The launch of Dino Melaye’s bathetic book against corruption was reminiscent of the proverbial quip: the guilty are afraid.
Even if the speakers, among them Senate President, Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, were earnest, there was a heavy whiff of rotten symbolism that enveloped the event.
From his wayward conduct, Melaye, the “Ajekun iya ni o je” exponent, not to talk of his phony foreign degrees scandals, is the very epitome of the corruption of the exalted position of senator of the Federal Republic. In a serious polity, he would be the last to write about corruption, and expect to be taken seriously. But alas, it’s all a burlesque — what the Yoruba would dismiss as a rotten plantain, nevertheless excited at its ripeness.
Then, on parade was the former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, whose crude and rude conduct was the very corruption of her husband’s unfortunate presidency, which itself was the very epitome of unbridled corruption. Besides, there is the little problem of mind-boggling sums traced to her name, which the courts are still trying to sort out. Again, in more serious countries, such characters would not deign to prattle about corruption, not even in private, let alone public.
O, the pair of Saraki and Dogara themselves! Prof. Itse Sagay said it all: the National Assembly, under the leadership of these duo, is the very bastion of unfazed corruption, arrogantly symbolised.
Indeed, as the right-thinking perceive the Buhari executive as absolutely intolerant of sleaze, the Saraki-led National Assembly gives a violently contradictory impression. Symbolically, it is the legislative equivalent of the Biblical house of worship violently violated. And yet, this Eight National Assembly glories in its notoriety, as if it deserves a gold medal for being radically so dysfunctional!
The Saraki quip, that democratic constitutions, on instinct, defend citizens’ rights first, thus making criminal convictions hard and tedious, was spot on.
But could it be a direct spin-off from his own personal experience, of a Senate president inter-changing his time between banging the gavel in the Senate’s chamber and sitting in the dock, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), dragging the Senate into his own personal odyssey, itself a brazen corruption of the parliamentary privilege?
Or Dogara! Before prattling over a primer to fight corruption, has he forgotten so soon the alleged corruption albatross hanged on him by the estranged Abdulmumin Jubril, former House committee chair on Appropriation, who accused the speaker of many infractions, threatening he had proofs to back his claims?
How was the matter resolved — or rather, unresolved? Was it not by the strong-arm tactics of suspending the accuser, in the most cynical tradition of the dead-stay-dumb? And isn’t that too a most brazen corruption of parliamentary privileges?
Hardball just wondered what Labour Minister, Chris Ngige, was doing in that crowd. If Melaye wrote his cant, and only got his crowd —and no one else — to luxuriate in the phony spotlight of a launch, as a pig would wallow in muck, would that not communicate a strong message that the long-suffering Nigerian public harbour zero tolerance for his sundry rascalities unbefitting of a senator? But alas!
Away with parliamentary cant from a legion who, by their below-par conduct, are giving lawmaking a bad name, and reducing the hallowed chambers of lawmaking to earning due public contempt by its sheer hollowness.
As Prof. Sagay rightly said: if you want those who, with relish, sabotage the war against corruption, look no further than Melaye and his crowd! Book on how to fight corruption, my foot!
