Nigeria’s corruption champions revel at a bathetic book launch. It’s left to a long-suffering country to confront them headlong
To start with, Dino Melaye’s book is a corruption of lexis. Its title, Antidote for Corruption, is unknown to English grammar. It ought to be Antidote to Corruption. That about set the tone for the heavy fog of corruption that hung over the event, for every form of corruption starts with the corruption of thought, epitomised in lexis by sloppy grammar.
Besides, it is the ultimate corruption of parliamentary practice, with its stress on parliamentary language, powered by immaculate lexis, that the lexically challenged would not only prance about the hallowed chamber of the country’s legislative summit, they would deign to freeze, in cold print, their lexical challenge.
As if everyone has gone over the bend, this hotchpotch of varied opinion, a compilation that could at best be dubbed as “chartered plagiarism,” attracted a N50, 000 price tag for its hard back, in a country where the minimum wage is N18, 000! Perhaps, that is no crime, if the enclave market, gathered at the pseudo-launch, is dumb enough to buy mere tinsel for the premium price of an 18-karat gold.
The real crime however, in terms of wanton abuse of office and privilege, is that both Senate President Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, forked out N23.4 million in public money to buy 109 copies for all the senators and 360 copies for all the members of the House of Representatives. Again, this is a most combative corruption of trust and privilege. Besides, if the National Assembly members love to quash their money on trash, why should such a hobby be charged to the public purse?
If just these alone had happened at the Dino Melaye burlesque, it would still have earned the most severe of strictures from right-thinking and long-suffering Nigerians. Their mandate was clear to President Muhammadu Buhari: go forth and flush out corruption. But this insensate National Assembly leadership, in words and in deeds, has wilfully set itself against that mandate.
That is why the shameful cant, of both Saraki and Dogara at the launch, is not only scandalous, it is utterly condemnable and unforgivable, at least to the teeming majority, whose future depends on the triumph of the present anti-corruption war.
Saraki went on a lecture binge, on why anti-corruption methodologies ought to be preventive and not punitive. From any other person, that could perhaps sound reasonable. But from Saraki, it sounds annoying, premeditated and shamelessly self-serving — and this has absolutely nothing to do with the ad-hominem fallacy.
Indeed, Saraki is Number 3 in a corrective regime, the head of the legislature, in a government voted in to fix the pathologies of the best-forgotten Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, which made sleaze its foundation of state policy. Yet, with a straight face bereft of any irony, he takes pot shots at the central plank of the regime’s policy, which he ought to rigorously drive.
Of course, it could hardly have been otherwise, given the dodgy way Saraki emerged the Senate President, selling his party, and its right to the senate deputy presidency, to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). With an opportunistic PDP opposition, and deluded All Progressives Congress (APC) elements, led by the brash and uncouth Melaye, he has pretty much formed a not-so-informal parliamentary coalition for corruption, even if he tries every sinew in his body to hide behind a finger, posturing otherwise.
Talking of the corruption army, nobody surely has forgotten the Melaye-Saraki anti-Ibrahim Magu stunt in the Senate, pulled to browbeat the Buhari presidency to drop Magu as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) substantive chairman. It took another executive legal sleight-of-hand to halt that heinous ploy. Yet, it was clear who, in parliament, is mortally afraid of Magu and his handling of the anti-corruption war.
Speaker Dogara also hee-hawed over the imperative of erecting robust institutions against corruption — hardly a bad counsel. But does the Speaker think robust institutions just cascade down from Mars? How can non-reform minds, as he and a good number of members of the 8th National Assembly would appear, birth the much desired robust anti-corruption institutions?
Besides, how much of thinking, in anti-corruption institution building, went into muscling out Abdulmimin Jubril, for his temerity to accuse the almighty Speaker of various infractions, which were nothing but crass corruption? Of course, Dogara would wish everyone would forget that uncomfortable little event!
Mid-year into a four-year term, it is clear the biggest obstacle against fighting corruption is the Saraki-led 8th National Assembly. That is bad enough. But to glory in such crass notoriety, and mock brave efforts to rein in this life-threatening monster for a nation, is the limit of parliamentary irresponsibility, by people who claim to represent the National Assembly’s leadership.
That is why the electorate must take vigorous notice of these sundry acts of rascality. Come the 2019 elections, no parliamentary sinner, to borrow that Biblical phrase, must go unpunished. The list for that black book may well start with the pitiable ensemble at the Dino burlesque.
