So long a year!

It’s only a few hours away from curtains down on this outgoing year and we could at this point begin to mentally consign it to the bin of history, as we look forward with hope recharged to alluring prospects of a newly incoming year. You are well familiar with that annual ritual, aren’t you? We are at the recurrent juncture of time when an old year wobbles, bloodied and bowed, to a tardy close as humanity strains with impatience for the breaking forth of a fresh year.

At a time like this, the prevalent mood is usually a cocktail of frustration over failed expectations from the outgoing year and a rebound of hope that the incoming year harbours better promises. Even among those for whom the outgoing year had been a cluster of accomplishments, there is eager anticipation that the incoming year will simply be distinctly better. But experience shows it is some vicious cycle of mood swings from a new year’s grand debut to its weary expiration: a swing from excited hope and steamy expectations of abundant bliss, through some chilling that things weren’t working out altogether as projected, to feeling downright distraught that some if not most expectations had been dashed, and back to rekindled hope that another incoming year holds out the desired break of unrestrained successes. Year after year, most of humanity go on this round tripping. But these mood swings are actually helpful, because life would perhaps offer too little if not lived with recrudescent optimism.

For us in Nigeria, we seem to have come away from chaotic spells that characterised this juncture of time in years past. Recall in recent history, for instance, that former President Goodluck Jonathan chose the twilight of 2012 to impose some 120 percent hike in the pumphead price of petrol, from which he later backed down in the face of civil protests as citizens hit the streets with fury in disregard of the festive season. That was one stormy new year crossover like none other that we’ve experienced.

But then, such rowdy year-end fits weren’t peculiar to the former Jonathan era. Year 2015 when President Muhammadu Buhari debuted in office as civilian leader witnessed a chaotic exit owing to a prolonged spell of fuel scarcity that the then newly incoming administration ascribed to the change of baton in power. Only that subsequent experience showed it wasn’t solely the issue of transition. Further down the line under the same administration, the end of year 2017 recorded a similarly nasty bout of energy crisis that the president blamed on blackmailers, whom he accused of contriving a grinding fuel shortage just to inflict avoidable hardships on the citizenry.

Now we seem to have effectively moved away from such seasonal supply snaps that often resulted in back-tossing the life of most ordinary Nigerians into the Hobbesian jungle, and you can’t withhold credit from the incumbent administration for this feat.

But this outgoing year is as well one in which we relearnt the lesson of how impactful sustained civic activism and international weigh-ins could be on the conduct of governance in our country. That, for me, is the sense to make of the release on bail early last week of former National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki and political activist Omoyele Sowore from detention. The prolonged detention of these two accused persons by the Department of State Security (DSS) had been in defiance of serial judicial pronouncements granting them bail pending their trial for offences they are respectively accused of, and it had widely been seen to signpost disrespect by the Buhari presidency for court orders.

“What has made the difference between those days of defiance of the courts and last week that government suddenly became responsive to the courts?” 

Recall that Dasuki, who has been facing trial since 2015 by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on alleged money laundering and criminal breach of trust involving more than N13billion, had secured several court orders granting him bail – one of them by the sub-regional ECOWAS court – which the government had hitherto ignored. For his part, Sowore, convener of #RevolutionNow protest, got caught in the security net last August and had been granted bail since October by an Abuja high court that was defied. He was briefly released early this December by the DSS upon threat of sanction for default by the Abuja court, only to be rearrested inside the courtroom barely 24 hours later when he showed up for his scheduled trial.

Ordering the suspects’ release on bail last week, Justice Minister and Attorney-General of the Federation Abubakar Malami said the move was in compliance with the same court orders that were until now spurned, adding that government was “considering the pursuit of its rights of appeal and/or review of the order relating to the bail as granted or varied by the courts.” Only days earlier after he called for Sowore’s case file following the public uproar that trailed his December 6^th rearrest by DSS operatives in court, the minister had insisted government would stick with ‘due process’ and would not be pressured into complying with the court order granting the activist bail.

So, what has made the difference between those days of defiance of the courts and last week that government suddenly became responsive to the courts, at least regarding these two accused persons? My guess is: pressure. Although civil society has been generally tame, some activists from its ranks stood up to be counted in openly demanding government respect for court orders. Ignore partisans who joined the fray only to milk political capital from it. Amid peer censure of its perceived temerity, The PUNCH newspaper stable took a stand to tweak its house style in symbolic protest of what it considered to be draconian disposition of the current administration. Even government’s own watchdog, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) last Monday spoke up, calling on the Buhari presidency to respect court rulings.

Meanwhile, pressure didn’t come only from within this country. Although he denied being in receipt of such correspondence, there is a widely circulated letter dated December 20^th and addressed to the justice minister by six members of the United States Congress, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in which the American lawmakers said they were “deeply concerned that established legal procedure and the rule of law” were not being followed in Sowore’s case.

Some people would argue, of course, that this is affronting foreign interference in Nigeria’s domestic affairs. And it is true that every sovereign country has inherent right to insular space from other nations.  But every country that is a responsible member of the international community – including the U.S. – must also expect and live with being held to certain universal benchmarks of conduct by external interests. Such ‘interference’ is a critical safeguard of the practice of pluralist democracy by any country; and it is the reason we often invite global attention to domestic processes like elections, for instance, so that local tendencies of authoritarianism would not override universal standards of equity, fairness and justice that ought to be applied.

The catch in all of this is that I expect the government would deny having been under pressure, and that it acted entirely on its own volition in the Dasuki and Sowore cases. And that is altogether desirable. But the only way to prove that point is to earnestly apply the same disposition to all other outstanding orders of the courts, so we would begin to see this as a standard trait of the administration in the incoming year.

Wishes of a blissful new year to you, dear reader.