If further facts beyond the House of Representatives subsidy fuel probe that indicted PDP leading lights and their siblings for defrauding the country of N1.6 trillion, the privatisation scheme described as mere sharing of our common patrimony among PDP stalwarts and their fronts, the pensions scheme scandal which took place inside the office of Head of Service, to validate John Campbell’s thesis that ‘‘PDP is an elite cartel at the centre of power in Nigeria that came together with no ideological or programmatic basis, but simply as essentially a club of elites for sharing of oil rents and political spoils”, the revelations coming out of Dasukigate through which $2.1b earmarked for arms procurement for our embattled soldiers fighting an insurgency that has killed over 15,000 Nigerians and rendered about two million refuges in their own land, was shared by who is who in PDP provided just that.
In fairness to those who have always provided intellectual support for PDP’s assault on Nigerians, they have never pretended to write out of ideological conviction. They have often given the impression they were motivated by altruism and patriotism. Unfortunately, with the sordid revelations coming out of Dasukigate, in the last three weeks, Nigerians now also know better.
And if Nigerians were expecting some form of remorse from PDP for betraying the trust of Nigerians, that hope was dashed by the Saraki and Ekweremadu’s sardonic humour during the latter’s family thanksgiving service in Enugu last week. And similarly if critics who have always accused a segment of the press of deploying sophistry to support PDP fraud had expected to be proven wrong for once, their last week specious argument that the difference between PDP and APC when it comes to corruption is that of six and half a dozen only consolidated the unassailable position of critics.
As if Saraki expected Nigerians to have suddenly forgotten the less than honourable way he hijacked the Senate of the Fourth Republic by trading off the victory of his party for Ekweremadu and PDP support, he was in Enugu to give a testimony before a priest that Ekweremadu is “a good example for us politicians”, and that he “will continue to work with him for the development of Nigeria”. He probably assumed Nigerians cannot make a distinction between those who work for them and those who are working for themselves.
Ekweremadu’s own blasphemy before a priest was more unsettling. Despite his well-publicised self-confession that he, with the encouragement of his PDP family members responsible for the nation’s current nightmare, secured his current position as a trade-off from Saraki who for a pot of porridge was ready to bargain away the victory of his party, he now says his emergence was a product of ‘divine’ intervention.
But beyond Saraki and Ekweremadu’s sardonic humour, it is now obvious that just as it was in the first and second republics, the strategy of PDP and those providing it with intellectual support is to tar everyone with brush of corruption relying on use of sophistry to blur the division between those who were out to genuinely provide public service and those who ravage the land. The crooked logic is that everyone in Nigeria is corrupt including candidate Buhari who accepted government donation of two vehicles which were his entitlement as a former Head of State. We were told last week that if sufficient light was beamed on APC, it would be discovered that its leading lights are also made up of men with feet of clay. This is similar to argument used to devastating effects by those who plundered the resources of the nation between 1954 and 1962.
In 1956, the Foster-Sutton Tribunal found Zik guilty of channelling government funds through ACB, a bank he owned along with his children and Sir Odumegwu-Ojukwu his friend and concluded, “Were a UK minister to be involved in a series of transactions the result of which public funds were used to support an otherwise shaky institution in which he was directly interested, he would be forced to leave public life.” There was widespread corruption in federal government. The ministers, like President Jonathan’s ministers, acted with impunity. An unrepentant K O Mbadiwe, the Minister of Aviation, dismissed proceeds from Ijora shady land deals as ‘chicken feeds in the mouth of an elephant’ while Festus Okotie-Eboh, Minister for Finance, when asked by the opposition to explain the source of his wealth quoted the Bible saying ‘to those that have, more shall be given, from those that do not have, shall be taken even the little they have’.
Then to tar Awo and his AG supporters during the 1962 intra-party crisis hijacked by the federal government, they found a parallel in the marketing boards’ 1954 loans given to the Western Region Finance Corporation and the Western Nigeria Development Corporation and the National Investment and Properties Co. Ltd. for building projects such Western House in Lagos, the Cocoa House in Ibadan, the first television station in Africa, the Liberty Stadium Bodija and Ikeja GRAs in Ibadan and Lagos etc. Even though there was no evidence that Awo and his colleagues personally benefitted from their efforts at encouraging an emerging middle class and building a solid economic base to absorb products of their free education programme, they found Awo guilty for failing ‘to adhere to the standards of conduct which are required for persons holding such a post’ of a premier.
In the Second Republic, the battle was once again between those who genuinely believed in public service and those who looted the resources of the nation. Ambrose Alli of the then Bendel, Adekunle Ajasin of Ondo, Bola Ige of Oyo, Olabisi Onabanjo of Ogun and Lateef Jakande of Lagos creatively deployed government funds and proceeds from government concerns to provide free education, access to university education by building state universities, free health and provision of other social services. Their NPN and NPP counterparts channelled government funds, including foreign loans which never got to Nigeria, to build private empires, including banks leading to educational and infrastructural decay of their areas. Thousands of youths from NPP and NPN-controlled states invaded Mid-west and West to benefit from free education. In 1983 when the ill-equipped and self-serving military came, the current type of sophistry was used to convince the new powers that there was no difference between those who deployed government money to the service of the people and those who squandered their state resources on self and others like Sabo Barkin Zuwo who, when caught with raw cash running into millions claimed he was keeping ‘government money in government house’. Thus sinners and saints were subjected to the same treatment with many receiving prison terms of 200 years.
The sufferings of aging Professor Ambrose Alli, Onabanjo and Ajasin contributed to their early death while the real enemies of the people deployed the looted funds to buy off government concerns through Babangida’s fraudulent privatisation economic programme. For example, in 1991, Oodua states military governors – Bode George, Sasaenia Oresanya and Mohammed Lawal sold 60% of 24-year old Cocoa Industry Limited (CIL) valued in 1989 at N97, 958,000 to a relatively new company called Emerald Packaging Company for N9m, an amount lower than the cost of land on which the company was built.
While it will be fool-hardy to trust all politicians, especially since our people say it is the thief who can accurately identify the footprint of another thief on a stone, those who want Nigerians to believe that there is no difference between ex- and serving APC governors such as Fashola, Fayemi, Oshiomhole, and Amaechi and PDP indicted governors such as James Ibori, Lucky Igbinedion, the late Alamieyeseigha and Odili who was shielded by the judiciary, must go beyond mere sophistry.
They will need more than those who according to Itse Sagay ‘just cooked up a panel made up of sympathetic, pro-Wike judges parading themselves in a most dishonourable manner’ to tarnish the image of Amaechi or those writing petitions against Fashola who ‘the whole world from the United States to Australia, to the Middle East, to even the United Nations, everybody knows has the best record in governance that this country has had since Awolowo’.
