Andy Ezeani
Forget about the optics in President Bola Tinubu granting pardon last week to 53 convicted drug-related offenders among a total of 175 criminals. The development can also mean that the president has turned the compassion bend.
Tinubu has been censured too often for not showing compassion to his compatriots since he took control of the reins of power, beyond his intermittent assurance to them that he shares the pain they suffer from his economic policies.
Last week’s presidential clemency to sundry criminals, chiefly among them drug dealers, murders and killers, illegal miners and economic saboteurs, may have been a doughty statement by Tinubu that no depth of sin or crime is too much for him to forgive.
In the annals of presidential pardons, though, whether here or anywhere, the thrust of last week’s pardon is bewildering. Clemency for convicted drug peddlers,murderers, and publicly denounced hardened criminals are rare.The soul of the society is involved.
It takes more than straight courage for anyone with the prerogative to grant pardon to convicted hardened criminals. Political offenses are entirely different.
Governments and political leaders easily come to terms with the dynamics of offenses in the political realm. Granting pardon to individual indicted or even jailed for political offenses is easily understood. Offenses of political nature are often driven by struggle for power or ideological contention.
Tinubu’s clemency last week to a motley of convicted hardened criminals, taken together with another recent act associated with the government, have raised serious concern across the country, especially against the backdrop of a glaring wrong the same government continues to perpetuate.
The act of the government and the leadership of the state security apparatus condoning, if not manifestly approving meetings between state officials and terrorists cum bandits in parts of the country, have left many Nigerians shocked beyond expression.
At the meetings with the terrorist leaders, some of whom are declared wanted by the country’s security agencies, visual reports show the rogues and killers coming in with fanfare, strapped with all manner of weapons. They make their demands with damning audacity and depart thereafter in a blaze of unthreatened power.
These concessions and strange rapprochement with terrorists and bandits, taken together now, with the jarring clemency by the government for convicted drug dealers, murderers and killers of all sorts, have exposed the double standard of the Tinubu government.
How can a government and its security leadership that show such level of comfort with certified violators of life and national security, be simultaneously deploying enormous resources and effort to hound and put away a citizen whose worst offence has been agitation for fairness for his people?
Tinubu’s clemency for 175 varied crowd of sundry criminals, with a veneer of historical validity woven around Hebert Macaulay and few others, has raised serious issues, not really of compassion, but of the sense of justice in his government. Why is Nnamdi Kanu still being held in detention by the All Progressives Congress (APC) government? Is he a part of the Buhari legacy that Tinubu must continue, in conformity to whatever pact they had? Of course, Kanu is not a candidate for clemency, not having been convicted for any crime.
Even at that, the fact that Kanu has, for almost ten years, been violently attacked, detained, kidnapped, arraigned and re-arraigned, reflect a level of lawlessness and ethnic baiting that present the Nigerian state before the world as ugly. And to imagine that the Appeal court had earlier set him free.
Whatever the irritation that Nnamdi Kanu represents, even to some in the South East, pales into insignificance against the backdrop of the injustice the state has meted out to him.
Even for many who never cared about his ideology, his demagoguery, grandstanding, or whatever, the truth is that gross injustice is being perpetuated against a citizen for no just cause. Let no one shy away from it, Kanu’s ordeal is not divorced from his being Igbo. That reality presents a problem larger than his individuality.
The message is clear now; the Nigerian government under APC can condone terrorists, bandits, killers and drug peddlers, but it cannot stomach a populist agitator, at worst, a demagogue, concerned with equity and justice for his people, especially one from Kanu’s part of the country. What does that say of such a government and the country?
It is a fact that Nigeria’s political potentates exercise their powers to the hilt. They are rarely swayed by moral appeal or regard for justice and equity. Indeed, they neither fear God nor man, although they love to appear loudly at places of worship.
There comes a juncture, however, where persistence of injustice and blatant abuse, either to one or to many, constitute an afront to natural justice. Such a situation sows the seed of a great danger to society at large. Every sensitive government must recognize such a point.
Tinubu should not be carried away by the spiritlessness and diffidence of the majority of the Igbo politicians near him, who are being haunted by shadows from their past. This state injustice to Nnamdi Kanu just has to be halted. Using Kanu as a pawn in political games guarantees no one any luck, either. It may backfire. That calculation is unconscionable and fraught with unimaginable danger, anyway.
If convicted serial killers, drug dealers, illegal miners and even terrorists and bandits do not constitute danger to Nigeria and Nigerians, the government will need to go to the outer space to manufacture convincing reasons why Nnamdi Kanu is a threat to the country. Enough of this costly show of meaningless power.
