Too corrupt to fight corruption

By Josef Omorotionmwan

WE wonder for how long our governance will be left at the level of comic relief. In most of the plays of Shakespeare, there are serious acts and scenes. In-between, there are breaks during which jesters are brought on stage to make people laugh and to lighten eyes that are already heavy.

People steal billions of Naira of public money. They hit the headlines in all the media. We debate on our streets and in buses and we laugh. Quite often, probes are set up. Sometimes, probe reports are produced. We debate, we laugh and nothing happens thereafter.

Virtually every body knows that the 2015 elections will be rigged but nobody is doing anything about it. The electoral umpires already have their eyes fixed on it. After the Anambra debacle, Prof. Atahiru Jega is asking for one more chance, apparently to be allowed to unleash the final pogrom in 2015. We just laugh and do nothing.

In the past, people were dogmatically tied to their political parties in the name of party discipline. Even where they saw something manifestly wrong with the steps being taken by their party leaders, they could not speak out for fear of anti-party activities.

But today, things are changing. President Goodluck Jonathan is being bombarded with “love letters” on every side. Most of these letters come from his party men. The most ludicrous of them all is the one emanating from the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

At his level, one would have expected the Governor to seek necessary clarification from relevant agencies before rushing to write President Jonathan that $49.8 billion oil money was missing, or put in his own language of thievery, “the amount was not accounted for”. And he went ahead to leak the content of his letter to the public.

Psychologists would readily admit that Sanusi’s letter is a Freudian slip in which he is thinking aloud and telling us how much he would have stolen were he in the oil industry.

It serves him right. He looked small and completely deflated when he came face to face with the Finance Minister, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala and the NNPC Group Managing Director, Mr. Yakubu. We are not in a hurry to forget that some $10-12 billion, depending on whose story we accept, is still waiting to be reconciled. This is too big an amount to be left hanging for comic relief.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Amiu Waziri Tambuwal, provided his own letter bomb. The summary of that bomb is that Jonathan is too corrupt to fight corruption. After citing all the good examples to buttress his point, including the fact that corruption has become virtually a way of life under this administration, he deposited all the blames at the doorsteps of President Jonathan.

Nothing could be worse than the fact that pension funds have become the easiest money to steal. They are now stolen with impunity and Jonathan is doing nothing about that. We only laugh and clap for them. What a comic relief!

If the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Bochner, suddenly stumbled into some misdeeds of President Barack Obama, would his first course of action be to rush to CBS, ABC or CNN studios to announce the discovery? Of course, not!

Both in Nigeria and the US, one person most favourably disposed to initiate, or cause to be initiated, any impeachment proceedings against the President, is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Essentially, when Tambuwal was cataloguing the various offences of President Jonathan, a bulk of which are clearly impeachable, he was also indicting himself, perhaps unwittingly, before Nigerians: that he and the National Assembly had failed to perform their functions. Whenever the President commits an impeachable offence and he is not impeached, there is a cover up, pure and simple. It is like seeing crime and not informing the police.

It takes a thief to catch a thief. General Matthew Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo has seen it all. In this season of letter writing, he should not be under-rated. That he is guilty of the offences for which he is accusing Jonathan is not a good reason for ignoring his accusation. Rather, it is a good reason to take him very seriously as a man speaking from personal experience, the fact that no one had the effrontery to accuse him when he was committing the crime, notwithstanding.

Apparently, Obasanjo needs deliverance. In more civilised climes, such a man cannot be making public utterances. If a man’s family is such that his daughter can be peached against him at will; his son is constantly at loggerheads with him; and there are insinuations that he may have severally slept with his daughter-in-law, he should spend more time organising his family instead of running around forming himself into a trade union with other retired Generals. Nothing here, however, vitiates the fact that we still have to leave this bad messenger and accept his message.

Jonathan’s reply also provides the worst example of selective enforcement for which the Obasanjo letter is loud. Surely, the man is pained by the accusation of training killers for the 2015 elections. If out of about twelve charges preferred against him in Obasanjo’s court, he is submitting himself for investigation only on the issue of snipers, that is a tacit acceptance that on other issues, he is guilty as charged.

In all this, Jonathan holds the ace. The Edo State experience under Governor Adams Oshiomhole has shown that superior performance is the only antidote against criticisms. If Jonathan were to do less of politicking and more of governance; learn to whip his appointees appropriately on line; and bring about visibly improved services to the nation, letter writers and mail runners would soon be put out of business.

For Jonathan, students of Latin may have adjudged 2013 annus horribilis, meaning “horrible year”. That’s why he must quickly embrace 2014 as an opportunity for a second, nay final chance!