Ihenacho’s Home Truths



Once, there was this rising star from the often repressed but ever-resurging Christianity of Northern Nigeria. Matthew Hassan Kukah was his name. He was better known by the religious title that usually prefixed his family name, Fr. Kukah.
Wednesday, January 30, 2002

David Asonye Ihenacho
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A TALE OF TWO MATTHEWS:
OBASANJO AND KUKAH


on't be fooled by this title! This is not the beginning of a novel that I am planning to do. I do not have enough information about the two Matthews to create a literature out of their mutual affection or, should I say lack of it. Moreover I do not have the skills to embark on a tale-tell Cinderella story that will be solely based on speculation. However the story I am about to tell could qualify for a tale of a mutual buddy-fest that has perhaps gone or about to go awry. But I hope you would not be disappointed to learn that every segment of it is fed by a speculative reconstruction. Sorry I can't do any better. I do not know how to track down the two Matthews for an interview.

Once, there was this rising star from the often repressed but ever-resurging Christianity of Northern Nigeria. Matthew Hassan Kukah was his name. He was better known by the religious title that usually prefixed his family name, Fr. Kukah. The "uncapped" Hassan Kukah then was a highly gifted young Catholic priest from the Zangon-Kataf district of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna in Kaduna State. He first presented himself to the entire nation with his penetrating weekly column in the New Nigerian Newspapers. He was blazing a trail that priests could be journalistically efficient and socially relevant. When I was embarking on learning the art of writing topical commentaries, I always wanted to emulate the writings of Fr. Kukah. He was so good that I told myself that if I should become a writer I would have to use Kukah's writings as my yardstick. For that his writings became a must-read for me every week in the New Nigerian Newspapers that would not otherwise impress me if not for his writings. Nearly everybody I knew looked forward to reading Fr. Kukah's weekly columns. They were extremely incisive, penetrating and to the point. Fr. Kukah exhibited such a mastery of topical issues in his writings that he was acclaimed nationwide as a man specially endowed with wisdom and courage.

Then fame and challenges began to knock at his door. Fr. Kukah was appointed to the position of a deputy general secretary of the Catholic Secretariat in Lagos by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria [CBCN] but assigned to man its subsidiary office in Abuja. There his path began to cross with the rich, the famous and the powerful in Nigeria. But Kukah, to his credit and true to his vocation as a committed Catholic priest fastidiously maintained the prophetic nature of his writings. He remained as incisive and fearless as ever. He spared no one including the powerful and intimidating junta who roamed around Abuja like the king of the universe. Kukah was always very forthright in his writings. People, especially the Catholic Church, began to take notice and to love what they were seeing in the man Kukah. He was complementing quite well the work of the once fiery Archbishop of Lagos Anthony Okogie, then the president of the Catholic Bishop's Conference, in fulfilling the prophetic role of the Church in a land festering with monumental corruption, repression and persecution. Their voices were absolutely indispensable in the task of challenging the repressive military and the corrupt elite of Nigeria who fed fat while the general populace went about hungry. The Nigerian Church needed a very strong voice and the two men stepped on to the plate to give theirs on behalf of the Church. We were extremely proud of them. Reading news stories from Latin America and the Philippines at that time, it was quite refreshing to find some of our own leaders of the Nigerian Church rising up to the occasion to take up the causes of the poor and challenge our corrupt elite. Kukah and a few others symbolized all that. His profile was rising quite fast and almost everybody felt that it was deserved.

When Monsignor Anasiudu's tenure as general secretary of the Catholic Secretariat in Lagos ended, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria had hardly any other place to look for a worthy replacement than to Fr. Kukah. He was promptly promoted to the office of the secretary general of the influential Catholic secretariat of Nigeria. Subsequently he transferred his residency to Lagos. His arrival in Lagos coincided with the terrible period of the Abiola election annulment, the interim government confusion and subsequently the military coup that precipitated the ascendancy of the dictator Abacha in the political scene of Nigeria. Kukah braced up to continue his prophetic mission on behalf of the masses of Nigeria. As the voices of his former sidekicks in the struggle began to wane and apparently disappear, Kukah became almost the lone fiery voice actively challenging and daring the very intimidating dictator to a showdown through his blistering writings. On many occasions he found himself on a collision course with the dictator and his allies. But Kukah held out. He was a man on a mission and in fact, the type Christianity in Nigeria had needed to give it some zip and bite. In his own limited way, he epitomized for Nigeria the vision of the martyred archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero who counseled that whenever and wherever the poor masses of God's people were being exploited and maltreated by their governments and the elite in general, the Church should and must raise a voice of protest.

From almost a parallel universe the profile of another Matthew was rising in the struggle against corruption and the Abacha-brand of dictatorship in Nigeria. General Matthew Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, a Baptist and a former military head of state, had of late come on his own to pose as a real threat to Abacha and his repressive government. He had begun to sharpen his criticism of the ironclad regime, and the dictator Sani Abacha had begun to grow impatient with him. Abacha being a junior officer in the military Obasanjo had commanded was not hoping to be able to silence his former boss. So the barrage of criticism continued to pour from both the Obasanjo's and Kukah's ends aimed exclusively at Abacha and the repressive government he ran. Somehow the two Matthews from two different worlds were becoming buddies even perhaps without knowing it. They had seen themselves sharing the same vision that Nigeria deserved better than Abacha could offer. And in a way they had also become buddies in making and topping the enemy list of the repressive regime. Gradually they began to see themselves as the real Matthews to Nigeria. [From its original roots in the Hebrew language Matthew seems to imply God's gift to God's people].

Being a veteran of so many coups in Nigeria, Abacha had a quick answer to Matthew Obasanjo's "ranting" against his regime. He immediately concocted a phantom military coup, yoked it around the neck of Obasanjo and got him convicted with it. Having become Abacha's coup convict, Obasanjo was immediately dispatched to jail for years that would outlast both Abacha's and Obasanjo's remaining life spans. Hence his critical voice was completely and comprehensively silenced. With one down and so many more to go, including the powerful voice of Hassan Kukah, Abacha knew that there was still a hefty task ahead of him to get all his diehard critics silenced. But he had no quick answer to the threats posed by the blistering pens of Kukah. Being a Catholic priest in a nation with a strong Catholic population Abacha knew that hardly would anybody buy it and it would never be a popular idea if he perhaps accused Kukah of an involvement in a military coup so as to imprison him as he had done to his namesake and the many others in their league. So he kept pondering and trying out many other surreptitious tricks to get Kukah into trouble. But being a very savvy and smart man, Kukah played it safe remaining focused on his prophetic ministry and his challenging job of running a highly complicated secretariat of the Catholic Church.

The death of Abacha, which was followed immediately by the release of Obasanjo from jail, seemed to have galvanized all the former critics of the regime of Abacha into embarking on helping to foster a solid democratic culture that would not allow the likes of Abacha to usurp power and use it to oppress everybody. Both Matthew Kukah and Matthew Obasanjo seemed to share the desire to help ensure a new beginning for Nigeria. Perhaps at the beginning of their dream of a democratic Nigeria both thought that they would make their contributions through their usual critical and prophetic roles. But hardly did they know that fate was going to bring them even closer as key operators in the whole task of fostering a new Nigeria.

Meanwhile the fresh-from-jail Obasanjo was singing a different tune that would soon win him the hearing and respect of the Catholic priest Kukah. Obasanjo was now talking much about his faith in his religion, the divine miracles that helped him to survive his jail term, the religious and moral values that would save Nigeria. In fact Obasanjo was sounding more like a church pastor than an ex-military head of state and a politician soon-to-be. Obasanjo's morality-laced language was music to the ears of Kukah who was running a secretariat dedicated principally to efforts at achieving all such wishes and more for the whole country. He thought he could use some help in this regard from a crusading ex-head of state. Gradually Obasanjo and Kukah began to see themselves as people sharing the same vision and goal for Nigeria. And this was the beginning of what would later blossom into a little friendship between a priest and a president.

When the military succeeded in persuading Obasanjo to come back and run for the presidency for the second time, Kukah was perhaps one of the very few who lent their silent support to him. Kukah had believed that the new Obasanjo with deep roots in the Christian faith could be trusted to practice what he often preached to Abacha. As Kukah would later claim, Obasanjo "waxed lyrical" with his vaunted mission to stamp out and destroy corruption in Nigeria. He sounded every inch like the longed-awaited champion against all the ills of the Nigerian nation. Kukah became in fact one of the earliest converts to Obasanjo's messianic program for Nigeria. Moreover Obasanjo had made his own all the issues Kukah had been writing about all of his career in public life, the evil of corruption in Nigeria, the need for equity and fairness for the populace, neutrality of the national government in religion, secularity of the Nigerian state and the need to provide improved social amenities for the people. Obasanjo began to sound as if all those issues were what would dominate his presidency if he were elected. Of course he knew before hand that he would be installed as the next president of Nigeria whether elected or not. Surprising most of his former admirers, the usually critical Kukah appeared instantly and uncritically sucked into the religious zeal and political commitments of Obasanjo to lift Nigeria from her decades of harrowing history.

But being a very tactful man it would only be after Obasanjo had been declared elected that Kukah would begin to solicit public support for him. However that was in line with the post-military government mood in Nigeria. Nearly everybody was soliciting support for the success of the new administration. However, Kukah seemed to have gone a little far in his articles to procure support for the new administration. He seemed to have done all that innocently though in the spirit of all hands being on deck to make the new attempt at democracy successful in Nigeria. But the way his articles started to slant in favor of Obasanjo surprised many of us. People wondered loudly what had happened to the golden voice of reason that challenged most corrupt leaders of Nigeria. At certain points in time we thought that Kukah was going way overboard in his support of the man Obasanjo. In fact he was using languages that bordered on declaring Obasanjo as a God-sent and messianic president of Nigeria. That was not sitting well with the many of us who had previously looked on him as the trailblazer of our journalistic engagements. We thought that Kukah's with Obasanjo's zealotry was a very risky investment in a fallible man whose history does not hold much promises for democracy in Nigeria. But since we did not articulate most of our concerns in writing, it was obvious that Kukah hardly ever got to hear us out. But our anxiety was nonetheless growing with Kukah. We often wondered what he was up to hobnobbing around the powerful in the way that had not been previously associated with his critical lifestyle. But life went on, and Obasanjo continued to chant his war songs about the impeding battle he was about to wage against corruption in Nigeria. He was winning so many allies and Kukah was obviously one of them. Kukah believed that Obasanjo meant every bit of what he was saying. He thought that he had found a warrior that would champion the war he had been advocating on Nigeria's social and moral life through the pages of newspapers.

And in a move everyone seemed to interpret as giving teeth to his promised apocalyptic war against abuses and corruption in Nigeria, Obasanjo promptly set up a Human Rights Violation Investigation Commission. He modeled it after the South African Truth Commission, which the legendary Mandela had impaneled in order to resolve some lingering pains and distrusts of the apartheid years in his country. Obasanjo believed that Nigeria after decades of military dictatorship needed a similar kind of mechanism to heal the wounds of repression in Nigeria. Like his friend Nelson Mandela, he appointed into his human rights panel people who could be considered among the best in Nigeria including his newfound friend Fr. Matthew Hassan Kukah as well as an eminent jurist and retired Supreme Court judge, Chukwudifu Oputa. Fr. Kukah, being a Catholic priest, a famed moral crusader, a social critic and more, and Justice Oputa, an impeccable legal luminary and a retired justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court who had emerged as a poster to the presumed excellence of Nigeria's justice system, brought an amazing credibility to Obasanjo's human rights panel and its mission. Hopes were high that Obasanjo was up to something serious in his moral crusades in Nigeria. Appetites were wet when the real big fish of Nigeria's moral turpitude would be made to take responsibility for all their reprehensible crimes against the Nigerian people. Giving the impression that he wanted the panel to do a thorough job, Obasanjo gave the Oputa panel broad powers to investigate everything from every time in Nigeria's history, declaring that nobody would be considered a sacred cow. As Kukah would later recall, the fire-eating Obasanjo declared.

But if in cleaning out the stable, we find cesspool of rogues, we will go after them recover the money belonging to the nation and bring the full weight of the law on them. This will be the case for anybody found to be corrupt regardless of whose ox is gored during the process. There will be no sacred cows. In an attempt to demonstrate his seriousness with the process of cleansing Nigeria of all traces of corruption as well as give signal to all former leaders that nobody would be spared by the process, Obasanjo presented himself as a test case for the human rights panel. He submitted to all their questionings and probes concerning his first term as a head of state of Nigeria. The whole situation looked absolutely unprecedented in Nigeria. And people like Kukah might have congratulated themselves for making the right choice of believing in the man Obasanjo.

Buying into what would later prove almost like a dummy sold to them by the Obasanjo administration, Kukah and his co-panelists focused themselves on doing a thorough and the best possible job that they were capable of. Responding in kind to President Obasanjo, Kukah, the famed social critic almost ceased from his habit of providing critical commentaries on contemporary issues. He was focused on uncovering all that was needed to be uncovered in the checkered history of Nigeria since independence perhaps hoping to write about them when they had finished their assignment.

For many months the panel released bombshells upon bombshells on the horrendous happenings in Nigeria in the last several decades. Most Nigerians were relishing and in fact cheering the unprecedented revelations of the panel about the unbelievable cesspool that was the Nigerian political scene. But when it appeared that the panelists would eventually get to the root cause of Nigeria's historical problems, they ran into a brick wall. The walls had been erected by the northern ex-military heads of state that feared that the panel had been an ambush laid to decapitate them politically and socially through the unveiling and airing of their horrendously sordid pasts. So they mounted what could be considered the most unprecedented force in Nigeria's history to derail the course of justice. They refused all summons and all efforts to get them to respond to the outrageous allegations made against them in the course of the panel's sittings. Their intention was to completely frustrate and derail the works of the human rights panel. They dared President Obasanjo and his administration to live up to their boast and come get them. Obasanjo flinched and started to exhort the ex-leaders in parables to follow his personal example and make themselves available to the panel. Kukah and his panelists wanted more from the man who held the ultimate power in Nigeria. Kukah in particular looked on his buddy and namesake, President Obasanjo, to provide the legal and moral force to compel the ex-heads of state to honor a legitimate judicial process. But Obasanjo buckled and preferred to abandon the panelists in a lurch. The once fire-eating and corruption-fighting president became cowered and started to plead neutrality thereby leaving the panel to fight it out with the powerful ex-leaders in the media. Of course if there was anything the ex-heads of states had learned since their days as dictators of Nigeria, it was to be impervious to media scrutiny and chastising. The first skill dictators of all ages try to acquire is how to muzzle the media when they can or be impervious and indifferent to it altogether when necessary. So the ex-heads of state of Nigeria from the North chose the latter. And the work of human rights panel was derailed in the process.

When Obasanjo abandoned the panel to fight it out with the powerful heads of states alone, it became a terrible embarrassment to the panelists. They had expected to have under their wings the force of the presidential might. They had hoped that Obasanjo would find a way to encourage the ex-leaders of Nigeria to honor judicial summons or as a last resort compel them to appear before the human rights panel, if anything, at least for the credibility of Nigeria's legal system and for the benefit of his own reputation as a strong democratic leader of Nigeria. But when the president appeared to have "chickened" out allowing the former heads of state to have the last laugh, Kukah and his people felt betrayed. It appeared as if they had wasted their time for nothing. Obasanjo had hung them out to dry. Kukah, once a very strong believer in the messianic mission of Obasanjo in Nigeria began to question whether he was actually the long-expected messiah or we are still to wait for another.

The recent "confrontation" between Obasanjo and Kukah seems to suggest that the latter has come full circle and has made his final judgment on the messianism of the president. If the words of the Vanguard reporter on his speech were anything to go by, Kukah has adjudged President Obasanjo to be a false messiah for Nigeria. And this is a monumental turnaround for Kukah personally and a major setback for President Obasanjo. It must have been very humbling for Kukah to go that route in the glare of the prying press. It must have been very painful for him to have to recant in his heart all the encomiums he had lavished on the man at the beginning of his administration. Also it should be very embarrassing for the president to see one of his premier allies break ranks only to start accusing him of hypocrisy. In other words, the relationship between these two political buddies has clearly gone south. There is hardly any doubt that Kukah is now feeling disappointed and embarrassed on the inability of the president to live up to his promises..

The stage was the ceremony to mark the conclusion of the National Media Tour in Abuja. A major item of the occasion was the launching of the second volume of the collected speeches of President Obasanjo. And Kukah had perhaps been invited as a special friend of the president to give his work a positive review. As usual Kukah had his script written in advance. He was undoubtedly expecting to speak to the president in person. But unfortunately the president did show up. The vice president, Abubakar Atiku had been detailed to sandd in for him. But Kukah, trying to put back the coat of his former self as a social critic would not be deterred. He decided to release his bombshell anyway. According to the Vanguard reporter, Kukah "accused President Obasanjo of not keeping to his words." According to Kukah quoted by the Vanguard, "we need to ask some very fundamental questions about the president's speech-making, the texture and quality of his speeches and the extent to which the president considers speech making a tool for politicking or communication." According to Kukah, the objectives outlined in the speeches of the president had not been followed up in his actions. He charged, "we hear the president waxing lyrical, (claiming that) there will be no sacred cows…. The speech had the rather ambitious title. No longer business as usual and for all we know and hear, it is indeed business as usual in many respects…. We know that as far as corruption is concerned everyone except the president believes that nothing has changed."

This seeming turn-around of Kukah against Obasanjo has contradictory implications for the president and Kukah respectively. It shows how the president's agenda against corruption has completely collapsed. Obasanjo will never leave a legacy of corruption fighting in Nigeria. The human rights panel set up to cleanse Nigeria of corruption and reconcile the wounded has woefully failed. The big fish of Nigeria's moral turpitude are walking free on the streets. And the rogues of the previous administrations according to Kukah have been incorporated into Obasanjo's government. How much worse can things get for Obasanjo's anti-corruption program?

However for Kukah this turn-around is quite redemptive. His ability and decision to separate himself from the sinking ship of Obasanjo's anti-corruption program can only help him in the short and the long term. Obviously Kukah now realizes how wrong he might have been to trust and identify with a politician that personally. To be a great politician is to learn and perfect the art of duplicity and deception. People of strong religious consciences trust politicians to their own peril. I always believe that a church or a religious person becomes most efficient when s/he limits his/her function to serving a prophetic role rather than usurping a royal mantle for the sake of changing things. Moreover Kukah's courage to perhaps indict Obasanjo in his presence tends to show that he has lost nothing of his former daring and prophetic vocation. He appears to be still that same old Kukah who has the courage of a tiger to fight corruption with his pens and to dare any leader who is not leading our nation in truth and justice. And it is wonderfully refreshing to recover the old Kukah for our nation. Nigeria still needs people like him a whole lot. He has a very strong role in a democratic Nigeria. As one of my colleagues in the Nigeriaworld columns, Alfred Obiora Uzokwe wrote recently, we must continue to hold the feet of the enemies of the progress of our nation to the fire until perhaps they learn to deliver for our people.