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Thieves in the Nigerian Senate
By Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
When a corpse comes hurrying to
burial with an erect penis, then something is absolutely
wrong. Not only that this has all the ingredients of an
abominable embarrassment, the corpse is not heading home
pretty soon. If he receives an interment, the odours of
gossip would ensure his eternal insomnia in the memories
of the living. At the dawn of time, long before the
birth of taboo, the coffin was already on record as
advising the corpse to relax, and make itself
comfortable because their journey and alliance is going
to be a very long one. Both of them are marching to
eternity together. And that is some pretty, long,
unending time. Hurrying to get there is not only a waste
of time; it is immortal inconvenience. But be that as it
may, a corpse sporting a penile erection is not yet
ready, or qualified for this journey. No matter, how
insistent his libidos are, or how much he desires the
companies of defunct pussies; he must lose his erection
to qualify for burial. To bury a living man is an
abomination. No society would gladly abide such
atrocity. This is a most ancient calabash of wisdom.
Let’s not punish your anticipations
further!
A corpse came to burial with such an
unwholesome burden, about a week and some days ago. On
Wednesday the 23rd of January, 2008, Senator
Nuhu Aliyu, an “honourable” senator of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria, rose in that hallowed chamber of
laws, and announced in clear, categorical and
incontrovertible terms, that the Nigerian senate is a
den of robbers. This senate for him is a haven of
fraudsters, swindlers, and men of notorious odour. To
remove his assertions from the realm of conjectures, he
threatened to release the names of those, who in his
opinion are moral lepers that are not fit to be in the
senate, based on their track records, as certifiable,
fraudulent characters. But he was stopped in his tracks
by the senate President, who mischievously deflected the
shot by referring it to a committee, where he hopes,
removed from public view; the assertion will be hushed
down, watered down and die a slow death.
The Senate held its breath. The
nation’s heartbeat pulsated. The revelation, though an
open secret to many Nigerians came from an unexpected
quarter. It came from a source deep inside the bowels of
Nigeria’s rendezvous with corruption. It came from a
member of the corrupt establishment, who suddenly
discovered religion and like Joe Vallaci, decided to rat
on his peers. Nuhu Aliyu was a policeman. The Police
establishment in Nigeria is notorious for its dalliance
with crime and corruption. The average Nigerian reserves
no trust on the Police. The establishment in spite of
its wooden apologetics harbours more criminals and
psychological degenerates in its ranks, than in the
normal population. This man rose through the ranks of
this decadent institution that summarizes everything
horrid about the Nigerian nation. He retired as a DIG,
in a state unknown to the public and went into politics.
Nigerian Politics has equally been a refuge of
irredeemable scoundrels.
Armed with a background as a manager
in an ethically-bankrupt institution, Aliyu was (s)elected
Senator of the Federal Republic in the 2007 electoral
fraudulence engineered by the PDP, and presided over by
Maurice Iwuh. The important thing was that he came to
the senate to represent a constituency. Whether his
avarice or timidity is a part of this constituency can
only be speculated on. But his volte-face shows him as a
man without spine or integrity. This has equally
consolidated the unholy reputation of Nigeria Police and
Nigerian politicians, who are considered to be the first
estate of the corrupt realm. Nuhu Aliyu spanned these
two most notorious of these structures, as an
ex-policeman and a politician. He remained an
insignificant public figure until he blurted out those
accusations.
The reactions generated by this
indignant choreography on the Floor of the senate, were
not as audacious as the righteous anger of innocence.
The hushed and brow-beaten reactions from the
“honourable” senators were the subdued benediction,
which an admixture of guilty conscience and
conscienceless impunity pays to sudden exposure. Many
thought that the man who asserted had the backbone to go
the long haul in proving his assertions. But our man
Aliyu; in a meteoric volte-face, as sudden and fleeting
as his prior assertions; lost his nerve and allowed his
resolve to fizzle out in the corrupt horizon of the
horse and donkey-trading that has been the albatross of
Nigerian politics since 1957.
We would not expend time plumbing to
find out why Aliyu recanted. One phrase summarizes him:
He stands for nothing! And as Martin Luther King, Jr.
would have it, “a man who stands for nothing can fall
for anything”. If he was threatened into keeping his
mouth shut, then he loves his hide more than the truth.
And such a man has no character, and lacks every moral
right to be in our senate. Or better still, he was a
coward, whose poltroonery is a pathological one, as to
castrate his resolve. If he was talked into abandoning
his threats of naming those, who in his opinion are the
pathological moral derelicts populating our senate, then
he is a moral prostitute who allows himself be seduced
with the fatal juices of eloquence, into betraying his
beliefs. If he was blackmailed into backing down, then
he must have a closet full of skeletons. If he needed to
consult his lawyers before backing down, why did he not
consult them before making those statements?
If this is case, then he is a man who
puts his mouth in gear before his brain is engaged. Are
these the kind of men we have abandoned the destiny of
our country to their caprice? Little wonder why Nigeria
is making no headway in policy directions that would
have rescued our daily decaying society. If this guy was
bribed into shutting his mouth, then he is extremely
purchasable. He is a commodity, who could be bought to
sell his heritage for sordid money. Whatever Aliyu’s
inspirations for electing to keep quiet and apologise to
those he accused, after his threats, is only known to
him and his conscience, if he has any. We can never
divine that.
Over and above his fatal character
flaws, Senator Nuhu Aliyu’s allegations are weighty
ones. In civilized climes, such explosive outbursts are
potent enough to force a whole government to resign.
Such allegations have been historical watersheds for
many a political dispensation in many lands, as well as
waterloos for many a politician in many climes. That he
recanted many days later, should subject him to the
opprobrium of every right thinking Nigerian. And he
should receive a negative political dividend from that.
In a place where scandals really scandalize the
populace, Nuhu Aliyu has not rendered himself
politically impotent, he has committed political
suicide. He has no credibility any more. He has proven
himself untrustworthy. And how can an informed
electorate vest its confidence and mandate, on a man who
vacillates, stutters, and changes his stands more than a
chameleon changes its colours?
Senator Aliyu by his statements and
consequent actions told Nigerians in clear terms, that
their destiny has been in the hands of rogues and
thieves, who masquerade as senators. He told us that our
posterity has been hijacked and mortgaged to a select
band of brigands and fraudsters, who have no agenda
other than the embezzlement of the Nigerian nation. How
a nation can function with such a bunch of butchers is
anybody’s guess.
Though what he told us is not news,
the new dimension to it is that what was common
knowledge was being affirmed by a member of this
faceless cabal running Nigeria aground.
And how can one find words to
articulate his boiling anger and excruciating
disappointment? Where can one find the concepts to
personify the extremities of his discontent; at the
betrayal of his heritage, by a bunch of recycled
thieves, whose manifesto has only one agenda, namely:
the avaricious enrichment of themselves and their
elitist club of political leeches and hangers-on in high
places? These crooks bestride our body-politic by
enthroning a regime of indentured thievery across
Nigeria.
And that is really annoying!
I am galled at the timidity of the
Nigerian electorate. I am scandalized by the
purchasability and the postural unconcern of the
Nigerian population that allowed itself to be brutalized
into emasculation, by the political class. The
scandalous poverty enslaving over 70 percent of the
Nigerian population is a capital indictment on the
Nigerian political class. The treasonable crimes of most
of our politicians on the Nigerian nation are capital
offences, which call for the highest form of punishment.
Had I not been principally, an opponent of capital
punishment, I would have been leading a campaign calling
for the heads of these unrepentant rogues.
Chinweizu once wrote that “when we start beheading
crooks in power, then crooked opportunists would be
disinclined to seek power.
But that is meat for another meal.
The fundamental fact is that any fragile sensibility
would be affronted by the decadence of Nigerian power
epicentres. Even if a thief sits atop the presidency, a
functional senate that is alive to its oversight
functions would check his thievery unto dysfunctionality;
making it impossible to exercise his instinctual
proclivities to embezzlement. The obverse obtains
equally in such a situation. But in Nigeria, everything
is unfortunately superlative in the breach.
The senate is the highest law-making
body in Nigeria. This is a house entrusted with grave
responsibility. It carries the hopes and aspirations of
the people. It is a trustee of the sovereign. And the
sovereign here is the people. A trustee cannot afford to
be untrustworthy. Unworthiness for an office compromises
the ability to exercise that office without let. When
the content of one’s character is compromised by his
fraudulence, he becomes tainted goods. His ability to
exercise a high office is seriously impaired. His
competence is compromised. Ontologically, the house of
laws is a house of honour. Honour is the conferment of
reason, on the good, the beautiful, and the true. Reason
honours virtue. Honour in lieu of this metaphysic can
never be conferred on a dishonourable vessel, as he is
not worthy of it.
To this end, those who enter the
house of laws, as custodians of the people’s mandate to
make laws for the peace and good governance of the
state, must be worthy bearers of the trust vested on
them. They must be worthy to carry the burden of the
people’s trust. They must earn totally, the trust of WE
THE PEOPLE. There is no room for malicious shortcomings.
Their office empowers them to take decisions that can
affect the lives, destinies and futures of millions of
people. Here, extreme diligence and moral stability is
the most basic requirement. But most unfortunately, the
Nigerian senate conglomerates a bevy of rogues, in whom
Nigeria is only a concept appropriated to advance
individual interests, or canonize personal greed. The
common good is alien to this conceptual scheme. It is a
jungle situation, where man is simply wolf to his kind.
That explains why life in Nigeria is strictly Hobbessian:
solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.
That there are thieves and shady
characters in our senate today marks Obasanjo and the
PDP out as corpses with erection. The corpses are
literarily dead-weights. But they cannot seem to lose
their prurient relevance, as their atrocious impress is
found everywhere on our firmament today. Over and above
the fact that the Nigerian political clime has rendered
it difficult for honest men to emerge on the corridors
of power, to exercise responsible leadership, Obasanjo
and PDP’s monumental indiscretions worsened an already
terrible situation.
Today politics in Nigeria remains a
corrugated maze of indentured roguery, with the shots
being called by godfathers, instead of the electorate.
Here allegiance is not owed the people, who are the
supposed sovereign. Rather, total subservience and
unalloyed obeisance is owed the narrow insularities of
crooked Mafia-like godfathers, who ruthlessly operate a
cult-like principality of crime. The relationship
between these brainless servants of opportunism and the
faceless cabal that brought them to power is nothing but
medieval feudalism in twentieth century robes.
And these opportunists and their
principals have engrafted themselves in our highest
decision making bodies. This explains the poverty of
ideas dominating those bodies. A senate that assembles
shady, questionable, and compromised characters like
Iyabo-Obasanjo Bello, Jubril Aminu, Chimaroke Nnamani,
George Akume, and many others can only be an
amphitheatre of political mercenaries, contractors, and
“agberos”, masquerading as legislators. They are
scoundrels legislating rascality and awarding juicy
contracts to their corrupt concerns.
The senators know that there are
thieves in the senate. They have not cared to find out
because they know who the thieves are. The names of
these thieves are well known to all Nigerians. Do we
need to talk about the chief presiding officer, whose
Belizean nationality and foreign accounts makes
mincemeat of any moral pretensions to any responsible
office, or his deputy whose name found its way
advertently into EFCC’s list of corrupt politicians? The
senators need only to look in the mirror to see the
thieves that Nigerians have known all along.
What should be done to arrest the
brazen impunity advertised by Nigerian office holders at
all levels? Well, Nigerians are now suffering from
olfactory or perceptual fatigue to corruption. Olfactory
fatigue renders the nose impotent to a strong odour
after being exposed to that odour for sometime. It can
no more react with the kind of revulsion it would have
mustered, the first moment it encountered it. To that
end, Nigerians most times take the news of corruption in
high places, as normal and continue with the miserable
lives they prefer to live on their knees, instead of
standing up to the thieves. This is why religious
hawking of quack hopes in a future paradise, and
instantaneous miracles in the present hell, are the
hottest commodity sold in Nigeria.
Every one is now a pastor and a Rev.
Dr. in the most proximate potency, just to squeeze out
some paltry privilege and pecuniary gains from the
emasculated and credulous Nigerian population sample
within his reach. And the religion practiced here has
all the trappings and features of “an opium of the
masses”. Our prayers for Nigeria in distress seem to
meet the deafening silence of heaven. The reasons are
simple. Sophocles the Greek poet summarized it many
centuries back: Heaven will never help those who will
never act. The Christian Bible made it clear, when St.
James in his letter to the Christians reiterated that
“faith without good works is DEAD. God never voted on
Election Day. Calling on God to sack those who stole our
mandate, instead of initiating the changes necessary to
prevent our mandates being stolen, ourselves is like a
man, sleeping throughout the day, and hoping to be paid
a salary at the end of the month for sleeping.
Nigeria’s predicament is a terminal
one, and requires urgent and decisive therapy. If
regicide could be committed to save Nigeria, let it be.
The king could be sacrificed if he refuses to sacrifice
himself for his people. Nigerians should start thinking
in that regard. The time has come for it. The scandalous
poverty manacling Nigeria, consequent on political
gangsterism, the insults that Nigerians are subjected to
everywhere in the world as a result of the fact that the
custodians of our welfare have sold us out, the
posterity of young Nigerians, which has dropped off the
horizon, all support a thought in this regard. We cannot
continue along these lines and expect a different
outcome for the Nigeria of the future. Away with these
inglorious bastards that have refused to let our nation
evolve to greatness. Nigerians should rise up and sweep
their house clean, before we could start blaming the
external collaborators to our plight. Shakespeare was
right: every bondsman in his hands lies the keys to
cancel his captivity.
With Nuhu Aliyu’s volte face,
Nigeria’s clamour to be rescued from the grip of elitist
leeches has suffered yet another set back. With every
such betrayal, Nigeria’s future is buried by instalment.
Nigeria is now a corpse that should relax and enjoy its
eternal alliance with the coffin of corruption. Our
salvation is not yet in sight.
As for Nuhu Aliyu, he deserves
neither our compassion nor respect. And we reserve non
for him. His volte face remains ultimately a betrayal of
his integrity. His credibility is forever toast. We can
never believe him again. Nigerians should bury such
shady characters with the irrelevance they abundantly
deserve. As for the thieves in our senate: every day is
for the thief, one day is for the owner. That day is
coming! And on that day, Nigeria will immolate her
thieves to water the trees of her liberation. We shall
live to see that day!
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Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
was born in Nigeria and currently lives in Germany. He
had his Bachelors in Philosophy from the Pontificial
Urban University Rome. Mr. Ogbunwezeh is currently
working on a Ph.D. in Social Ethics and Economics at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main,
Germany. His book The Tragedy of a Tribe: The Grand
Conspiracy Against Ndigbo and the Igbo Quest for
Integration in Nigeria was published in 2004. "Shots
at Immortality: Immortalizing Igbo Excellence" and "The
Scandal of Poverty in Africa: Reinventing a Role for
Social Ethics in Confronting the Socio-economic and
Political Challenges of Africa of the Third Millennium"
will be published in 2005. Additionally, Mr. Ogbunwezeh
published dozens of articles in newspapers, magazines,
internet sites, and trade journals.
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posted 4 February 2008 |
