I had hoped that realization would dawn on the National Assembly to the crazed state of the economy, and sanity would prevail. What the assembly wants to do, however, is a sign of the failure of sanity.
I would have said that ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo is a great letter writer but for the little fact that he is yet to write to me. I guess though that he would not because, as you may have noticed, he writes mainly to accuse. He wrote Abacha when that one was head of state. Was it a love letter now, I can’t remember. But I don’t think there was any love lost between the two of them, what with one of them’s back being used as an ironing board and all, so it could hardly have been rrrrrove!
I can’t remember now if he wrote Yar’adua but he certainly wrote Jonathan, more than once. Were those letters dripping with love or hate now? Oh dear, this porous brain of mine is a real let-down these days because I have trouble remembering the trail of my thoughts. So, what were we talking about again? Oh yes, Obj.’s penchant for letter writing. Yeah, you could say his pen was so very busy he looked for people to write to. How on earth he has consistently missed my name among the privileged ones to receive his missives is not clear to me. You think maybe it has something to do with my name? I could change it…
Anyway, Nigeria’s national assembly are currently on the hit list of those at the receiving end of Obj.’s love letters. The lucky devils, eh? Oh yes, they are love letters; you know, the kind that says ‘It is because I love you that I am telling you the truth about yourself – you’re selfish, rude and stupid!’ Thank God for love!
So, Obj. the truth-sayer wrote to the assembly and told them a few home truths about themselves (which they did not know before) and about the nation (which they knew already). He told the senators and Representatives that they are greedy, selfish … but you already know the rest (i.e., the contents of the letter).
I don’t want to appraise the contents of the letter here. I believe that there are others who can do that infinitely better than I can mainly because they are more intelligent, savvy and can sling insults and praise better than me. I intend to confine myself to just a few tasks here. First, I want to praise Caesar, then I want to bury Caesar, then I want to try Caesar for carrying stories.
First, let me tell you about Caesar. That man had great power as the Consul of the Roman Republic, just like our Obj., though not in Rome. Actually, you are free to substitute Obj.’s name as we go along if you like, because, like Obj., he was a general and a penner of prose. Look at that, so many similarities. Anyway, insofar as he could set all records straight, especially the records of his beliefs, thoughts and campaigns, he was indeed praiseworthy.
In a similar way, Obj. has tried to set the records straight for us by drawing attention to the hearts of the assembly members. What he said in effect is that their hearts are not in the right place as far as the nation is concerned. They are, said he, spending more than the nation is earning. They are, further said he more or less, heartless in refusing to align themselves with the nation’s dire straits. Did he say it well? I heard this morning on radio that even his erstwhile gainsayer (someone who says, ‘I object!’ to everyone’s embarrassed hearing) nodded his head and said, ‘Well said, very well said indeed’. He said that. Twice I heard it. Let’s move on, oink, oink.
While Caesar can be said to be truly dead and buried, thankfully Obj. is not. So the comparison breaks down there. However, let us see what we want to bury in the man. Truly, I don’t know much about the man Obj. but I hear he tells people the truth about themselves, out of love. I hear he looks people in the eye and tells them they are selfish, rude and stupid; a real truth-sayer, that one.
So, it appears the nation was not quite surprised when he told the truth about the National Assembly. Now, do we want to bury that truth-saying aspect of him? I guess not. I guess we want more truth-sayers in the land. Indeed, if there were more of them, my guess is that we’d be in less murky waters than we are in right now. And we are in such murky waters it looks like we are in some quick-sinking quicksand (stop objecting; this is no time to get technical). We hardly have any money to eat as a nation; people are earning less than fifty dollars a month and here are their honourable selves planning on buying new cars for oversight functions, some say even planning to buy new cars for each member, and some even going further to say even paying themselves higher than they are supposed to. Seriously?!!
In response, I assure you, some among the assembly have tried Obj. on their own. They have weighed him in the balance and have found him altogether wanting. They stated indeed that Obj. was trying to ‘distract’ them. This is curious, you’ll agree, because I asked, distract them from what exactly and how? Well, as usual, I’m full of more questions than answers. They accused him of being mistaken in the identity of those to receive his missive this time. Then, they accused him of trying to divert attention away from any investigation into some of the scandals of his own time. I don’t know if they are truth-sayers here or gainsayers; but they have not given any cogent reasons for the proposed expenditure.
Truth here is, I’m the one putting someone on trial and it’s someone else flinging out the charges. As for me, my own accusation is this: why did Obj. not see to the completion of the Oyo-Ogbomoso new express road before he left office? Why, oh why? Since he would not write to me, I have promised myself that I would one day write my own missive to ask him this.
In the meantime, many, I understand, have been calling for the heads of the assemblymen. Since these men (and women too) have represented mainly a drain in the purse of the nation, many people have reasoned, and since very few really understand their duties, let us do away with them altogether, they have cried.
While I am as grieved as anyone that the nation’s representative assembly could plan to go on this kind of spending spree when the nation is going a-borrowing to finance its budget, I am really reluctant to join my voice with the ‘off-with-their-heads’ group. This is not Alice in Wonderland. Though I had long since been afraid it would come to this, I had hoped that realization would dawn on the assembly to the crazed state of the economy, and sanity would prevail. What the assembly wants to do, however, is a sign of the failure of sanity. In the assembly then, reason seems to be on vacation.
But reason must come back. There are many states, dear Senators and Honourables, where many, many workers have not received salaries for months. Unfortunately, the workers have not been the only ones carrying this cross. Listen, just this afternoon, someone peddling a tray of bananas was grumbling to my hearing that since salaries stopped being paid, she had stopped having good sales. She said she was on the verge of folding up her banana business. She was therefore praying that workers would be paid soon so that she could have good sales again. In this situation, dear truth-sayers and gainsayers, please let us be reasonable about this proposed expenditure.