Management of the COVID-19 pandemic has handed extra powers to governors and various authority figures at all levels. While citizens appreciate the necessity for these war powers to engage in the fierce battle with an unseen enemy, they still hold citizenship rights. We caution against the descent to the rule of man in various states in the name of containment of COVID-19.
States, mainly in the Northern half of Nigeria, have wilfully trampled on the rights of Almajirai children. Governors of the Northern States resolved, peremptorily, to undo years of sociological conditioning and history by decreeing a return to their home states for the Almajirai. The consequence has been the mass movement of these victims of society and politics to various locations. Those places rejected them and forced attempts to invade the southern states with vehicles breaking the lockdown restriction of movements across state boundaries.
The handling of the Almajirai has been mean and wicked. They have been treated as subhuman cargo and loaded in trucks alongside animals or sundry artefacts of trade. Their traducers then ship them to states that in turn reject them.
The Almajirai problem became an existential threat when many of the ones in Kano became positive for COVID-19. The Northern Governors Forum then saw an opportunity. Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State said. “We’ve been looking for the ways and means to end this system because it has not worked for the children, it has not worked for Northern Nigeria, and it has not worked for Nigeria. So, it has to end, and this is the time,” said El-Rufai. The governor said that the Kaduna State government located the parents of the children returned from Kano State to Kaduna State. The Government would train those parents on their responsibilities as parents.
Across the country, many governors have seen their state boundaries with other states as international borders. They erected control posts and determine who goes in or out. Their actions have been patently illegal and against the spirit of our federal structure and constitution.
A most egregious case of gubernatorial excess happened in Eleme, Rivers State where Governor Nyesom Wike supervised the bulldozing of two hotels for flouting the state’s executive order. Executive Order 6 stipulated that hotels should not open for business. The two hotels not only opened for business but officials of one shot and injured Rivers State government officials who came to enforce the regulation.
Governor Wike in reaction went to the hotels on Sunday, 9 May 2020 and brought them down. The action earned him a fusillade of angry condemnation by citizens. It also raised many troubling issues for the more discerning.
Wike failed to follow due process of trial and adjudication by a court or independent panel, preferring to be prosecutor, jury and judge of the matter, even as there was an Executive Order. He overstepped his bounds. Citizens are right to pillory him.
On the other side, however, is the tendency of Nigerians to ignore and disobey laws. The culture of disobedience has played out in the difficulty of enforcement of rules outlined by the federal government in line with World Health Organisation guidelines for the control of COVID-19.
We have a sociological challenge. Part of the challenge is that because we have never enforced our laws, we now tend to take them for granted. We do not even bother to read those laws and understand their full implications. Or the Executive does not specify the sanctions that follow some regulations.
For instance, though the Executive Order specified pulling down of the structures housing recalcitrant enterprises, critics suggest that Governor Wike should have varied the penalty, to ensure it is not “too harsh”. Yet the punishment was in the books ab initio, and the Rivers State Government repeatedly announced it on communication channels in the state.
Since it was specified, what gave a citizen the nerve to ignore the law? Because the Nigerian Factor would come into play and we will rewrite its provisions as citizens are now doing after the fact? Because the Nigerian Factor means that laws are for the books and not for application?
The onus is on the Governors to follow the rule of law no matter their good intentions. The rule of law involves the due process, fair hearing and citizens’ rights. We must operate as a democracy regardless of the COVID-19 challenge.
