Post by Godswill Essien (@godswill_essien)

THE BUCK STOPS WHERE POWER SITS

There is a particular brand of intellectual dishonesty that thrives in Nigerian political discourse, and it is never more visible than when the subject is insecurity. Today, a familiar choir is singing a familiar tune, but with new lyrics carefully written to protect new beneficiaries.

Before 2015, these same voices were unanimous and thunderous. Every kidnapping, every bombing, every herdsmen attack, every failure of the security apparatus was laid without equivocation at the feet of President Goodluck Jonathan. Not the governors. Not the local government chairmen. Not the traditional rulers. The President. They argued, correctly, that security is a federal responsibility. They argued, correctly, that the armed forces, the police, the DSS, and the intelligence architecture all answer to Abuja, not to Government House in any state capital. They were right then. The constitutional architecture has not changed.

What has changed is who sits in Aso Rock.

Today, the same commentators, the same newspaper columnists, the same television analysts, the same social media voices who prosecuted Jonathan on security grounds have discovered, with suspicious timing, that governors are now the appropriate defendants. Suddenly, the federal structure is invoked selectively. Suddenly, state police, which this same class of people resisted for decades, is now the magic wand being waved to transfer culpability downward. Suddenly, the man who commands the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Police, the DSS, the NIA, and the Office of the National Security Adviser is peripheral to the conversation.

This is not analysis. This is alibi construction in borrowed academic language.

The people of Oyo, Borno, Kwara, and every other state ravaged by kidnappings, banditry, and insurgent violence are not dying because their governors failed to deploy federal assets they do not command. They are dying because the federal government that commands those assets has either failed to deploy them effectively, failed to fund them adequately, or failed to hold their commanders accountable. A governor who watches his citizens taken from school premises is not powerless because he is incompetent. He is powerless because the constitutional order placed the guns, the helicopters, and the intelligence networks under a presidency that is not being interrogated with the same ferocity it once was.

We are expected to forget. We are expected to absorb the revision quietly and move on.

No.

The standard applied to Jonathan must apply to Tinubu. The logic used to prosecute one must be used to prosecute the other. If the buck stopped with the President then, it stops with the President now. The Constitution has not been amended in the dead of night to redistribute that responsibility. Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution remains unaltered. The security and welfare of the people is the primary purpose of government, and that government is federal in its command of force.

Those who are peddling this revisionism are not confused. They are calculating. They know exactly what they are doing. They are building a firewall around a presidency they have chosen to protect, using governors as the fall men in a script that depends entirely on the public's willingness to forget what was said, what was written, and what was argued before 2015.

We must refuse to be that public.

The evidence is in the archives. The articles are still searchable. The television interviews are still on YouTube. The standard was set in plain sight by the very people now attempting to lower it. Our responsibility, as citizens who take accountability seriously, is to hold the standard constant regardless of who benefits from its application.

Insecurity is a federal failure until the Constitution says otherwise.

The buck has not moved. Only the people trying to redirect it have.

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