A man who steals his neighbor’s goat is a thief, and of course, a criminal. An armed man who breaks into a home and robs its inhabitants of their possessions is an armed robber: the most dreaded and reviled of all Nigerian criminals. What then are a group of men who, armed with the terror of the gun, robbed the people, an entire country, of her mandate? Their scale of criminality defies the English lexicon. Unable to cobble together a new word that will aptly characterize such men, I will, for lack of words, call them criminals. As it is these men that hold sway over Nigeria, the affairs of this country are being directed by criminals, criminals in power. What can be expected from criminals as rulers but chaos, falsehood, broken promises, corruption and theft?
Normally, democracy is a fount of political stability, social justice and overall societal progress. Not surprisingly, the world’s wealthiest and socially advanced countries are mostly democracies. However, for democracy to be a wellspring of national advancement, it must be leavened by capable, purposeful and above all, lawful leadership. It was reasonable to expect that democracy in Nigeria will progressively improve the standard of political morality, steadily elevate national ethics and values and appreciably enhance the quality of life for the generality of Nigerians. Unfortunately, none of these has happened because democracy in Nigerian is not associated with legitimate leadership. It is destitute of democracy’s most fundamental ingredient, the right of the people to freely choose their leaders.
An iniquitous oligarchy unsurpassed in its contempt for the law, theft of public funds and electoral fraud reduced the electoral process in Nigeria to a charade. In the 2007 general election this evil oligarchy orchestrated one of the most fraudulent elections in history. That election repudiated the collective will of the people and imposed on them political thugs, freebooters and electoral robbers as rulers.
At the apex of this illegal formation is the president of Nigeria, Musa Yar’Adua. He rode to power on the coattail of an “evil quartet”: Olusegun Obasanjo, Ahmadu Alli, Sunday Ehindero and Maurice Iwu. Obasanjo and Alli brought savagery, viciousness and “do or die” into the electoral process. Ehindero, then the Inspector General of Police, reduced the Nigerian Police Force to an agency of intimidation and brutality. And Iwu reduced the entire Independent National Election Commission (INEC) structure to a gargantuan election rigging machinery.
Yar’Adua lost a magnificent opportunity to legitimize his presidency and extricated himself from the grip of the immoral powerbrokers that were to encircle and enchain him. This he could have done by rejecting the April 2007 presidential election and holding a free and fair election. Instead he went to court to defend the indefensible. Lamentably, the court validated the monumental hoax that brought him to power. That ruling made nonsense of the universal notion of the court as a spring of justice. The court sometimes fails in its supposed role as a source of justice. The reason for this periodic failure is that judges can choose to ignore the evidence before them, and reach their verdict based on their sensitivity to other insinuating factors. Secondly, a fundamental problem of Western (which Nigeria is by extension a part of) jurisprudence is that the courtroom is devoid of dialectic or argument and discussion for arriving at the truth but dominated by eristic or argument for the sake of winning a case or downing an adversary.
The policies of a presidency determined by collusion in electoral theft and infamous agreements between contending concerns within an oligarchy cannot be dictated by public needs but by narrow-minded interests of a privileged few. Not surprisingly, after two years in power, Yar’Adua has failed to achieve any of his 7 point agenda. This failure is most evident in his inability to curb lawlessness in Nigeria.
Thus, Nigeria remains a vast scene of confusion, a reality glaringly palpable in the suffocating levels of official corruption and the government’s refusal to hold a credible election. Despite all the fanfare about war on corruption, Nigeria remains an exceedingly corrupt country. For all practical purposes, the war on corruption has collapsed into mere trumpery. Mrs Waziri was not appointed the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) to fight corruption but to protect the booties of our former rulers (Yar’Adua’s masters and sponsors) and to provide an enabling environment for our present rulers to illegally amass their own wealth.
So, despite her blustering and claptraps, the EFCC has failed to successfully prosecute any notable politician and it sometimes feigns ignorance of illegal and corrupt activities flourishing among the elite. For example, with the overwhelming evidence against those former governors that stole millions of dollars from the public coffers, is two years not enough time to have brought some of them to book? But they all remain free; prancing around. Secondly, the EFCC has turned a blind eye to high level bunkering in the Niger Delta. It has been revealed that illegal bunkering thriving with the acquiescence of Aso Rock steals up to 20% of the country’s daily oil production.
In the latest election in Nigeria, the partial gubernatorial election re-run in Ekiti State, the ruling elite’s scorn for the law was once again irrefutable; they rigged the election. Initially, the INEC Resident Commissioner, Mrs Ayoka Adebayo refused to be involved in the rigging. But armed-twisted by the racketeers that suffuse the highest echelon of INEC, she relented. Then, she accepted and announced falsified election results; thus, re-imposing a criminal in power on the people of Ekiti State.
To the chagrin of the Yar’Adua government, Nigeria was not invited to the last G8 meeting. The itinerary of President Barack Obama’s visit to Africa included some relatively insignificant countries that border Nigeria, but excluded the giant of Africa. It is not surprising that world leaders are avoiding the criminals in power in Nigerian. Why should any respectable leader anywhere in the world want to be smeared by associating with a dishonorable clique unequalled in their litany of crimes against their own people?
Tochukwu Ezukanma writes from Lagos, Nigeria
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0803 529 2908
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