It’s time to immortalise, by Tonnie Iredia

ex-President Shehu Shagari Whenever Nigeria chooses to honour anyone, there are two things that do not appear well considered.The first is the honouree’s past while the second is the likely impact that subsequent events may have on the reasonability of the decision which influenced the honour. The first is truly bad because of its failure to recognise the saying that ‘to understand today so as to plan better for the future, it is important to comprehend yesterday.’ Using the emotions of a particular time to make crucial decisions can easily be overwhelmed by new events which come after the honour. On this score, Nigeria must make greater efforts to avoid being propelled by only the spur of the moment to make decisions. 

Last week’s decision of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to honour his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari who died a few days earlier raised many concerns. On the positive side, Tinubu was praised for displaying exemplary personal commitment to the honouring of a former president.  Considering the enormous task of the office, its holders ought to be celebrated; but the celebration must be carefully implemented not to provoke anger from some citizens. Put differently, the person being honoured must deserve it in every respect. It is not enough to honour a person for holding a dignified office orto be honoured at death in line with African culture.

To honour the dead does not mean that the celebration has to be lavish. In 2018, when former president Shehu Shagari, died, Buhari who was president at the time did not act as Tinubu has just done. Between then and now, nothing has been done to immortalise Shagari who was indeed, the nation’s first executive president. Meanwhile, there is so much that posterity can gain if the country honours Shagari. Apart from Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa, no other Nigerian leader has been as clean in office as Shagari in terms of amassing wealth. Unlike their predecessors who built personal mansions and used tax payers’ money to attend to their health challenges or to send their children to schools abroad;Shagari lived a simple life.

During my tenure as Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority NTA, I visited Sokoto to establish a Zonal Network Centre in the ancient city. On a courtesy visit on the former president. I met him in a poorly furnished living room with a rustic television set. Yet, he was able to make several persuasive observations about what he called the newly improved NTA and urged me to keep the flag flying. I had to direct the NTA Sokoto to procure a new tv set for our former president who was removed from office by ‘reformers’ who turned out to be less patriotic. One of the reasons for his removal was that our hospitals during his tenure were mere consulting clinics without medicines. In due course, those who removed Shagari from office neither improved the consulting clinics nor were they treated there.

Although it was quite easy to see that Shagari was personally a disciplined leader, he was booted out ostensibly for his failure to control his corrupt ministers. In which case, he was forced to carry the burden of vicarious liability which is normal because in civilized systems a leader is accountable for the conduct of his aides.  In later years, it became official that Shagari was not corrupt because two different panels set up to probe him found nothing against the man. Should we not have immortalized a wrongly vilified leader? After Shagari, corruption was no longer restricted to ministers, almost every leader has either been indicted or had become billionaires at the expense of the nation.

Why has no one been held vicariously liable for the conduct of their officials. After Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, his national security adviser Sambo Dasuki was arrested and detained for longer than made sense. Jonathan his principal was never questioned. After Buhari’s government his CBN governor Godwin Emiefele has been under prosecution. Buhari who was well known as a lover of change of national currency which adversely affected thousands of Nigerians was never interrogated. Why were Shagari and his deputy, Dr. Alex Ekwueme the only ones punished for what their officials did? An answer to this question can put our leadership story in proper perspective that would in turn make those in office engage in introspection.

Another reason Shagari was toppled was because the general elections of 1983 which saw his re-election and the victories of candidates of his National Party of Nigeria NPN wereseen as massive rigging. Anyone who has followed Nigerian elections would readily agree that as bad as the 1983 contest was, it was better than most of the ones we have had since 1999. Whereas it is good that our military has stayed away from politics despite our recent irritating elections, those who are superintending the processes particularly the electoral body and the judiciary need to think twice. Otherwise, history will not be kind to them especially if anyone attempts to honour them anytime soon. Their abuse of technology and conflicting judgments will dishonour such honours.

What would immediately make such honours perverse would be the absence of any link between the performance of those honoured and the specific honours given to them. For example, those who think it is good to honour Buhari can hardly comprehend why he deserves to be used to distort the history of a centre of academic excellence such as the University of Maiduguri. The former president neither hailed from the North East nor was he ever known as a lover of education. As president, none of his budgets for 8 years pointed to education as a priority. Even the legislators’ fake constituency projects which his government could not stop never pretended any day to prioritize any educational pursuit. It would probably have been more tolerable if the train service to Niger was named after the former president.

We certainly need to change our culture of bestowing unreasoned honours. There is no better time than now for those mandated to handle the subject to be more diligent and rational. It is an aspect of national history that we are yet to make some progress as we keep taking several wrong steps. In 2011 for example, this column fiercely criticised our national honours list of the year for once again offering to honour celebrated literary giant, Professor Chinua Achebe which he again turned down. His reason was that what influenced his refusal of the previous national honour offered him had not changed. Why did the committee not investigate the reasons Achebe adduced earlier before making another effort to include him in a new list?

More importantly, the parameters for selecting a person for the award are quite difficult to understand given the nature of those usually selected. We seem to have suddenly turned the exercise into a quota system assignment. Governors, Ministers and Legislators appear to now have their allocated figures. So, when at that time the governors that were picked did not include Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State that many thought was the best of the group, a question mark was immediately put on the selection. It was also observed that certain office holders were automatic winners, a good example being the office of the head of service of the federation whose occupants each ends up with the award of CFR.

In 2011, when the nation was being bombed incessantly by terrorists, the then Inspector General of Police whose headquarters was boldly attacked was among the security heads who were listed for national honours that year. Certainly, to decorate every occupant of an office with a particular award is a ritual because in the strict sense not every appointee would be hardworking enough to deserve the award. The case of the president which gets the highest award of GCFR is even more difficult to appreciate. If every president gets the award, the day he is sworn-in, it means it is not an award for excellent service but a decoration. It is better for a president to get it after leaving service so we can at least pretend that it was given as a reward for hard work at the end of a tenure. 

Except we change the current convention, the likelihood is that the awards would have little value. Awards should be self-explanatory, rather than the cash and carry type that our governors get from newspapers annually. For as long as citizens struggle often to imagine why someone got an award, for that long will such distractions make us forget who to really celebrate. It is time in our considered opinion for Tinubu to immortalize president Shehu Shagari who was both a defacto and dejure president having come to office through the only legitimate channel – ballot box.

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