Two courts – one in Israel and the other in Thailand – recently did what many Nigerians may consider unthinkable: they made political leaders swallow the bitter pills that the rule of law has to offer.
Ehud Olmert is Israel’s former prime minister and Yingluck Shinawatra was, until last week, Thailand’s prime minister. Olmert is on the verge of going to jail to serve a six-year term for an offence he committed when he was the mayor of Jerusalem. He was said to have collected a paltry bribe (at least by Nigerian standards) of $290,000 or N47million, and lied about it in court, thereby committing perjury. The bribe was said to have been offered to him in a Jerusalem property development deal. In the case of Shinawatra, the offence had nothing to do with money; yet it was considered serious enough to cost her her job as that country’s first female prime minister. She was accused of illegally transferring Thailand’s national security chief, Thawil Pliensri, appointed by the preceding opposition government. She is likely to face a five-year ban from politics.
If these two leaders were Nigerians, they would be celebrated as saints. In Nigeria, heads of government would feel insulted if offered a bribe of N47 million. Even a state governor would feel slighted. At that level, we don’t talk of bribes in millions. No. Mention billions and trillions and it would be more like it. That is why, at the moment, the government is treating with levity an allegation that $20 billion from the nation’s oil revenue is unaccounted for. In more civilised countries like Israel, that alone is enough to bring down the whole government, not just a prime minister.
But, in Nigeria, an ordinary assistant director in the civil service put in charge of pension funds made away with billions of pension money and simply disappeared into thin air.
In Nigeria, also, it is normal for a new government to sweep away all political appointees it inherited from a preceding administration, including security chiefs, regardless of the sensitivity of such offices, the competence of their occupants or, for that matter, the political colour and affiliation of the appointing authority. Thailand, a more serious-minded country, insists that such changes, if they were to be made at all, must be sufficiently justifiable and not based on flimsy political excuses.
While we commend the systems in those countries, their tenacious hold on the rule of law and the purity of the democratic process, it is our hope that their counterparts in Nigeria are watching with a view to learning a lesson: that the law, at all times, is no respecter of persons. Anti-corruption war is not a poem to be recited but a national call to duty.
