By Lasisi Olagunju

In the early 1940s, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the hugely popular Sardauna of Sokoto, found himself at a crossroads of politics and rivalry. After losing the contest for the Sultanate of Sokoto to his long-standing rival, Sir Abubakar III, he was appointed emirate councillor and superordinate district head of Gusau in Sokoto Province. The posting, however, came with what he would later describe in his autobiography as “not lacking dark undertones and hidden motives.”

The shadow over his new position darkened in 1943. One day in the afternoon, a friend arrived with a troubling warning: Bello’s enemies were plotting his fall.

The man said: “Look, a plot is being arranged against you, so that you will fall into an inescapable trap.”

“What sort of a plot?” Ahmadu Bello said he asked the friend. He went on to say that “people were being organised to lay complaints against me so that I would be involved in a court case. I replied, ‘Tawakkaltu Alal Haiyil Lazi Layamutu (I depend on the Soul that never dies).’ A week later, I heard some Fulani (herdsmen) were being told to say that they paid cattle tax to me which never went into the treasury.” He was also accused of accepting gifts. The allegations quickly became a weapon in the hands of his rival, the Sultan. “After necessary investigations by an instigated administrative officer who was specially sent for the purpose, I was summoned to appear before the Sultan’s Court. I was tried and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment.” Bello recalled in his autobiography years later: “Knowing my own reputation and standards and the way the case was tried, I appealed to the Appeal Court. The learned Judge (Mr. Ames), with two Muslim jurists, allowed my appeal and I was therefore acquitted.”

He got back his freedom; but that experience signposted an example of what politics could throw at any of its practitioners no matter the height of their standing. Bello’s experience was an early taste of the trials and political intrigues that would mark his rise to prominence in the years ahead. Read ‘My Life’, Sardauna’s autobiography. Read ‘Ahmadu Bello: Sardauna of Sokoto’ by John N. Paden, page 119. Read Chapter 2 of Steven Pierce’s ‘Moral Economies of Corruption.’

You saw what happened in France last week. Seventy-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in prison by a Paris court. There is a lot of fun in watching tragedies. Some courts are crazy. The man they jailed was the Commander-in-Chief of a super power. He wielded veto powers at the United Nations and rubbed shoulders with the president of the Almighty United States. He did not kill, he did not rape. Even if he killed and raped, didn’t he have everlasting immunity from being treated like a common commoner? His crime was not even looting of his country’s treasury. His sin was criminal conspiracy in a scheme to secure campaign funds from the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. What kind of crime was that?

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Reuters reported that “the presiding judge said there was no proof Sarkozy made such a deal with Gaddafi, nor that money that was sent from Libya reached Sarkozy’s campaign coffers, even if the timing was “compatible” and the paths the money went through were “very opaque”. But she (the judge) said Sarkozy was guilty of criminal conspiracy for having let close aides get in touch with people in Libya to try and obtain campaign financing.”

Why would the president of a first world country be so broke as to go to North Africa for a bailout? The central bank of France is called the Banque de France (Bank of France). Don’t they print money there? Wasn’t Sarkozy the one who reappointed Christian Noyer as the governor of that bank? So, what happened that Noyer allowed his benefactor to be that exposed and hard pressed that he had to go beg Ghadafi, the ultimate sinner, for campaign funds? What is even bad in collecting money, even from Satan? What kind of law and judicial system did that to a benefactor of their country?

Sarkozy should have been a Nigerian. If he were a Nigerian, our courts would have scolded the prosecutor for being rude to a father of the nation. We would have told him sorry and compensated him with a comeback from retirement and a third term.

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Nigeria can never be France. A country where people love life and fear death more than they fear hell is a doomed state. Nigeria is caught in that loop. We have long abandoned the fear of sin and hellfire. We mock morality, twist God’s words, and purchase prayers to sanctify our iniquities. Yet, while trampling on conscience, we go to great lengths to stay alive. We act with impunity, but move about with convoys of armed men so we may live to enjoy the spoils of our recklessness. We wreck healthcare at home and pile money into hospitals abroad against the day when sickness comes calling. We sin, we revel, and we rock the world. We move freely with sinful steeze without consequence, without judgment. Sarkozy should have been a Nigerian; he would have been saved the insult of that Paris trial and conviction.

I am not the originator of the contrast between fearing death and fearing hell. A man called Thomas Hobbes saw it centuries ago and wrote it down. Hobbes lived from 5 April 1588 to 4 December 1679. At his death he was described as “greater in his foes than in his followers.” He is the same man who, in his social contract book ‘Leviathan’, famously declared that without law and order, life collapses into fear and violence; and, in his words, it becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Times change, people change. Hobbes observed that in his own age the fear of hell outweighed the fear of violent death. Religion then carried such weight that eternal damnation was a stronger restraint on conduct than the threat of sword or sentence. Men trembled more at the thought of sinning against God’s commandment than at the prospect of breaking the law. Religion and politics worked hand in hand to uphold order.

But that was Hobbes’s time. Today, the opposite holds sway. And that inversion explains the brazenness of misbehaviour around us. When men cease to fear God, and hell (the consequence of sin), they also cease to fear what the Yoruba call Atubotan; they disdain legacy, and numb conscience. Their only terror is not afterlife; it is just death, and, maybe, poverty and loss of privilege. And so, to prolong their lives and cling to power, they kill, they silence critics, they loot without restraint. The loss of a soul is, to them, an abstraction; but the loss of office and privileges is real, immediate, unbearable.

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I go back to Hobbes; he was right: fear shapes society. But when the wrong fear governs, politics mutates into predation, and the polity collapses into a jungle. Nigeria suffers that fate. We are ruled by men who worship power and fear coffins more than they fear God. Until that fear is reordered, until conscience returns as a brake on ambition, no constitution or law will be strong enough to restrain leaders who no longer believe that God is watching.

Back to Sarkozy, Western media described his fate as “a historic moment for modern France”, a nation where politicians, until last week sinned while sneering at the idea of punishment. The media said Sarkozy, who served as president between 2007 and 2012, was known for his hard line on immigration and national identity, and for championing harsher punishments for offenders. He must now prepare to face the same fate. Judges ruled that within months he will report to prison, making him the first former French president in modern history ordered to serve time behind bars.

It was, as The Guardian of UK put it, “a spectacular downfall and a turning point” in France’s struggle to deal with graft and political impunity. Sarkozy sat in court flanked by his wife, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, and his three sons as judges delivered a sentence laced with a message: Thomas Fuller’s words of almost four hundred years ago, “Be ye never so high, the law is above you.”

France has shown that even the mighty can crumble under the weight of justice. Nigeria, by contrast, keeps teaching its politicians that what sin has is not consequence but reward. Until our courts can frighten the powerful as much as our cemeteries do, Hobbes’s warning will remain our reality: life in this jungle will stay poor, nasty, brutish, and short.