If you need any evidence that Nigeria’s problems have started to overwhelm us you need to listen to people. The problems are really beginning to get at us. People are beginning to swear and curse. Others have started to call on Holy Ghost fire. Some are just hallucinating while others are mumbling senseless oddities. They are all signs of helplessness and surrender! How else can you place Dr Victor Olunloyo’s dim verdict last week that our civil war heroes died in vain and that Nigeria is the “World Headquarters of hypocrisy”. Dr. Olunloyo, former governor of Oyo State, according to Vanguard of Monday 27 September was speaking at the 50th anniversary of the Government College, Ibadan Old Boys. Such is the level of despondency in the land!
But the one that mirrored the state of confusion our problems have induced in people was a suggestion credited to distinguished Senator Idris Kuta by New Age newspaper of 27 September. Senator Kuta was reported to have suggested that: “To ensure that lawmakers would not be easily manipulated by the executive and others who have vested interests, only the rich and contented should run for election into the National Assembly.” The senator who was reported to have spoken on NTA Abuja added: “People who could not be bought or unduly influenced would be a true representative of the people.” Reminding us that it cost US$160 million to contest a senate seat in the United States, the senator restated what Senate President Adolphus Wabara had earlier told us that no amount of salary or perquisites could recoup what a senator spent during electioneering campaign.
One fact that is incontrovertible in Kuta’s theory of plutocracy is that the press, the whipping horse of every degenerate government, has never exaggerated the vulgarity of Ghana-Must-Go (herein after known as GMG) that has become the Hansard of our National Assembly! Apart from the factual reports of the press and many times live TV display of bundles of Naira bribe money next to the mace, the Senate President not long ago rationalized this depravity. The legislators have to recoup their electoral expenses. Here again we are hearing it from the man who conveniently provided the template for the removal of former Senate President, Dr. Chuba Okadigbo. It seems people are weary of pretending that there are many distinguished men in the National Assembly. The bewildering way the National Assembly passed some bills speaks more eloquently than Senator Kuta of the type of people we have in the National Assembly.
Senator Kuta is right in implying that there are many hungry, greedy and pliable people in the National Assembly. Many there are in various assemblies in the land who are there strictly to fend off generations of family poverty. Many are the first lights in their family. If they become millionaires they are the first generation millionaires in a long history of poverty, spelt with double “t” and double “y”! But the troubling poverty is not that of material lack but that promoted by greed and as Kuta pointed out, lack of contentment. You have many today who are not materially lacking but are poor because of their greed and lack of contentment, for as they say, he who drinks salt water thirst for more!
But let us return to the matter of the rich in Nigeria. Who are Nigeria’s rich men and women? In plain language many of Nigeria’s rich are thieves who have escaped prisons because of a corrupt legal system! There are not many of those who Senator Kuta would refer to as rich who got rich by adding value to our economy. And that is why our country is in a mess! Many of the rich people are crooks of yesterday, the drug barons who have laundered themselves into decent society but who nevertheless stink, rich evangelists who are self-confessed yesterday’s armed robbers, scammers, ritual killers, ghost contractors and looters of the national treasury! Presently, our political arena has become the easiest avenue for scoundrels to legitimize themselves. Only few who made their money through visible and legitimate ways come near Nigeria’s politics. And they are usually squeezed, crowded and frustrated out! The negligible few who make it are harassed by crime bosses who are euphemistically called political godfathers!
It must be remembered that today’s legislators who are being manipulated with GMG will become tomorrow’s rich men. What I have noticed in developing a political career in Nigeria is that the man who steals as a local government councillor develops appetite for stealing at the local government chairman level. When he is done with that level, he aspires for commissionership, from there, to the House of Representative, Senate or governorship, after which he wants to be the president! The only contented people I know in Nigeria’s political arena are dead men!
The real issue here is that of dignity and self-respect. The question we have to begin to ask of our political aspirants is: “Who is your father?” “From which family?” “What is your pedigree?” For me what we call corruption is plain stealing! Stealing is the most depraved of all degradations. It is not an attribute of anybody or any family that has self-respect, dignity or integrity! Anybody who has not learnt stealing from the family, starting with the soup pot or the parents indoctrinating him or her into lying, cheating, ostentatious lifestyle not supported by family income, or bribing or fixing school certificate or JAMB results is not likely to suddenly start embezzling, I mean stealing, public fund! Pride, not money, is what makes the difference between a corrupt person and a distinguished public officer. That is why those in America who know that Washington or Whitehall salary cannot support the standard of living they are used to do not take bribes to pass bills. They return to the countryside from where they came!
Plutocracy as being peddled by Senator Kuta is not what will cure the legislators of their disgraceful behaviour. The cure lies in our electoral system. I explained this exhaustively in my article here on 4 May 2004 titled “The Rule Of Lock Pickers”. Today we have many people in public office who can at best be described as gate-crashers. Many of the people in the National Assembly have no business there. For example, I cannot speak of the credibility of the election that brought Kuta to the Senate, but the man who passes himself off as the Senate President is a man who owes his seat in the Senate to a cranky high court judge, Justice Egbo-Egbo, who has since been disgraced and removed from the bench! There are “senators” in that Senate as Kuta himself lamented in Sokoto recently, who, in other climes would have been handed to the police as impersonators. But the rightful owners of those seats are being tossed about in a legal merry-go-round. Why would such impostors not be willing to make as much money as they can before they are shown the way out?
Our flawed and discredited electoral system is the problem, not the bank account of the legislators. Until we have a credible electoral system that can guarantee that only the people’s choice of leaders and representatives occupy our public offices, frustrations induced by the activities of lock pickers will continue to force us to make illogical suggestions. The present electoral system simply knocks down the perimeter fences that protect the sanctity of public offices and makes them vulnerable to the invasion of all manner of miscreants. I nevertheless share Senator Kuta’s anxiety. There is an urgent need to restore integrity to our National Assembly. But the place to fix it is at the electoral system. Make it credible and screen out the crooks who are using public offices as immunity from prosecution. Believe me, if some of the “rich” crooks standing trial today as 419ers were not in the net, it would have been a matter of time for them to surface as “Distinguished Senators”!
