When in September, President Muhammadu Buhari put a stop to police moves to arraign Senator Ademola Adeleke for the purpose of arraigning him on charges of examination malpractices and related offences, right-thinking Nigerians applauded the timely and patriotic intervention to maintain decorum and fairness in our practice of democracy.

That episode also spotlighted some of the undesirable tendencies of law enforcement agencies capable of casting aspersions on government’s stance during electioneering periods. But the most significant and impactful action was no doubt the presidential intervention which dramatically and emphatically distanced President Buhari from condoning such acts of political intimidation disguised as routine official duty.

Obviously, the police authorities somehow failed to consider the glaring political implications of the timing of their routine duty because they also expected the government authorities to look away since it was the opposition’s interest that was being jeopardized.

Perhaps it had become routine for the police and other politically-potent government agencies to pave the way for the incumbent administration’s political interest to be enhanced while claiming either to be doing their duty or obeying the now notorious “orders from above.”

Whatever the guise for lending themselves to partisan political agenda, President Buhari had served sufficient notice that such abuse of office was not in his character and he was not going to look the other way as his predecessors did to encourage the police to make it “routine duty.”

Certainly, for a President whose election witnessed an unprecedented groundswell of mass support and endorsement across the nation, so massive as to dethrone an incumbent President, the thought of using the police or other security agencies to harass and intimidate political opponents or otherwise manipulate the electioneering process would be outlandish.

Even then, it takes a superior sense of statesmanship and personal integrity not to be tempted to exploit the elastic opportunistic excesses anonymously attributable to “orders from above” by aloofness, especially when dealing with the boundless mischief of an opposition.

Recent events have vindicated President Buhari’s exemplary deterrent action against politically ill-timed police action and it can no longer be tenable to associate him or his Administration with such suggestive actions of law enforcement or other agencies of government as the mischievous imagination of opposition rabble rousers have been striving to.

It has become a silly spectacle bordering on law-evading tactics and distracting blackmail for the PDP to drape the cloak of political victimization over any and all lawful investigative activities of government agencies that directly or indirectly affect their leaders. This political palaver has been taken to tactless extremes that imply extension of immunity from law enforcement duties to PDP’s retinue of suspicious, evasive and even awaiting-trial members!

Nigerians have watched wondrously as the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, launched frenzied alarms over the routine airport security inspection of its presidential candidate’s private jet on arrival from abroad almost like a pre-emptive alibi in lieu of whatever.

Then hollered hysterically about the EFCC’s posh limousine-trailing raid on posh N13 million per annum apartments rented by former Governor Orji’s night clubbing children until it turned out that his anxiety about Atiku Abubakar’s children, also resident there, was unwarranted and self-inflicted. He was wrong again about the freezing of the presidential running mate Obi’s accounts.

Amazingly, the same Ologbondiyan wants Nigerians to believe him when he said, “the PDP is not against any legitimate effort by any security agency in the discharge of its duties” adding, “we totally reject this unrelenting attempt to use trumped-up charges to take down our candidate”.

If only the PDP and its overzealous mouthpiece would cease trying to de-legitimize the routine and well-informed investigations of EFCC and other security agencies only when its leaders and their pampered children come under scrutiny, we will be able to know that the problem is more of trumped charges of politically-motivated law enforcement operations.

All these deliberate wolf-crying maneuvers by the PDP only confirm that its members had become used to shielding themselves from even routine functions of law enforcement agencies by recourse to the politically-conferred immunity implicit in referring to orders from their Oga-at-the-top before they were swept away by the 2015 tsunami and they find it difficult to be compliant now that the oga-at-the-top says he will have nothing to do with law-evading politicians in or out of power.

President Buhari will never be distracted from serving the millions who voted him and remain loyal to notice a handful of loud mouths trying to blackmail themselves out of legitimate security screening and apprehension.

By Okemeke Goodluck

Goodluck wrote this piece from Port Harcourt, Rivers State