The Trial Of Bishop Kukah.

Poor Mathew Hassan Kukah! He has had it up
to the nape of his cassocks. The torrents of
abuse have now transformed into a tsunami of
vilification. It was just as well that the week
ended with the congregation of Catholic
Bishops removing the ground from under
Bishop Kukah by wholeheartedly supporting
President Buhari’s anti-corruption hurricane.
Never in Nigeria’s public history has a hitherto
respected man of god tumbled so fast in
public esteem. Never has a man so widely
admired for his cutting intellect become a
master of pompous equivocation and fatuous
obfuscation. Never has the implacable Nigerian

intellectual lynch mob been so fast and furious
in dismembering and devouring its victim.
It is a sad spectacle, and a consuming
Nigerian tragedy to boot. Many of us who
consider ourselves friends and admirers of the
gutsy and cerebral Bishop of the Sokoto
Catholic Diocese can only watch in pained
silence as the man of god appears to unravel
in a drama of self-demystification. But in
revolutionary situations, everybody must
answer their fathers’ name and one must be
ready to drop a friend because of principles
rather than drop principles because of a
friend.

These must be revolutionary times in Nigeria
indeed. It is only in revolutionary times that
people lose total respect for priestly cassocks
and other symbols of traditional authority. It is
only in revolutionary times that the sacred
become desacralized in bitter profanity and
people move from hero to zero. The man of the people becomes the enemy of the populace. The dark night does not recognize sacerdotal distinction. As the mob brays in implacable distemper, the expiring ruling class that has held Nigeria hostage must note this
development.

Bishop Kukah’s superiors in the Nigerian
Catholic nomenklatura must be clicking their
tongue in sagely relish. A child can have as
many new clothes as an elder, but he can
never have as many rags. Many of the
superiors of the Sokoto Bishop must be
rubbing their palms in smirking satisfaction.
Only the barely discerning would not have
noticed a certain froideur, a chilly discomfort
among the Catholic hierarchs as Kukah rose to
secular apotheosis as a liberating theologist
and friend of the rich and powerful at the
same time. As the Yoruba will put it, nobody
must stop a youngster from climbing the hill of Langbodo.

In retrospect, perhaps it will be said that the
Sokoto bishop chose the wrong time to cross
the Homeric frontline between the Nigerian
powerful and the teeming powerless; and
between whistle blowing against the powerful
or becoming a loud and brash megaphone of
its rearguard rally. Not even the most gifted
and proficient trickster knows when the trick
will fail, and in revolutionary situations one
cannot be too careless in his choice of
enemies.

The last straw, it seems, is Kukah’s stirring at
the behest of the controversial Peace
Committee. Let it be bluntly and baldly stated
that this committee is not about peace at all.
It materialized as a last ditch ruling class
initiative to force General Buhari to accept
dishonorable defeat and hence to stave off the
revolutionary turmoil and anarchy that would
have accompanied electoral miscarriage. It is a
wearisomely familiar Nigerian ploy to impose
“peace” in the absence of social and political
justice. But they misjudged the mood of the
nation and the fact that Nigerians have had it
with their ilk.

Bar a few misguided ones who are glad to be
dredged up from peat bog of political oblivion
and the odd naïve do-gooders, most of our
newly minted peaceniks are compromised
scoundrels working for the old regime and
traditional mischief-makers on a typical pay
day. Available reports indicate that some of
them were already privately gloating about the inevitability of a Jonathan victory. They came to bury Buhari and not to praise him. But It bombed spectacularly. Perhaps this is one of the “spectacular” things that Jonathan did which Kukah referred to with deliberately
oblique disingenuity.

Having failed in their core mission, they have
now transformed into a “peace” council to
disturb the peace of the nation, and to
stalemate the inevitable sanitization of the
polity. They have gone about endlessly
chattering about due process and the fact
that this is a democracy and not a military
order. One wonders how democracy and due
process would have fared had they succeeded
in suborning the sovereign electoral will of
Nigerians. Let this be the last time President
Buhari will give them a decent hearing.
Kukah’s attempt to defend the motive of the
peace council has brought a gale of angry
denunciations on the internet and social media with many of them charging the Catholic supremo with perfidy and betrayal. This columnist read about three hundred of these angry rebuttals and only a few were willing to stake their integrity on the integrity and honesty of the bishop. It was redolent of pent up fury and misgivings, as if they have been waiting for Kukah to cross the line.

Kukah’s attempt to correct a purportedly
mischievous slant that gave the impression
that the council went up to President Buhari to bargain for a soft landing for the disgraced
and discredited Jonathan drew even more
tempestuous tirades. And then in the
unkindest cut of all, a shadowy and hitherto
unknown organization going by the name of
CUPS came out to directly impugn Kukah’s
integrity and claims to probity in a well-
detailed allegation of sleaze and corruption.
This column will refrain from publicizing the
salacious and insalubrious details, but they go
to show how far Bishop Kukah’s stock has
fallen. It is a remarkable development and no
matter his public grandstanding and defiance
of the gravitational pull of seamy scandals, the
plucky priest must be having some anxious
private moments. Even if they remain at the
level of mere allegations, that they are ever
broached at all shows how public perception
can be influenced by the power and
putrescence of offensive associations. The
bishop’s cup is full and it overflows indeed.
It may well be too late to ask the august
catholic prelate to return to base. For a man of
such calm and deliberate mien, such choices
are not lightly made in the first instance. As
we have said, everybody must answer to his
patronymic in these perilous times. Like a
savage hawk remarkable for its hunting
prowess and ferocious precision, the Nigerian
ruling class knows the particular moment to
home in on its intended prey and which foibles
and personal peccadilloes to zero in upon.
In a postcolonial society infamous for its
political dysfunctionality , the transition from
civil society activist to state actor is a very
precarious affair indeed. In Nigeria, only few
people, if any at all, have been able to manage
the transition without major scars. This is
because inchoate and disadvantaged civil
society feels abandoned and neglected by one
of its own. Like vultures waiting for the
ethically deceased, they bid their time waiting
to take their pound of flesh or carrion and the
quiet hysteria of private abandonment soon
gives way to the public hullabaloo of angry
and messy divorce.

The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese seems
to have had it coming for quite some time.
There might have come a time when a
practical patriot like Kukah might have come
to the conclusion that it might be better and
more nation-rewarding to remonstrate with
the Nigerian powers that be at close proximity
than to demonstrate against them from a far
distance.

As a minority scion of the most minority of
ethnic formations, Kukah might have
concluded that he stood no chance raising hell
among the hell-bound majority monsters—as
he himself once memorably dismissed
Nigeria’s major ethnic formations. It may well
turn out to be a bridge too far, but in the
brutal power calculus of Nigeria’s political
coliseum, innocence is not a virtue but a
symptom of suicidal naivety.

Who will then speak and speak up for the
Nigerian minority ethnic subaltern? As a
devoted watcher of Nigeria’s volatile and
explosive political gymnasium, this columnist
entered into a private correspondence with
the father who art in Kaduna then over his
seemingly seamless transition from civil society activist to state actor. Yours sincerely wanted to know whether the transition was conscious or seemingly unconscious. It was a particularly illuminating exchange whose details must remain private and confidential.
What did it for this columnist was Kukah’s out
of proportion reaction to a Soyinka piece
detailing the ills and ailments of the Nigerian postcolonial state. As usual with the
implacably agonistic Nobel avatar, it was a
merciless and astringent critique dripping with
venom and vitriol. The old literary lion does not
take hostages in these matters. But anybody
who has watched Nigeria’s descent into
political infamy over the decades would side
with Soyinka’s angst about the fate of his
beloved country.

What seemed to have drawn Bishop Kukah’s
particular ire was Soyinka’s damning
conclusion that nothing good could come out
of the Nigerian state as it was constituted. It is
interesting and intriguing that Soyinka’s
response to Kukah was a mixture of puckish
humour and elderly irritation. Subsequent
events seem to have proved the Nobel
laureate right.

Thereafter, certain changes in Kukah’s public
personae became noticeable as he moved
closer and closer to the sanctuary of state
power. An imperious swagger seems to have
been added to the bouncy gait even as a
pompous and pomaded puffery became the
order of the day. A moody irascible brio and
prickly condescension became the sine qua
non of Kukah’s public engagements. The
bishop’s secular beatitude was in full progress.
But such beatitudes do not beautify, and
neither do they ennoble in the tumultuous and turbulent context of a postcolonial nation
roiling in crisis and contradictions. In such
circumstances and situations, it is the
bounden duty of all men of god to speak truth
to secular power and not to become
carpetbaggers and reactionary rearguard
rallying points for the retrogressive and anti-
progress rump of a failed ruling class.
The current pope is an outstanding exemplar
of this sacred moral responsibility to the
powerless of the earth; and so was the old
much admired and revered Polish pope, the
illustrious Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. We dare say
that in the last decade and a half beginning
with the Oputa Panel, Bishop Kukah has been
rather remiss in that historic and sacred duty.
If it is not too late, this gifted priest should find
his route back to public restitution and
redemption.

.m

It is a wearisomely familiar Nigerian ploy to impose “peace” in the absence of social and political justice. But they misjudged the mood of the nation and the fact that Nigerians have had it with their ilk...

They still do.