By Obi Nwankanma
Finally, the Senate took up the gauntlet last week and threatened to call a vote of no confidence on the president for what they have generally perceived as his lack of serious engagement with the national security situation.

Specifically, the senators were up in arms with the administration’s handling of the Boko Haram terrorist killings, and the heightened general insecurity of life in Nigeria. I will begin with a caveat: the senate, and the entire National Assembly in fact, seems to me rather slow in waking up from its duties as the oversight arm of the government of the federation.

The president does not govern alone. He presides over state matters but it is ultimately the chamber of the people, the National Assembly that directs, assesses, examines, and guides his hands usually in a timely fashion.

The president’s party, the PDP, for good measure has an overwhelming majority in both chambers, and so the president has largely been having an easy ride in getting favorable bills passed. Indeed, the PDP’s long and sustained control of the two arms of government since the return of this so-called democracy has often obscured the true nature of the structure of government.

Presidents since Obasanjo have been given safe-landings and protected from the potentially difficult process of engaging with the parliament.

This easy ride and coverage given to the president since the transition to democracy in Nigeria in the last decade and more has often made the power of the president seem exaggerated; the conduct of the affair of the state seems powerfully and extraordinarily invested in that office, and it has seemed that the president has the power of life and death, and the capacity to take absolute decisions without a recourse to the National Assembly.

It was always as though the National Assembly was a rubber stamp institution. I think this precedence was set by a man called Olusegun Obasanjo who ran the office of the president as if he were running the affairs of his harem.

Perhaps this Senate, and this national assembly can, for once in its life, challenge the office of the president for greater accounting and for greater efficiency in running the affairs of the nation. So indeed it was, that the senate launched a pre-emptive strike to call for a vote of no confidence in this president, who it seems have been quite incompetent in dealing with the national security situation.

For the records, Nigeria’s national security situation began a progressive decline, not under the watch of this president, but from Obasanjo’s administration, when the spate of unsolved and unremediated killings, many of them political, happened at such a scale never before known in Nigeria.

Indeed, one of the most horrendous was the blatant execution of Nigeria’s Chief Law Officer and Attorney General in Obasanjo’s administration, Mr. Bola Ige. The Nigerian police have been to this day unable to unravel the circumstance and the killers of a whole Attorney-General of Nigeria.

There was also the Niger Delta militia killings and such unresolved situations which challenged and continues to challenge the veracity of Nigeria as a sovereign entity.

I think that terrorism did not start with the Jonathan administration. But Boko Haram has only added a new dimension to it: Boko haram, and many still find this group far too surreal, has publicly declared its objective of seizing Nigeria’s sovereign will and establishing a “Taliban-like” state in Nigeria.

They have launched a series of brazen attacks to demonstrate that Nigeria’s security apparatus is not a match for them. Of course, only last week, officials of the Nigerian security system tried to allay public fears, and ultimately to no avail, by declaring Nigeria’s security system as the “most advanced in Africa.” That the system is intact.

It may well be, for us who have no idea how that shadowy world of intelligence and security works, there must be some terrible logic in its seeming disarray, for indeed, the challenge of insecurity in Nigeria has more than proved that Nigeria’s security infrastructure is either asleep, compromised, inefficient, or complicit in creating the destabilizing mood of fear and death on Nigerian streets.

It was this mood of heightened insecurity that has finally compelled a bulk of the senate to seek to declare the president incapable of governing the land.

What we see of course, is the first thrust of steel, in this political swordsmanship that has just commenced. Earlier on, administration spokespersons alleged that there is a concert of efforts by some unnamed powerful interests to undermine, upstage, and bring down the government of President Jonathan.

Much of the killings and much of Boko Haram is seen in many quarters, especially within the administration and among its supporters as an orchestrated and highly staged act of political defiance calculated to make Nigeria under a minority southerner ungovernable.

This scenario may just be true. But it behooves the administration to take it from the realm of “conspiracy theory” to the realm of living truth, by producing incontrovertible evidence; or better still by proving that it is “not only in office but also in power.”

This, I think, is the sum of the senate’s attempt – to push this president towards some proactive action. Nigeria is in utter conflict with asymmetrical and non-state actors challenging the powers of the federal government.

Perhaps it is time for the President to re-examine and retool the entire national security protocol and its administration. Indeed, it is long overdue to restructure and re-equip the Nigeria National Police Force, for instance, from its current colonial constabulary character to a more efficient, highly modern, highly trained, and highly professional police system trained to meet the challenges of the current age.

It is imperative indeed that the Jonathan administration should shape up in other directions: it feels like an inchoate, directionless administration thus far. Many Nigerians elected Dr. Jonathan this past April and invested their hope for a new day on him.

So far, the administration has been working on a script that seems of little relevance to the transformation of Nigeria. Its social policies are geared still towards “privatization” and obsessive “free enterprise”- all the failed political and economic choices that have generally put places like Greece and Italy and many countries in Europe today in dire straits, and which many neo-con factors in his administration push as though it were gospel.

Among this is the fiction of petroleum subsidy. There is a general call for him to step back on this policy and face the utter disarray of the Nigerian state under his watch. This is the sum of the senate’s frustration because indeed it mirrors the frustration of the Nigerians whom they represent in the national assembly.

This frustration is bubbling slowly up to the surface. Nigeria does not seem thrust in any clear direction yet under President Jonathan. He still has a chance to reverse course, and work strategically to stave off the coming anarchy. This time he was saved by Mr. David Mark, senate president, who kept the senators at bay. The next time may be a train wreck.