The silencing of Mallam el-Rufai!

The ex-militant turned university proprietor, Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, and a former Federal Capital Territory Minister, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, have something in common: Both men make President Goodluck Jonathan appear powerless.

They both call the virility of the overarching powers he personifies into question when they make statements capable of inciting violence and disrupting the body polity. Even when they don’t speak directly about Jonathan, their rhetoric manages to go back to his authority. When last weekend, the State Security Services summoned el-Rufai for questioning, eyebrows were raised. Why pick on one and leave the other? The answer is simple: Asari-Dokubo is not el-Rufai.

Jonathan needs Asari-Dokubo for the same reason a frightened person needs a pit bull: To scare supposed enemies.

Asari-Dokubo is neither an environmental activist nor particularly a friend of Jonathan. Rather, he is Jonathan’s strong arm; the one who will articulate what the President cannot because of the bounds of political correctness. As the 2015 elections draw near, Asari-Dokubo will serve as a vociferous moral conscience to remind us that we, the Nigerian people, owe it to the Niger Delta to return Jonathan to power whether he performs or not because he is the first President from the Niger Delta that has fed Nigeria for more than five decades. In case our conscience has been seared with a hot iron, he will threaten us that when it comes to oil production in the Niger Delta, the white man that made the pencil also made the eraser; that we cannot take their oil and throw out their son.

Now, why would anyone want such a messenger silenced? Why will the SSS go after him for threatening war when it knows that even if the Peoples Democratic Party loses, the man will not go to war as long as he keeps getting paid?

El-Rufai, however, taunts the President’s strength differently.

He speaks as a learned man, not a common thug. He has a pedigree and for all it is worth, has a following too. People take him seriously and he is a visible figure. Somebody like that cannot be allowed to propagate a campaign of violence for the 2015 elections. He needs to be taught that there are limits to free speech. In the process of showing who’s the boss, the state however risks making a martyr out of him.

I must say I find the conduct of the SSS in arresting the diminutive Mallam overzealous. When did going after citizens’ over their mis-statement ever replace serious intelligence gathering? If the man has something up his sleeves, why not investigate him properly and then arrest him for whatever crime? Why harass el-Rufai for saying what Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) and even ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo have said? What were they trying to prove?

But of course, that does not mean el-Rufai was justified. When people like him summon up the likelihood of post-election violence –either as a threat, warning or just by way of speaking — I wonder three things.

One, on what planet do they live that they do not see that Nigeria is bleeding heavily already? If the incessant killings in Nigeria are not acts of “violence,” then what is violent enough for them? Some days ago, some 40 people were killed in Adamawa State and from the way these things go in Nigeria, their deaths will probably be unatoned forever and the reasons behind their killings will never be uncovered.

Before then, many deaths had been reported and several cases of extrajudicial killings are going on as you read this and somebody still says there could be violence in the nearest future. Really? Have killings, deaths and bloodshed become the norm in our national life that folk no longer “see” them and can still call for more to make a point?

Two, when they use careless phrases that say the monkey and baboon that will be soaked in blood, I wonder if they do not derive some macabre pleasure in envisioning the spectacles of bloodshed and violence. Do they just talk about it or are images actually running in their minds as they speak? Of course, we will have to psychoanalyse them to find out.

Three, somewhere in their hearts, do they actually want their doomsday prophesy to happen so they can be justified? Or, so they can continue to play the victims of a dysfunctional society ever robbed of their electoral mandate? I really will like to know. Are they like the Biblical prophet Jonah who wanted God to destroy a whole nation because he prophesied it and his ego was tied to his words, and he would rather die than not see it happen? If violence should actually happen in 2015, is it so that el-Rufai can retreat to the safety of his Twitter handle to start tweeting “Wetin I talk?!” or what?

El-Rufai’s defenders might like to point out that his statement was conditional on how the elections are conducted but then, so what? Does anyone actually imagine that the 2015 elections will not have some measure of irregularities? Why attach the possibility of violence to something that you know will very likely happen? By the way, what will constitute “free and fair elections” for el-Rufai and those who have constituted themselves into his echo chambers? An election in which the All Progressives Congress wins almost every available seat or what?

While I think rigged elections are a very terrible thing, capable of setting a country backwards by decades, I also think for now, we cannot do away with it because what ails our elections is not in isolation of our national underdevelopment. The best we can do is to reduce the incidence, and plug as many holes as possible. I mean, how can a country that cannot account for a majority of its own citizens, either through driving licence, ID card project or even mere birth certificates, say it can conduct “free and fair” elections?

Curiously, the commentators in Nigeria’s opposition parties like to throw the phrase “free and fair elections” around, but you wonder why they never begin their charity at home. Why do they almost always look in the direction of the presidential election when a lot of rigging goes on in state and local governments’ elections held in places led by their own parties? Why not set a standard for themselves for a change?