of ‘a government.’ This is so because governance
is not an individual function but the cumulative, collective
activities of institutions of state that has a life of its
own separate from the life (tenure) of the political heads
of governments that superintend over the institutions of
government. Governance as above defined can thus be divorced
from its functionaries as consisting of institutions and
their political/administrative processes.
A government voted into power as, for instance, in a
democracy, or a military junta shooting its way to power,
would more often than not inherit a basket of functioning
political/cum institutions of state in place notwithstanding
the demise of its predecessor. And such pre-existing
institutions of state only need to be attuned to the
policies and programs of the new ‘administration’ or
‘regime’ as the case may be, to continue the cycle of
continuity. These institutions do not necessarily require
the physical presence of their political heads to continue
to function in the short run. As such, the death or absence
of the political heads of a particular administration does
not fundamentally affect the activities or functions of
governance, at least, not in the short run, until new
political heads emerge to issue new directives in
governance; retain and/or modify existing ones. Thus, while
governments are temporal, and therefore time specific,
governance is permanent, or if you like quasi-permanent. So
long as the geo-political entity remains a going concern,
its governance is a never-ending process that is co-terminus
with the life or existence of the geo-political entity
itself.
The above postulation is self evident but nevertheless
requires some elucidation. In relative terms, a state is by
no means a temporal but permanent geo-political expression.
The operative word is ‘permanent.’ States are not created as
‘temporary’ geo-political entities though ‘permanency’ here
is understandably relative rather than absolute.
However, it’s not just the state itself that enjoys the
attributes of permanency. Just like the states, permanency
also defines the institutions of states, and to a more or
lesser degree, functionaries of governments of states. It
follows, therefore, that permanency of governance conduces
to permanency of governmental institutions and, ipso facto,
the programs and policies embodied in those institutions, as
well as the functionaries of the states. This is why, for
example, Congressmen and women remain in the US Congress for
life as senators and members of House of Representatives.
It’s not uncommon to find US senators retiring after putting
in 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years in Congress! The oldest
serving US Senator from the state of Virginia is already 90
years and he’s just getting started! This service lifespan
epitomizes not only the permanency of the US Congress as a
democratic institution of governance, but also of the
functionaries of that institution, themselves. The attribute
of permanency imbues Congress with the qualities of
legislative solidity, authority, experience, respect, and
professional competence, not otherwise achievable through a
regime of fleeting tenure-ship, otherwise referred to as
term limits.
This attribute transcends the judiciary and the legislature
extending as it did to the White House itself thus
completing what might be termed “Trinity of Permanency,”
comprising the Executive, Legislature, and the Judiciary.
The US presidency, until Watergate, represented the
permanency of both institution and its occupants until term
limit was introduced due to the abuse of executive powers by
President Richard Nixon. Watergate inspired a constitutional
amendment that introduced term limit to the US presidency
otherwise there would have been no limitations whatsoever
placed on a sitting US president going for re-election over
and over again until death did him/her part with the
presidency or otherwise voted out of power, just as it is in
the US Senate today.
Perhaps no other institution exemplifies the feature of
permanency of tenure-ship than the US Judiciary where both
the institution and its functionaries share the same quality
of permanency. Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed
for life and thus remain permanent fixtures in the nation’s
highest court with the privilege of stamping their judicial
authority on the land as long as they live! Once nominated
by the President and confirmed by the Senate, a US Supreme
Court Justice has a job for life, not subject to term limit.
In other words, he/she has a ‘life term!’ Who says only
dictators go for and enjoy life-terms? Judges too! Thus a
permanent governmental institution like the Supreme Court is
complemented by a permanent tenure of its justices. The
reader should note the term ‘complement,’ for the life terms
of its functionaries are complemented by longevity of the
institution itself. The one is the complement of the other,
enforcing and reinforcing as they do, institutional
solidity, history, and cohesion for the overall growth and
stability of the system. Permanency of institutions and
their functionaries is further complemented by permanency of
policies and programs run by their institutions and
functionaries. A nation thus stands on what could be
described as a tripod of permanency—institutions,
functionaries, and policies or what was described above as
Trinity of Permanency.
A stable nation therefore, is one that exhibits to a greater
extent, the quality of permanence of institutions, policies,
and as well as functionaries. Institutions are products of
the individuals they are comprised of and as such draw their
reputations—fame or notoriety from the cumulative acts of
their functionaries and not the other way around.
Put succinctly, institutions are built or destroyed, as the
case may be, by individuals. And the goal of institutional
development cannot be achieved through high level personal
turnover. This point cannot be stressed enough. The surefire
way to destroy an institution is by engendering an
atmosphere of instability through high turnover rate of its
highest level political/administrative functionaries.
The same equally holds true for governmental policies and
programs. Take for instance the social security policy of
the United States and the Health policies of Britain,
Canada, France, Japan, and other industrialized countries.
These policies were put in place decades ago and they remain
intact regardless of the government in power at any given
time. Administrations may come and go but the policies
remain, while being subjected to fine tuning and perfection
over several administrations without abandoning them for
fresh ones with every new government coming in. The result
is the stability and near certainty in the operations of
these policies.
Citizens of these countries have come to see these policies
and programs as being always there for them when they need
them and their existence do not depend on political
exigencies or the party in power at any given time. These
policies and programs were there before they were born. They
served their grandparents and parents well; they’re serving
them well, and they will serve their children well—and, with
every confidence and near certainty, the policies and
programs will equally serve their grand and great grand
children well.
This is one of the stark differences between developed,
stable societies of the West and East, and the
underdeveloped, unstable societies of the South, like
Nigeria and most of Africa. Mature societies are defined by
the stability of governmental institutions, policies, and
functionaries. Conversely, immature societies are notorious
for policy summersaults, institutional instability, and high
personnel turnover rates at the highest levels of
administration.
Nigeria fits snugly into the above description. She is the
epitome of impermanence and instability and therefore the
concomitant absence of development. There is a direct link
between political and therefore institutional instability
and underdevelopment. The country Nigeria has acquired
notoriety not only for abrupt policy summersaults, but also
institutional and personnel changes, usually at the most
destabilizing of times! High level political appointees are
ousted while on official duties abroad representing Nigeria
and the government that just humiliated them out of office
without notice! Pray, who would die or stick out his neck
for such a country? Is it any wonder that ‘patriotism’ is
the last word on the lips of Nigerian political appointees,
and indeed, Nigerians in general?
The abrupt ouster of Nigeria’s anti-corruption Czar,
Chairman Nuhu Ribadu, is only one of a long list of such
unflattering examples of Nigeria’s derailed continuity and
relative permanence of functionaries in governance. His
acting successor was similarly removed while on official
duty abroad! And you wonder what kind of a country is this?
Policy summersaults have not only created a profile of
instability and uncertainty for the nation, thus scarring
away potential foreign investments, but has also resulted in
Nigeria’s arrested development amply attested to by the
quantum of abandoned projects which are now permanent
monuments of her national developmental failures. Abandoned
projects that would have cost the nation only a few millions
of dollars to build years ago cannot now be completed simply
because their costs have skyrocketed beyond reach. A case in
point is the erstwhile Lagos Metroline project which now has
to be drastically scaled back to a ‘light rail’ because of
costs implications. That was a project initiated by the
Lateef Jakande administration in the Second Republic, but
callously abandoned by the military. Other ready examples
are the national ID card project and the National Population
Census; projects that could have been consummated decades
ago at mere fractions of their present forbidding cost
profiles.
The nation has lost so much in abandoned policies and
projects that it might not be out of place to consider the
act of project and policy abandonment as a form of economic
sabotage and criminal misconduct warranting the full wrath
of the law, except where compelling reasons dictate
otherwise. There is no gainsaying the fact that the losses
incurred by the nation by the callous and abandonment of
policies and projects amount to trillions of dollars enough
to bring the country to the status of a developed nation—all
wasted by individual rulers who don’t see anything right,
but see everything wrong with the policies and projects
embarked upon by their predecessors in power.
Enters Iwu and INEC:
It’s for the foregoing reasons that the author fervently
calls on all well meaning Nigerians to prevail on the
Yar’Adua administration to break the pernicious cycle of
policy summersaults and project abandonment in order to move
the nation forward. The nation makes no progress whatsoever
with what appears to have metamorphosed into a policy of
‘destroy and rebuild’ that has animated our development
agenda over the decades, which more than anything else, has
been responsible for the nation’s stunted growth and
development. And one area to begin this cyclical break is no
other than INEC and its Chairman, Maurice Iwu.
In the aftermath of the results of the general elections the
drumbeat of calls for Iwu’s resignation and/or removal
reached its crescendo after the presidential election. Sore
losers, notably Abubakar Atiku, who was the presidential
candidate of his one-man party, AC, and Muhammadu Buhari,
who contested under the platform of the ANPP, strenuously
sought to make Iwu and INEC their scapegoats. Maurice Iwu, a
patriotic Nigerian with an uncommon commitment to advancing
our electoral processes, became the bogeyman who must be
sacrificed to appease electoral failures. With raw emotions
fueled by the misguided reports by foreign election
monitors, reaching boiling points, Iwu was strenuously
portrayed more as the PDP Chairman than that of an
independent electoral commission.
While the Iwu bashing lasted gullible Nigerians were easily
mislead and got carried away with Atiku and AC inspired
anti-Iwu rhetoric. The overturn of a couple gubernatorial
elections, even though more on technicality than on
substantive issues, only served to pour fuel on the raging
anti-Iwu inferno. It took the decisive decision of the
Federal Court of Appeal to de-oxygenate the inferno that
could have engulfed the nation and reduce it to ashes.
Yet, the call for Iwu’s ouster, though somewhat muted, has
not completely ceased. Failed politicians are not banking on
Yar’Adua to assuage their bruised egos with Iwu ouster in
his much talked about cabinet reshuffle exercise as if Iwu
is Yar’Adua’s minister. For the avoidance of doubt Iwu was
appointed for a term certain with all the security of tenure
that goes with it. That said, it’s fair to say that the tide
of public opinion has changed somewhat, thanks to the Court
of Appeal decision. If the second highest judicial authority
in the land that had ruled against INEC in the past could
find that the presidential election was conducted in
‘substantial compliance’ with the electoral law and the
constitution, there was no basis to discredit Iwu. On the
contrary the man who achieved the impossible for the nation
(where all his predecessors failed) deserves nothing short
of a medal.
Iwu has so far weathered the storm and I would give credit
to President Yar’Adua and other patriotic Nigerians who
stood by him through thick and thin, for not listening to
the voices of retrogression advancing their parochial agenda
in disguise. The case has been fought and won in court on
the basis of facts presented and the applicable law before a
panel of independent Justices, not Ahmadu Alli or OBJ-appointed
panel.
And there was more good news for Iwu and INEC still:
Gubernatorial election re-runs ordered by tribunals
generally acclaimed even by Atiku himself as free and fair
and therefore credible, returned the same PDP governors
whose prior elections were condemned by the opposition as
PDP’s fraudulent impositions allegedly with Iwu’s
connivance. These credible gubernatorial re-runs conducted
by Iwu, which returned the same governors previously
declared as winners proved one and only one point that was
already judicially reaffirmed: that is, the general, in
particular, presidential and gubernatorial elections, were
conducted in ‘substantial compliance’ with the electoral
laws of the land and therefore credible before the laws of
the land. When the nation’s highest court, just like the
American Supreme Court in Vice President Al-Gore’s case in
the 2000 US presidential election, makes a final judicial
pronouncement, it’s taken as the final word on the issue,
even if we disagree with its verdict. In the same vein
Yar’Adua’s election as declared by INEC has been adjudged as
valid and until that decision is set aside it’s the final
word on the issue. Nigerians must respect judicial decisions
even if they disagree with them. As such those still
publicly claiming that Yar’Adua was imposed on the nation or
that the presidential election was stolen even in the face
of the judicial pronouncement are doing great disservice to
the nation in general and the judiciary in particular. They
cannot therefore claim to be democrats when they so treat
judicial decisions with contempt.
The same results would be returned were the elections to be
conducted by God Himself or his angels from heaven and Atiku
and Buhari would still complain of rigging! However, to hold
that the elections were conducted in substantial compliance
with the electoral law is not to say that the elections were
flawless, but that whatever flaws there were did not rise to
the level of gross or wholesale non-compliance with the
electoral law as to render the results therefor, a nullity.
The problem is not with Iwu but our politicians. We could
change INEC Chairs a thousand times but if our politicians
do not change, nothing will change.
The trashing of Abubakar Atiku in his own state and even
local government area in the Adamawa State gubernatorial
re-run has exposed Atiku’s electoral hollowness even in his
own backyard. No wonder AC only did well in Lagos where
ex-Governor Bola Tinubu held sway. In terms of electoral
calculus Tinubu is a whole lot worth more than Atiku and
therefore better suited to fly AC’s presidential flag. Atiku
is now a liability to AC; not that he was ever an asset in
the first place. And as he flees from the US to Dubai in the
United Arab Republic (UAR) over the Jefferson case in which
he has been cited, it will be well for the AC to strip Atiku
of its leadership if it doesn’t want the party to be run
from Dubai, which Atiku has made his first country against
Nigeria.
With the tide of public opinion turning against Atiku and
the AC, now is the time to give Iwu all the support and
encouragement to proceed with God’s speed with his reform
agenda for the agency. Now is not the time to change a
winning team, and I would therefore expect Mr. President to
stoutly resist any attempt by pressure groups to undermine
the good works Iwu has done with INEC. The Ribadu treatment
has no place for Iwu because he has a term certain and his
removal can only be carried out with the concurrence of the
senate on legally stipulated grounds, not on a presidential
whim as happened to Ribadu and Lamorde.
The onerous task of building enduring democratic
institutions entails not only democratic continuity but
institutional and leadership continuity as well. Iwu has
proved his mettle and has been validated and vetted by an
independent Judiciary that bluntly refused to visit the sins
of our ethically challenged, fraud-prone politicians, on the
electoral Czar. And, as the nation awaits the Supreme Court
verdict in the appeal before it, all that I’m permitted to
say for now is, Mr. President:
Let Iwu Be!
“…for the sake of institutional growth, solidity, and
cohesion.”
INEC Chairman, Prof. Maurice Iwu, must not be sacrificed to
appease the gods of electoral failures before and after the
Supreme Court verdict, which I humbly predict, will uphold
the Appeal Court decision on grounds of law and facts alone
as presented at the hearings, not necessarily on the basis
of overriding national interests, as some mischief makers
would want the world to believe.
And I dare say that if Mr. President will keep his job with
a favorable Appeal and Supreme Court decision which in
effect, is the ultimate vindication of INEC, Iwu deserves to
keep his too! How about that for equity and fair-play, Mr.
President?
Let Iwu Be!!
 Franklin Otorofani, Esq. is a Nigerian-Attorney based in the United States
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