MAY 29 is gone. Not so the deep emotions it evoked.
Of all the Democracy Day goodwill messages, none was as touching as that issued by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the faction led by Ahmed Makarfi –many insist he’s a nice man in a bad company – that is. It was a flashback to those good old days when life was like an endlessLagos owambe party, when the rich did not have to hide their wealth in cemeteries; when champagne flowed at parties as if it was rain water in June and former lords of the creeks became landlords of mansions, commuting in jets and partying like Hollywood stars.
The message was as pungent as it was moving. Elegiac. “APC has destroyed all we built,” one of the headlines screamed, quoting PDP spokesman Dayo Adeyeye’s acerbic statement to mark the occasion.
Poor PDP. Nothing can be as painful as a legacy shredded like scrap paper. My sympathies.
Consider one of the videos that made the rounds just before the 2015 general elections. It had a party scene in which the celebrator and his friends danced themselves into a frenzy. They sprayed dollar bills on their fellow revellers and the musician. At a point, they felt the confetti of dollar bills would not do; they started throwing up bundles of $100 bills from a steel box brought in by an aide. Soon the dancing floor was strewn with the green back and the naira. The frolicking went on and on.
Those were the days.
To the well-connected, the dollar was the currency of first choice. Today, even factories are striving to keep their machines roaring as the exchange rate has refused to come down after being jerked up so violently by crashing oil prices.
Isn’t this enough for the PDP, which superintended over high oil prices, more than $110 a barrel at a point, to look back and mourn its loss? Being human, the party’s loyal supporters and dutiful officials will surely have memories of those days when forex was not our problem but how to spend it. We imported toothpicks, handkerchiefs, eyelashes, eye shadow , eyeshades and such important goods.
The other day when distinguished Senator Daniel Dino Melaye presented his book, “Antidote for Corruption”, there were few donors, despite the presence of an army of dignitaries, some of them victims of the war against corruption who should be happy that at last a manual on the right way to wage the all-important battle was finally available.
Senate President Bukola Saraki bought copies for all 109 members at N5.5m. House Speaker Yakubu Dogara shelled out N18m for a copy for each of the 360 members. Can that be a reasonable reward for such an intellectual exertion on a subject that has been such a difficult knot to untie even for renowned academics?
In those good PDP days, the Senate President would have ordered copies for the Sergeant-at-Arms, all senators’ laundrymen, chauffeurs, stewards, gardeners and just anybody who deserved to have one – in the national interest.
The price?
It would have been whispered in the author’s ears, lest the poor whom the lawmakers are dying to uplift feel offended.
Instead of praising Melaye’s deep commitment to scholarship, many have been talking about the lexical shortcoming of the book’s title. Some, who like Alaba traders know little or nothing about our copyright laws, dismissed the work as a mere compilation of other people’s ideas. Others latched onto the debate to define corruption in contradistinction to stealing.
One of such rationalisation: “Beat a Nigerian child. Console him/her with biscuits. Ask him/her: ‘who beat you?’ He or she will point to another person. That was how bribery and corruption began in Nigeria.”
The other day when the Directorate of State Services (DSS) stormed the homes of some judges in the dead of the night, rousing their Lordships from sleep, there was uproar from some quarters. Don’t judges deserve some respect? Should they be hunted like common thieves? Who ordered the raids? Where is the separation of powers that we preach? Is this democracy? Don’t judges have a right to snore away the night after a hard day’s job?
The operatives found troves of foreign currencies and huge sums in Naira. The government hauled the judges before the courts. Some of them have been freed and restored to their offices. No apologies. No remorse by the DSS and any of its agents.
In the days of the PDP, the thought of raiding a judge’s home, let alone seizing their hard earned hard currency, would have been considered sacrilegious, and would have attracted the highest sanction – like treason. If anyone dared to commit such an egregious abuse of the rights of their Lordships to earn, own and keep cash in whatever currency, the executive would have apologised profusely. Besides, adequate compensation would have been paid to the aggrieved parties. Not now.
Oh, good old days.
Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike has approached a court to stop the DSS and the police from searching his house. Recall that His Excellency had to rush out of bed the other night to physically stop DSS operatives from storming a judge’s home. That heroic feat of protecting the right of a citizen was derided as obstruction of justice. They forgot Chief Wike is a lawyer.
In those days he wouldn’t have needed the stress of filing an action. Who would have contemplated searching a governor’s home?
When a court granted the former First Lady, Dame Patience “Mama Peace” Jonathan the right to her $15m accounts, the tension that had built up in the hearts of ordinary citizens melted like ice cream under the scorching sun. Relieved, Her Excellency hit the bank to withdraw some cash for a long overdue shopping spree.
Unrepentant, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which insisted that the cash was a proceed of some unstated illicit undertaking, asked the court to stop her. It obliged.
Only in the current atmosphere can such audacious affront happen. Not in the days of the PDP when the rule of law took preeminence over all other things and everybody was happy.
Not even Dame Patience’s passionate plea that the money was part of a fortune given to her by her aged mother could move the anti-graft agency. It had made up its mind that such a huge amount of money must have come from some crime.
In its May 29 speech, Acting President Yemi Osinbajo urged Nigerians to make more sacrifices. Some cynical fellows who had taken up the unassigned role of public rights defenders tore at him. They sneered: “Sacrifices; what sacrifices? What else do they want, these change people? Haven’t we done enough?”
Those were the objective critics anyway. The scurrilous ones recalled the good days of the PDP when “making sacrifices” had a meaning, when a former governor collected N4.6b for some spiritual exercises and nobody raised an eyebrow.
Scarcity of funds never featured in the PDP’s deliberations. In fact, when prominent citizens raised the alarm that the economy was in trouble, the government, one of the most inventive that has ever taken office anywhere in the world, dug deep into its bag of tricks, brought out some strange figures, juggled them and announced triumphantly that ours was the biggest economy in Africa. It called the magic “rebasing”.
Those were the days when we had real experts. Take a bow Madam Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
Before the Buhari administration took the reins, Boko Haram, the evil sect giving Islam a bad name, had already carved out of Nigeria its Islamic State. The Armed Forces were impotent. Soldiers were dying in hundreds. Civilians were murdered in an orgy of violence never seen in these parts. Funds voted for weapons were shared by PDP chiefs, their wards and friends. Anytime they ran out of cash, they rushed down to the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), which dished out funds in local and foreign currencies. Everybody was happy. Oh, the good times. Not anymore.
Those who are lashing the PDP for crying too early, saying after all Buhari has done just two years out of his four-year tenure are sorely lacking in the empathy that the calamity that befell the party requires. Here was a party that boasted of being Africa’s biggest , a party that vowed to rule for 60 years in the first instance and wowed us all with its vote harvesting gimmicks, now a shadow of its old self. A party wracked and wrecked by a feud that has turned friends into foes.
I won’t join those castigating the PDP. It deserves our sympathy. Its leading lights should be allowed to mourn. More tears gentlemen!
NOT SO FAST, MAJOR
After a short break, the Major Hamza Al- Mustapha (retd.) road show has returned. In Ibadan last week, the dreaded Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the late Gen. Sani Abacha (of dreadful memory) attempted to rewrite history by turning facts on their heads. He said he was bundled into detention because he had a video on the murder of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election – Nigeria’s freest and fairest ever – which was annulled by military leader Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Bababngida for no just reason.
Nobody is fooled. The facts of the matter are clear. The charges are clear. Al-Mustapha, the prosecution believes, knew about the plot that led to the daylight murder of Abiola’s wife, Kudirat, the indefatigable defender of democracy.
If Al-Mustapha has a box-office-hit -video, let him release it, if only to show that he is not a villain and a coward as charged. Otherwise, he should face his case forthrightly, seek restitution and desist from offending people’s sensibilities.
