The joke persists 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 civilization 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 metastasized tumour; a priapism of vice and nuisance to be endured, like varicose veins or ethno-religious bigotry.
A surfeit of base politics and exaggerated high jinks perpetrated on the floor of the country’s Senate and House of Representatives further establishes the National Assembly as a coven of adult delinquents.
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 of the house 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.
Few 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 hilarious character in 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 sane, decent folk therein. 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 psychosis – while the world watches.
In the National Assembly, institutions and culture fade into irrelevance as the ‘honourable’ legislators mutate into insuperable thorns and impediments to Nigeria’s progress; they are currently engaged in feverish quest to tame and woo the executive into a romance of mutually rewarding incestuous relations.
But President Muhammadu Buhari would have none of that; the retired General from Daura, Katsina, nurtures a different view of governance. Before the truth dawned on Mr. President, he derived comfort perching on a three-legged stool of contrived supremacy and invincibility, to onslaughts by antagonists in the Judiciary and the country’s Eighth National Assembly.
Buhari sought to eradicate diseased plants from the nation’s fields of enterprise even as sickly seeds sprouted, on his watch, 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, hinders the impact of his anti-corruption crusade in real time.
Then a desperate thing happened; gangs of hoodlums masquerading as the country’s esteemed lawmakers and custodians of morals and culture, threatened to impeach Buhari – simply because he seeks to unmoor their holy place of sleaze from the country’s bastion of law and ethics.
Lawmakers loyal to the embattled senate leadership dubiously claim, that the ongoing travail of the leadership, is a slight on the honour and the integrity of the country’s National Assembly.
Perhaps if the National Assembly had established itself as a body of honourable men and women truly involved with the citizenry and attuned to their pains, needs and fundamental human rights, the Nigerian electorate would be sympathetic to their cause.
There is no gainsaying the National Assembly is currently infested by shades of poorly, self-centred characters thus the nation’s hope rests on the Executive and Judicial arms of government – the Presidency in particular as most state governors personify the worst of Nigeria’s political predators.
Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, cut a portrait of hope and prosperity for the nation – compared to worse alternatives – given both men’s touted and fairly established distaste for corruption, and their predilection to truly serve. But their government still rides on a great deal of presumption and moral baggage. While Buhari and his VP signify hope, prudence and inestimable opportunity for redeeming our corrupt social and political institutions, his team becomes the bane to the successful attainment of our ideal state.
His ministers are dubious change agents feigning his morality and growth crusade. Like many state governors and lawmakers operating on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), they epitomise a moral, philosophical duplicity. They negate and reject the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves.
President Buhari of course must be aware of this bitter reality. 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, the Nigeria is caught in the vortex of dysfunctional public institutions and organs of government. The executive and legislature crush the hope of the citizenry and stifle the birth of progressive vistas of the future, in a cycle of incestuous cannibalism enacted by male and female tin gods, who attack and retreat in obsessive rhythms of attack and counter-attack, victory and defeat.
In the crushing, bloody symbolism, the Nigerian citizenry is cast as a babe, persistently dragged, and violently exchanged by ogres who nail her down upon 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 riches and bloodlust. The executive and legislature live on the shrieks and cries of the babe. They nourish from her blood and forcefully suckle from its unformed tits.
It’s about time we reversed the cycle.