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An Open Letter to Abuja’s Rats and Mosquitoes

November 26, 2009

Image removed.Dear Pests: Barka da Sallah greetings to you in the name of Allah the merciful and the beneficent. It is with great surprise and sorrow that I have been compelled to write you this letter after reviewing President Yar’Adua’s proposed budget allocations for the 2010 fiscal year. You are not unaware of the frosty relationship between the Lower and the Upper Chambers of the National Assembly. That impertinent small boy who heads the Lower Chamber does not know his mate. He has been poking his boi-boi fingers in my nose and competing for superiority with me. How old was he when I was Governor of Niger State? How old was he when I was Minister of Communication? He was probably in Secondary School.


It is against this background of a small boy’s scorn and arifin that I discovered that his own wing of the National Assembly was allocated the sum of one hundred million naira to get rid of rats and mosquitoes in the year 2010 whereas my own superior chamber was allocated nothing under that category. How can that small boy get a hundred million to clear rats and mosquitoes from one room and I get nothing? Ordinarily, we get double of whatever they get in our capacity as senior and superior lawmakers. Their one hundred million automatically entitles us to two hundred million – if not more – for the same pest eradication agenda.

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The strange omission of the Senate from this vital allocation made me set up a high-powered commission of inquiry made up of fifty trusted, eminent, and Distinguished Senators. They were, among other things, to look into the immediate, intermediate, and remote causes of our exclusion from that allocation; do a census of all rats and mosquitoes in the Senate as a basis for our making a powerful case for a supplementary budgetary allocation of four hundred million naira for pest eradication in the Senate Chamber for the year 2010.

Dear rats and mosquitoes, in the course of their patriotic and onerous assignment, members of the commission of inquiry were shocked that the census exercise on which we spent so much money yielded nothing. Absolutely nothing! We found not a single rat or mosquito in the Senate Chamber. Since the absence of members of your respective species from the Senate is about to cost us two hundred million naira, I had no choice but to set up another commission of inquiry to look into the immediate, intermediate, and remote causes of your unfortunate boycott of the Senate.

This second commission of inquiry made even more shocking discoveries. It would seem that the all the rats and mosquitoes allocated by Mother Nature to the National Assembly Complex only go to the Lower Chamber. They practice some strange Apartheid policy that keeps the Senate out of the picture. Our rigorous investigations revealed that that small boy heading the Lower Chamber is behind it all. It was revealed to us that in anticipation of next year’s budgetary allocations, he held secret meetings with the leadership of the rat and mosquito species in the Federal Capital Territory and bribed them to concentrate only on the Lower Chamber of the National Assembly. That devious move has now earned him and the pack he leads in the lower Chamber a one hundred million naira windfall.

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This explains why I am writing to ask you to reconsider your actions. You stand to benefit a lot more by working with me. For starters, would you be inclined to let me know how much he paid you to live exclusively in the Lower Chamber and procreate generously there? I am prepared to double or triple it and have your people migrate to the Senate if only to teach that boy a lesson. As you probably know, President Yar’Adua is in Saudi Arabia attending to his health. May Allah grant him quick recovery. His absence provides us with a window of opportunity to prepare a strong case for a supplementary budgetary allocation of two hundred million naira for pest and rodent eradication in the Senate.

If moral considerations make you a bit reluctant to violate the terms of your existing agreements with that small boy, there are other options. Since you, rats and mosquitoes, breed very rapidly and generously, you must have ample supplementary population in Abuja. How much will it cost us to rent a crowd of two thousand rats and two thousand mosquitoes to invade and infest the Senate Chamber for the next two weeks? Once we reach an agreement and you invade us, we shall invite friendly editors of friendly newspapers to come and see what is going on in the Senate. That would earn us screaming headlines such as: “RATS AND MOSQUITOES TAKE OVER SENATE”; “FORTY SENATORS HOSPITALISED FOR MALARIA”.

With such friendly press, it would be easy for us to slot in the supplementary budget allocation request. It may seem funny that we are asking you to invade us in the Senate so that we can ask for money to fumigate the Senate Chamber and kill you in the process. Let me assure you that this is Nigeria. Not a single rat will be killed. Not a single mosquito will be killed. The fumigation will only take place on paper and it will be carried out by fictitious companies owned by… by… by… well, let’s just say that your people will not die. Anyway, you probably already know this from your arrangement with our junior partners in the junior Chamber.

I await your response very eagerly. Time is of the essence.

Yours Sincerely,

Distinguished Senator Chief David Mark

Senate President

Federal Republic of Nigeria


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