SECTION 39: The pot and the kettle

Although it would be better for Nigerian leaders to stay home and attend to the fast-deteriorating conditions of life in the country, rather than junketing abroad in search of international legitimacy, President Umaru Yar'Adua's recent visit to Saudi Arabia when the world's leaders were meeting at the United Nations, highlighted a disturbing confusion about what our foreign policy goals are, and where our real national interests lie.

While at home citizens have wondered whether the President is really engaging with their problems at all, on the international stage the concern has been that when its presence is needed, Nigeria has been missing in action there too.

So it is a relief to see President Yar'Adua providing the Economic Community of West African States with some much-needed leadership on the burgeoning crises in our own back yard.

The crisis in Niger Republic, where President Mamadou Tandja is trying to perpetuate himself in office and in respect of which ECOWAS balked at taking any meaningful action, has been overtaken by the September 28th atrocity in Guinea. Both have their roots in reluctance to relinquish power. Tandja was elected but had reached the end of the maximum number of terms permitted by the Nigerien Constitution.

Captain Moussa Dadis Camara seized power in a military coup and only bought temporary acquiescence in his power grab by claiming that he wanted to sanitise the Guinean polity, and promising that he would return the country to democratic civilian rule through elections in which he would not be a candidate.

But after balancing comfortably on the seat of power for a few months, Camara began to have second thoughts. Like others before him, he began toying with the idea of transforming himself into a civilian president.

The good people of Guinea had some advice for him on that idea, and when they gathered to deliver it, the army did not just move to prevent them from doing so vis et armis, their use of force was so excessive that they killed some 200 of their fellow citizens, and their depravity was so unbridled that they openly stripped and raped several women who had gone to register their opposition to Camara's self-succession plans.

In this age of mobile telephone cameras, the army's bestiality and brutality was captured and flashed around the world in an instant. So it was impossible for Camara to adopt the formula that our own ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo was able to get away with when faced with pictures of members of the Nigerian Army assaulting women at Choba in Rivers State: namely to reject the evidence out of hand on the grounds that no soldier who was committing rape would allow himself to be photographed doing so! Instead, Camara could only feebly protest that the perpetrators were "uncontrolled army elements". Whatever that means.

The wave of revulsion that swept the world at these events penetrated even Aso Rock, and, as President Yar'Adua said, together with the Niger constitutional crisis, compelled him to convene an extraordinary summit of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government.

The summit has come out with a variety of measures designed to bring its erring members to heel. For Guinea there is an arms embargo, while Niger is to be punished by not having ECOWAS support for its candidates for international office.

Neither country will be allowed to host any ECOWAS function while they remain in breach of ECOWAS' protocols on democracy and good governance. Guinea, facing condemnation that goes well beyond ECOWAS and the threat of more biting sanctions, is trying to seem conciliatory and concerned (although Camara has so far been unable to unequivocally rule himself out of future elections).

Tandja is unmoved, and is consolidating his position with parliamentary elections which the opposition intends to boycott.

Of course, as we contemplate the difficulties that the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, even with all their troops and aid, have had persuading President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to ‘do the right thing' we can appreciate that ECOWAS, which has fewer sticks or carrots to deploy, is likely to face even more problems trying to persuade its own members to ‘do the right thing'.

What is more, Tandja and Camara may, with some justification, be wondering what right Nigeria or ECOWAS have to pontificate about constitutionalism, democracy and human rights.

Tandja will be asking himself whether it is because he was able to force his own constitutional change through (even if he had to dissolve Niger's Constitutional Court to do it) while Obasanjo was not, that the rules have now changed?

Camara will be asking why his own case of would-be self-succession as a newly civilianised ex-coupist is different from that of Blaise Campaoré in Burkina Faso or Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia.

But Nigeria and ECOWAS cannot remain aloof from the resolution of the crises that have erupted in the sub-region. Even if the records of their leaders are not all perfect. Even if it means that a pot has to call the kettle black.