The joke subsists in moral circuits, that, when brigands and outlaws copulate, their incestuous liaison produces the lawmaker – the Nigerian lawmaker to be precise. If you would excuse the ribaldry therein, you would find that the contemporary lawmaker hardly epitomises unimpeachable humaneness and civilisation which are prime essentials of the Legislature.
Neither does the legislative chamber symbolise the conurbation of nationalism, detribalised evolution, altruism and high art oft associated with evolved species of humankind.
In Nigeria the lawmaker sticks out like a metastasized tumour; a priapism of vice and nuisance to be endured, like varicose veins or ethno-religious bigotry.
A surfeit of theatrics and high jinks perpetrated on the floor of the country’s Senate and House of Representatives further establish them as an assembly adult delinquents.
Last dispensation, for instance, the Eighth National Assembly carried on like changelings, men and women whose moral compass cringed beneath their storm of whim and arrant obscenities.
From their frantic bid to pad the national budget, and muzzle free speech via online censorship, to their desperation to ‘protect’ and ‘serve’ the interests of peer being investigated for financial fraud by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), members of the Eighth Assembly betrayed grievous lack of character and integrity.
But they were only being true to tradition. Their predecessors in the chamber had a penchant for sleaze and wild drama. One week after a male senator was forced to apologise to his female colleague for dealing her a blinding slap, a chairman and deputy chairman of a House of Representatives committee got locked in a fight with the deputy chairman, a woman, dealing the chairman several blows.
The latter completely lost his balance as the impact of the assault from the heavily built female legislator shattered his eye glasses to smithereens and left him with a bloody eye. Pandemonium ensued when he tried to retaliate but he was prevented by their colleagues who formed a ring around his female aggressor.
Cut to another hodgepodge of members of the Federal House of Representatives embroiled in a free-for-all fight, street-brawler style. The lawmakers engaged in fisticuffs on the floor of the House as members opposed to the embattled speaker at the period, tried to introduce a motion for his impeachment over corruption allegations. Parties loyal to the aggrieved rebels pounced on them and they exchanged blows to the amusement of the world.
Years after the disgraceful incident, one of the major characters whose dress was torn to shreds as he got beaten to a pulp, made the news again. The controversial senator’s name will not be mentioned on this page, lest it desecrates this column and offends the sensibility of decent folks. The hilarious character in a fit of decadent rage allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate a fellow senator.
At the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, you could be forgiven for likening the National Assembly to a mental asylum – apology to rational, decent lawmakers. There is no gainsaying the fact that the upper and lower legislative chambers move epic clowning, violence and tomfoolery into the open air of gangsterism and debauchery.
In the Eighth Assembly, institutions and culture faded to irrelevance as the ‘honourable’ legislators mutated into impediments to progress; more worrisome was their feverish quest to tame and woo the Executive into a sleazy romance, having succeeded with the Judiciary.
But President Muhammadu Buhari would have none of that; the retired General from Daura nurtured a different view of governance, one that left him perched on a two-legged stool of contrived supremacy and invincibility to onslaught by antagonists in the Legislature and the Judiciary.
Last dispensation, lawmakers loyal to the embattled Senate President Bukola Saraki, considered his interrogation by the EFCC and trial by the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), an affront and slight on the honour of the country’s National Assembly.
Many of the aggrieved lawmakers claimed President Buhari was trying to tame and pocket them. But they were only being mischievous with the truth.
In truth, Buhari sought to eradicate diseased plants from the nation’s fields of enterprise even as he sowed sickly seeds under the roof of the Nigerian barn house. Crucial appointments he made and wanton concessions he approved of, apparently in the spirit of political expediency, neutered the impact of his anti-corruption crusade. And his antagonists in the legislative and judicial arms of government were quick to finger the specks in his eyes.
Now, a desperate thing has happened; shady characters masquerading as patriots within the country’s Ninth Assembly, have coalesced to thwart Buhari’s renewed bid to unmoor the predatory and corrupt, from their holy place of sleaze within and outside the circuits of governance and industry.
The current National Assembly, like its predecessor, is infested by shades of poorly, selfish characters. Thus, Nigeria’s hope rests on the Executive and the Judiciary – the Presidency in particular, as most governors still personify the worst of Nigeria’s afflictions.
Last dispensation, Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, cut a portrait of hope and prosperity for the nation by their fairly touted distaste for corruption and their predilection to truly serve.
This dispensation, their leadership rides on a great deal of presumption and moral baggage. Although they symbolise hope, prudence and the capacity to redeem the country’s badly worn and bastardised institutions, their inclination to shun unchaste expediences would ennoble their leadership and prepare Nigeria for the journey to the attainment of an ideal state.
Going forward, Buhari must shun the compromises and expediences that rendered him conflicted in personal and administrative ethics during his first term. Certain appointments he made and politics he played, accentuated the ridiculous bent of his presumed bigotries. Hence the catalogue of failures and inaction listed in his wake.
His cabinet ministers, for instance, were dubious change agents feigning his moral and growth crusade. Like certain governors and lawmakers operating on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), they epitomised a moral, philosophical duplicity.
They negated and rejected the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves. Hence the parlous performance and exaggerated growth figures churned out by their ministries.
President Buhari, of course, must be aware of their fraudulence and failures as a bitter reality of his first term. If he isn’t, then he must be truly naive and incapacitated by his overwhelming desire to grow bananas out of a pine tree.
As it is now, Nigeria is caught in the vortex of dysfunctional public institutions and organs of government. The Executive, Legislature and Judiciary crush the hope of the citizenry and stifle the birth of progressive vistas of the future, in a cycle of ethical cannibalism, enacted by male and female tin gods, who attack and retreat in obsessive cycles of victory and defeat.
In the crushing, bloody symbolism, the Executive faces a frantic conspiracy of the Legislature and Judiciary. The masses are cast as a babe, violently dragged, and mauled by the ogres, who nail her to a rock, bind iron thorns around her head and waist, pierce her palms and feet, and cut her heart out to make it feel the heat and frost of their inordinate hankering for spoils and bloodlust.
Each organ of government lives on the shrieks and cries of the babe. Together, they nourish from her blood and forcibly suckle from her unformed tits.
It’s about time we reversed the cycle.
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