We are used to it by now. A serious issue unfolds serendipitously. It provokes public outrage.
Rather than address it poignantly, those involved attempt to bury it or play it down until societal amnesia takes over. The NDDC scam is going through the same rigour.
It was not meant to generate all the noise, we only got lucky and even our anti-corruption czar expressed sadness at the way it is rubbing off on the country’s image. Not grief that it happened.
Senator Saint Godswill Akpabio must have been schooled on how best to throw off the hounds. He denied ever saying that top officials of the National Assembly benefitted from the sleaze that crippled the NDDC. Akpabio denied his own audio and video.
NASS insisted on briefing its lawyers. It was all a sham.
Akpabio knew he had to send a list. But after doing so, he leaked the letter to a neutral agency, the so-called National Youths Council. The council issued a press statement attaching the list.
It too was huffing and puffing if nothing is done about the allegations.
It did not ask Akpabio to resign; rather it wants Femi Gbajabiamila whose name is not on the list to resign.
An ex-militant responded excusing the sleaze.
He considers any wastage of NDDC fund a tip of the iceberg of national corruption. In other words, our corrupt brothers have our vote of confidence.
Already, the public hearing has been suspended. It is the beginning of the hush-hush deal that has made the Nigerian political system the most corrupt in the whole wide world.
It is the beginning of the end of a style in which Nigerians hear the beginning or the middle of a thing but don’t get to determine how it ends.
It is a trick perfected by every regime. It is the reason nobody takes our nation seriously. Our rulers don’t think we have brains to connect the dots. We confirm their suspicion by recycling them back.
If they had known that the thing would blow on their faces they would have hushed it.
The fact that a naïve member of the investigating committee insisted on knowing more was the sole reason the sordid details became public knowledge.
Now that it is public knowledge, they want to stop the charade before the shame they’ve lost returns to embarrass them.
The outrage over the exposures made at the public hearing was not over the revelations; it was the fact that a few members of the lootocrazy discovered nectar and settled to suck it dry.
They should have alerted the hive and help the meal go round. After all, the other members did not come to Abuja to count the number of wild monkeys roaming free on Aso Rock.
We all know that the concept of padding budgets is to help the legislooting class return to the ministries and agencies they oversee for a mop up operation.
Compromised chief executives know the game. They scratch the backs of the legislooters and those ones look the other way on issues of performance and or impact.
We have heard top members of the NDDC management barefacedly reveal how they paid themselves generous COVID allowances. They could do that because they had settled the legislators that matter.
They know that those ones would give them coverage. Our comedians rightly covered the skits for the subsequent fainting spells in memes that Nollywood could never have imagined.
Now the curtain has been drawn on the so-called inquiry.
If these immoral people had not played ball, we would have been subjected to more ear-tingling revelations for the public show.
Chief executives who fail to play ball expose their own behinds for legislative excoriation and sometimes EFCC sniffing. This is how the game is played.
The executhief plays dumb because its hands and foot are enmeshed in the scam.
Elections have to be won or rigged. Either which way, money is involved and that money must come from somewhere.
This is what makes the so-called anti-corruption war a smooth charade.
Nothing pays like politics Nigeriana. A first term exposes the corruption of the predecessor while a second term is for mop-up operations.
When government talks about fighting corruption, what it means is that it is fighting other people’s corruption.
It is expected that when it leaves the scene, a successor government would uncover its own sleaze and start another sham anti-corruption war. Sometimes, a ruling party looks for scapegoats to sacrifice.
Examples are Tafa Balogun, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha and Sunday Afolabi under the grandmaster of subterfuge, Olusegun Obasanjo. How is the Transmission IG better than Balogun?
Goodluck Jonathan did not get a second term to make notable casualties of his party’s enemies, but he was there long enough to pardon Alamieyeseigha.
Once his government fell, suspected and known crooks read the acronym correctly and joined the Association of Privileged Criminals.
In our country, majority of those sniggering at corruption are only ruing their inability to partake. Being fantastically corrupt makes politicians wiser. It grants immunity against prosecution to those who play their cards right.
