By Suyi Ayodele

The elders of my place caution that the sacrificial àkàrà should not be given to an emèrè to share. When you ask why, they respond that she will merely make her kindred spirits the sole beneficiaries. And when that happens, the elders further caution, the tragedy (ultimate death), which the sacrifice is designed to avert will eventually happen.

Having shared this traditional caution, I would like to turn to my own childhood experiences. Growing up in the hinterland can be fun. In my part of Yorubaland, we have special children called Emèrè. They are mostly females. Emèrè are not Àbíkú which the Igbo call Ogbanje. The difference here is that while a typical abiku dies and returns to the same parents as many times as he or she can muster before he or she is ‘overpowered’, an emèrè remains a pain in the neck of her parents through frequent and indeterminable illnesses. The illnesses don’t kill her but merely drain the resources of her parents. Powerful children, Yoruba metaphysics says that emèrè are husbands of witches (emèrè ni oko àjé) because they are stronger and more ‘wicked’!

Emèrè children are treated specially, most times, with utmost attention. They are fragile in looks and conduct. Thay are also particularly spoilt in the real sense of the Yoruba concept of àkébàjé. Parents offer sacrifices to appease them to stay here on earth. Our belief is that emèrè children have their kindred spirits waiting for them by the gates of heaven. If an emèrè eventually dies, it is believed that a replacement might not come easily. Everything is therefore done to prevent such a tragic end.

So, to keep them alive with their suffering parents, sacrifices, known in the local dialect as òsè, are offered. The sacrificial items, mostly small edibles ranging from groundnuts to sugarcane; èkuru (white moi moi) to àkàrà, are prepared and offered to children who are in the same age bracket as the emèrè. After the preliminary prayers, the emèrè is asked to share the items to the ever-joyous children who sing traditional praise chants for her.

But there is a strange practice in the sharing of the sacrificial edibles. While all the other items are given to the ‘celebrant’ to share, the akara is never given to her. The explanation for this exception is illustrated in the saying that nobody gives the sacrificial àkàrà for the emèrè to share; otherwise, she will simply give it to her kindred spirits to pave the way for her journey to the great beyond (A kìí fún emèrè ní àkàrà òsè pín kí ò má baà pin fun egbé è láti pa ònà òrun mô).

In our elementary Government classes from Form Three to Form Five of those days, the then Miss Folake Afolabi, and Messrs Abayomi Oduntan and Vice Principal Ojo, repeatedly, listed what they called “The Presidential Powers of an Executive President.” We were taught that an Executive President is both the Head of State and Head of Government, a fountain of honour; he declares state of emergency; assents to and vetoes bills; declares wars and signs treaties and has the prerogative of mercy, among almost twenty of such powers.

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On the Prerogative of Mercy, we were told that an Executive President has the right to pardon a convict on the death row. And once pardoned, such a beneficiary can no longer be held in relation to the offence(s) that led to his or her conviction.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu exercised his Prerogative of Mercy power last week and set free 147 ex-convicts. The controversy that greeted that act is one that will not abate in a hurry. In all the comments for and against the action by the President, everyone, including the President’s ‘political enemies’, agreed that Tinubu’s action was, and is, within the ambit of the law. The constitution allows him to extend pardon to any manner of convicts, and his action cannot be subjected to any judicial review. Good enough.

However, the grey area in the review of the President’s exercise of his prerogative of mercy has to do with the morality that informed the choices of some of the ex-convicts President Tinubu set free. Majority of the people who frowned at the list of the beneficiaries of the President’s ‘kindness’ argued, and very correctly too, that the huge percentage the president allocated to convicts of drug-related offences, speaks volumes of the President’s disposition to the fight against narcotics in the nation.

The argument here is that of the 147 convicts President Tinubu pardoned, 60 of them are those who were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for dealing in hard drugs. A simple arithmetic puts that figure at 40.8 percent of the total number of 147 beneficiaries! Many, justifiably, concluded that if not for anything, Mr. President should have exercised discretion in freeing those drug lords.

Reviewing the arguments for and against this latest action of President Tinubu, I drew inspiration from the words of wisdom by our elders as quoted above that one should not give the sacrificial àkàrà òsè to an emèrè to share. Of the “Executive Powers of an Executive President” those good teachers of yore taught us, the one that looks more like an àkàrà òsè (sacrificial àkàrà) is the prerogative of mercy. In the hands of an emèrè president, who causes the people pain and agony, draining their meagre resources by the minute, that power can be easily abused. The morality of 60 drug offenders benefiting from the list of 147 pardoned ex-convicts flies in the face of decency!

Colleen Shogan, a former Senior Executive at the Library of Congress, US Senate, on December 2, 2022, wrote: “The History of the Pardon Power: Executive Unilateralism in the Constitution.” In the article, which was published by The White House Historical Association under the Rubenstein Center Scholarship, said that when the exercise of the clemency power is not used discretionally, the one who wields the power suffers public opprobrium. Hear her:

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“Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon was arguably the most famous exercise of executive clemency in American history. After Ford’s pardon of Nixon, his approval rating fell over twenty points in the ensuing days. Many political analysts conclude that Ford never recovered from the pardon, thus severely damaging his chances to win election to the White House in 1976.” She added that Ford’s explanation “that he granted the pardon as an act of mercy to Nixon and for the broader purpose of restoring domestic tranquillity in the nation after Watergate”, could not salvage the situation.

Imo Udofa, Professor of Law, University of Uyo, reinforces Shogan’s arguments. In his “The Abuse of Presidential Power of Pardon and the Need for Restraints”, published in the Beijing Law Review, Vol 19, No 2, June 2018, Udofa argues that “The power of pardon is virtually unfettered and unchecked by formal constraints in most jurisdictions, thereby rendering it susceptible to abuse.”

Udofa further states that “The recent exercise of presidential power of pardon by the current American President, Donald Trump, by granting pardon to Joe Arpaio (a former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was found guilty in July 2017 of criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order against prolonging traffic patrols targeting immigrants) has rekindled the discussion on the uses and abuses of the pardon power…. It has been argued that Arpaio should have been allowed to serve his punishment, and the presidential pardon amounted to a presidential endorsement of the criminal contempt for which Arpaio was punished.”

In Nigeria, the teacher of law says the case of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s “pardon of Chief D.S.P. Alamieyesigha, former Governor of Bayelsa State, convicted of several corruption charges, remains the most controversial exercise of presidential pardon power in the country.”

He posits further that while “The power to grant pardon is of ancient origin and recognised today in almost every nation…. However, in recent times, the pardon power has been abused as political and other extraneous factors tend to determine its application. It has also been seen as capricious and inaccessible by ordinary people. The usefulness of the power has seriously been dented by lack of control and checks in most jurisdictions, including Nigeria.”

“Sacred” as prerogative of mercy is, Udofa says its application should be alongside “checks and guiding principles.” I add here: with utmost discretion!

The US for instance, punishes tax evasion and drug-related offences severely. On drugs, the US would go to any length to get the culprit to book. That was why, against international conventions, the administration of President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama in an operation codenamed “Operation Just Cause” and had President Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno (February 11, 1934 – May 29, 2017), simply Noreiga, ‘kidnapped’ on January 3, 1990, on the accusation of dealing in hard drugs. In that operation, the US used over 200,000 US troops to effect Noriega’s arrest. His eventual trial in 1991, tagged “trial of the century” by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, earned the Panamanian president 40 years in jail!

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Noreiga’s travails, suspect as they were, are lessons in how a nation that wants to grow treats felons. After his jail term was reduced to 17 for “good behavior” in the US, Noriega was extradited to France in 2010, where he was convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for money laundering. By 2011, France extradited him to Panama, where he was imprisoned having been tried in absentia in the 1990s for the crimes he committed while his dictatorship in Panama lasted. He carried that ignominy to his grave!

Political theorists and analysts believe that Noriega was punished not necessarily for being a drug baron, but for his audacity to stop spying for Big Brother, the US! This side of the Noriega’s coin notwithstanding, the former dictator of Panama was punished home and abroad for every crime he committed against the State. That is how society moves from bad to good. A system that places politics above the wellbeing of the people and asks felons to walk freely irrespective of the irreparable damage they have caused, cannot move forward.

This is what President Tinubu did, when he set free drug offenders in his latest half-thought presidential clemency. In case the president does not realise it, by making drug barons 40.8 percent of his clemency list, Mr. President has sent the wrong signal that here, in Nigeria, crime pays. Why nobody in Tinubu’s Presidency considered the collateral damages those ex-drug convicts have done to the public shows how reflective this government could be. That nobody considered the number of children in various rehab centres because of the activities of the freed drug peddlers interrogates the depth of advice the President gets!

But more importantly, and most troubling is the lead President Tinubu has given to those who believe till the second coming of the Messiah, that the President’s past was tainted. They can now go to town with the did-we-not-say-so cliche. Our elders say when a man is accused of having a long intestine, he has the responsibility to curtail his gastronomic tendencies (tí a bá pe ènìyàn ní abífun ràdàràdà, ó ye kí ó pa ìfun rè mó).

Again, they submit that a man accused of being a petty thief should not be seen playing with a goat’s kid in a dark corner of the village (a kìí pe ènìyàn l’ólè kó máa fi omo ewúré seré l’ókùnkùn). How the wisdom in these sayings of our ages got lost on President Tinubu when the committee he was said to have constituted for the purpose presented the list of those to benefit from his presidential pardon such that almost half of the list are drug convicts, beats one’s imagination. One is heavily tempted to believe that this is a case of paddy paddy, ala someone helping someone!

Nothing brings home the caution that we should not allow an emèrè to share the àkàrà òsè so that she will not give it to her kindred spirits more than the pardon of the 60 drug offenders by President Tinubu. How his ‘political opponents’ will not draw a correlation between the perceived reputation of the President in the social world, and the pardon of 60 drug lords would be the eighth wonder of this age.

By that indiscretion, 60 notorious drug dealers are out on the streets without any encumbrance! What are the implications? Your guess is as good as mine! How the President would explain that he did not free those drug felons to pave way for their return journeys to the underworld of drug trafficking is a herculean task. And I take a bet: Presido go explain tire, but we no go understand!