This misconception of change is not only by the poor and the wretched but by almost all our elected officials bar the President.
These are hard times for most Nigerians. A little over a year ago, Nigerians trooped out in their millions to vote for change and change they got. The All Progressives Congress (APC) campaigned on the “change” mantra and from the results of last year’s elections, the generality of Nigerians seemed to have bought into it. The problem is that we have failed to key-into it. Most of us were only thinking of personnel changes and not attitudinal and this is where our problems arises. We were thinking of only changing Diezani and bringing in Nchokoh for him to start where she stopped – business as usual.
This misconception of change is not only by the poor and the wretched but by almost all our elected officials bar the President. We are today treated to stories of crass theft, euphemistically called “budget padding”. The forty thieves who, in the cover of the night, shared our commonweal among them are now dragging each other in the public square as to who is the saint and who is the devil. The media is making too much fuss about Abdulmumini Jibrin’s new found vocation of fighting corruption. I am not quite sure both Jibrin and the media are aware of what the whole thing is all about. Fighting corruption, I mean. Being honest and possessing the ability to live aboard board. To vie for political office because one wants to serve, have the ability to serve and has something to offer and not just to be close to the cookie jar.
It took ages of living a Spartan life by people like President Buhari to be regarded as perpendicular; this was not achieved on the pages of newspapers or screens of smartphones and tablets. There is a deliberate pattern and rhythm to such a lifestyle. It doesn’t happen overnight or when one lost an office and feel it is convenient to become a whistle blower. We had the likes of Dr. Usman Bugaje and Dr. Haruna Yerima in the same House of Representative. These were people who went to the House of Assembly with the intention of reforming the system but what did we do with them? We voted them out after just one term and replaced them with the likes of Jibrin.
Jibrin knew he was going down from the moment the President refused to assent to the Appropriation Bill transmitted to him by the national assembly in April. He had known quite well when he sent text messages to all Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen of Standing Committees asking them to remain steadfast in “justifying” their reports, especially in the media. This was after he made additional “insertions”, as he called it, to the budget without the knowledge of the same standing Committees. So he knew he was going down; what he cannot stomach is his removal as Chairman of the Appropriation Committee. What his pride and greed cannot take is the lack of another opportunity to “insert” projects not meant to be executed in next year’s budget.
His unrelenting media war against those he accused of being corrupt is a sign that he knows he is finished as a lawmaker. That is the ought to, anyway and so it ought to be. He is part of a system which he is now trying to destroy just because the system appears to have jettisoned him and not for any altruistic reasons. Such a vicious system hardly forgives any of its beneficiaries who choose to expose its sleazy activities. It is therefore a matter of life and death for Jibrin to continue to live the persona he is striving to create for himself. He needs a prestige he don’t deserve; an achievement he didn’t accomplish; to save a name he never had or earned the right to bear. I am of the firm believe that the things he is now preaching are farthest from his mind.
It is my humble opinion that Jibrin and Dogara et al, are superficially varied manifestation of the same thing. Of the same intentions ab initio. Selfishness is their only guiding moral principle. They have worked together in harmony through all the paddings and “insertions”, each giving-in to the other’s selfish demand, though Jibrin was the one who pushed himself forward and hogged the limelight when the President refused to sign the budget.
The culprits are the people. I failed to see any hint of rationality in what they now respond to. I have given up all hope of understanding them. I am very convinced that Jibrin and his co-travellers in politics represent so impertinent, so vicious a fraud that to suspend the evidence of my eyes is beyond my elastic capacity. To canonise Jibrin as an anti-corruption crusader will be sacrilege.
