Dankaka’s revolution at the Federal Character Commission

BY FALILAT ENIKUOMEHIN

The case of Zambia’s chairman, Task Force on Corruption, Maxwell Nkole, illustrates vividly the challenges that those who seek to change the endemic status quo go through. Harangued repeatedly by President Rupiah Banda, Nkole was shown the gate of the anti-graft agency when he began to kick against the acquittal of former President Chiluba on charges of embezzling about 500 thousand dollars of Zambian state funds as president of Zambia from 1991 to 2001. It mirrors the fact that harangues, combined attacks, sometimes death, are the fate that always befalls those who seek to change the decrepit order of things.

“Last night, I had an hour’s interview on television, and I think I spoke very strongly about the acquittal of Doctor Chiluba. And I also prayed that the anti-corruption fight be intensified. And today I’m told they don’t want to continue with me,” Nkole had said.

Nicolaus Copernicus, a German mathematician, and astronomer, in 1543, also did the unexpected by formulating a model of the universe which placed the sun, rather than the earth, at its center. For the world, this was a major event in the history of science and triggered what is today called the Copernican Revolution, through this pioneering contribution to the scientific revolution. Before him, the world had been comfortable with the invention of Ptolemy, of the Ptolemaic System, which held that the planet Earth was the center of the universe and all of the other planets, stars, and the Sun revolved, or circled, around it.

Those who take the unconventional paths that Nkole and Copernicus took are non-conformists who upset society’s apple carts. Most of the time, because they disrupt the order of things, no matter the joy and progress they give to humanity by so doing, they face the fiery wrath of the establishment. For the establishment does not want a divergence or a departure from how things were done from the days of antiquity. In many instances, by upsetting apple carts, some beneficiaries of the status quo are banished to a life of penury and want. These beneficiaries fight tooth and nail to ensure the success of the decadence of society against any reform.

The fates of Nkole and Copernicus seem to explain the fate of Dr. Muheeba Dankaka, one of the few female heads of the Nigerian federal government agencies and parastatals. Since her inauguration in 2020 as the executive chairman of the Federal Character Commission (FCC), Dankaka has faced the fiery darts in the dark and in the open from a rotten system that prefers the sustenance of the past, not minding the great leap forward that she has recorded in office.

Dankaka’s major act of audacity which the establishment that was majorly patriarchal resented was that she had the temerity to be a woman. How dare she! In a society which is driven by the ego and whims of men, for her to sit atop a major artery of the federal government operations, a commission that has a consequential role to play in the lives of millions of Nigerians, was itself an act of audacity that they could not stomach. Surrounded by men who come to the commission with their egos and big fat stomach – apologies to Fela Anikulapo Kuti – expected to be filled to burst level, it was logical that these sexists could not stand her guts.

The second audacity of the woman was that she had a mind of her own. The establishment could stomach the “error” of a woman who commits an “unheard of” sacrilege of riding to the top of an organisation like the FCC, so far as she subjects her actions and policies to the sanction of men who would help her “straighten them up” but that she had a mind of her own and dares to open the rules and constitution of Nigeria in her defense was like committing suicide.

Before Dankaka came into office, the FCC was a rotten metaphor for Nigeria. Since its establishment in the late 1990s, it had been run as a conduit pipe for the satisfaction of the god of Mammon which resided in the bellies of those who ran it. Aware of the epidemic of unemployment that has afflicted the country’s youth, a denim that virtually every family in Nigeria suffers from, runners of FCC of yore found in it a conduit pipe to make ill-gotten wealth off the travails of the unemployed. Whoever was posted to administer the commission, even though on the outward, the commission does not have money allotted to it, uses FCC to make cool, easy but hell-of-fire furnace money. They did this by selling jobs that the constitution empowers the commission to superintend over its allotment to federal government agencies, at very huge sums of money. It was said that commissioners and the heads coasted home sometimes on a daily basis with multiple millions of naira.

Dankaka’s mantra, which she mumbles around from the word go, immediately she took over the mantle of leadership, sickened the establishment to who she communicated her philosophy. “President Muhammadu Buhari swore me on oath with the Holy Quran that I would not subvert goodliness in office, so each person working with me must swear by the Bible or the Holy Quran that they will not sell jobs meant for suffering Nigerians,” she quips off-handedly. This discomforted those coming into the commission with lofty eyes on making money off jobs that were pawned like fish sold in the open market and those who had been planted in the FCC, who had benefitted tremendously from the maggots that wriggled out of job racketeering.

The woman’s contentedness was an affront to them and a very huge insult for them to swallow. How could any person appointed into office in Nigeria not seek to amass and amass money until their last minutes on earth? Always armed with the Nigerian constitution as a guiding light of her actions and policies in office, Dankaka’s adversaries are rankled by her obstinate religiosity and knack for doing right. Their immediate assignment, upon finding out that she had become a turgid fish that could not be bent to accommodate unrighteousness, was to begin a regime of attacks on her personality, mudsling her serially and making her totally malformed in the presence and estimation of her appointor, the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The first pedestal they jumped on immediately they began their dirty job of pulling her down was to say that they found a disjunction in her credentials. According to one of the “human rights groups” which landed the tar-brush portfolio, Muheeba Farida Dankaka, the name that was contained in the certified true copies of her curriculum vitae and certificates submitted to the senate for screening was at variance with the name on her Master’s degree certificate obtained from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria which was Muiba Nike Salau. When told that the woman, born in Kwara state, was entitled to a Yoruba name which might not be the norm in the north where she later came to grow and live and where she got married, they drew blank and were further persuaded to proceed on their ruinous path. Before this, they had claimed that Dankaka, her marriage name, was inconsistent with her maiden name and that she did not finish from the university she claimed to have attended. It took one of her old classmates who came to her office with the photograph taken at their departure from school, as well as her certificates, to confirm their cache of lies as mis-human rights apologia.

Having failed to pull a strand of hair with these claims, architects of this dissembling parade now began to manifest physically at the FCC. This came in the form of some directors alleging that some commissioners in the commission’s jobs were being taken over by directors. In this regard, five of the 36 commissioners went to the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to lay complaints against the Federal Character Commission leadership. This became an orgy circulated on social media and even on an Abuja-based radio where the architects of these lies took their campaign to.

In Dankaka’s reaction to this allegation, she labeled it false and mere fabricated stories which were calculated to dent her image and that of the commission. “Over 30 honourable commissioners are currently working in harmony with the executive chairman in bringing positive changes. Five of the commissioners are fighting for their personal and selfish interest; they want business as usual in the commission which is not possible under the chairman’s watch”.

Another claim brought against Dankaka was that the FCC under this Amazon had been flouting the constitution, especially, the establishment act. On November 18, 2020, some commissioners alleged at plenary that her administration was engaged in maladministration. They alleged that she was involved in “an unwholesome arrogation of powers to herself by not adhering to section 2(1) of the act and failure to render an account of financial transactions to the plenary”.

In her response, however, Dankaka had said: “Let me make it clear that my decision to explain these issues should not be interpreted as answering your query because it is only my employers that can give me a query on my actions and inaction and not plenary”. On Section 2(1), she said that as the chief executive of the commission, the other members are described as representatives of their various states in the commission to ensure and enforce compliance with the principles of the proportional sharing and that “it is rather a bad interpretation to equate the chairman with the commissioners in terms of the running of the commission… The chairman is not first among equals as claimed by the memo bur rather the chairman is the chief executive officer and the accounting officer of the commission…”

Ordinary workers and stakeholders in the FCC will affirm that both in the condition of work and the aesthetics of the work environment, Dankaka has revolutionised the FCC by bringing positive changes to the commission in all areas. This she did by centralising the administrative structure of the monitoring and enforcement department. The environment has also received a major uplift as an elevator, never known since the office complex was constructed, has been fitted to the office.

The truth is that Dankaka has blocked the long-winding culture of theft of public funds, injudicious use of allocated government money that ended up in the purses of individuals, and has brought dignity to those who believe in hard work at the FCC.

In saner societies, the kind of Habeeba Dankaka are celebrated as heroines that they are.

Enikuomehin, an Attorney at Law, writes from the Federal Capital Territory