The joke persists in moral circuits that when brigands and outlaws copulate, their incestuous liaison produces the Nigerian lawmaker. If you excuse the ribaldry therein, you would understand why the lawmaker excites the loathsome tribute of inexorable scorn. There is no gainsaying that the Eighth National Assembly hardly symbolises the conurbation of nationalism, detribalisation, altruism and high ethics often associated with evolved species of humankind.
The Nigerian lawmaker sticks out like metastasized tumour; a priapism of vice and nuisance to be endured, like varicose veins of a veteran harlot. 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.
It would be recalled that 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. The deputy chairman, a woman, dealt 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, has made the news again. The controversial lawmaker’s name will still not be mentioned on this page lest it desecrates this column and offend the sensibility of decent folk. The hilarious character, in degenerate fit, allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate a fellow senator. He was recently embroiled in a fake certificate scandal thus calling to question his claims to higher education. Nigeria waits with baited breath as the lawmaker fights his proposed recall by the constituency he represents. Lest we forget the Senate leadership that was recently acquitted of corruption charges in suspicious circumstances.
At the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, you could be forgiven for likening the National Assembly to an asylum – apology to sane, decent folk therein. There is no gainsaying that the upper and lower legislative chambers move epic clowning, violence and tomfoolery into the open air of gangsterism and psychosis to the amusement of the world.
In the National Assembly, institutions and culture fade into irrelevance as the ‘honourable’ legislators mutate into insuperable difficulties and impediments to progress. Their feverish quest to tame and woo the executive into a romance of mutually rewarding incestuous relations equally evokes the dread locusts inflame in the heart of the peasant farmer.
Against their onslaught, incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari put up a feeble response. The retired military General, before his incapacitation by an undisclosed ailment, stuck to his carrot and stick approach, perching on a three-legged stool of contrived supremacy and invincibility to Nigeria’s legislative antagonists.
Buhari sought to eradicate diseased plants from the nation’s fields of enterprise even as he sowed sickly seeds under the roof of the Nigerian barn house. Crucial appointments he made and wanton concessions he approved, in the spirit of political expediency, ultimately neuters the impact of his anti-corruption crusade. Now a desperate terror unfolds; Nigeria fears that its amoral Senate, having overwhelmed and domesticated Buhari’s presidency may move on to the next phase of its plan, and impeach President Buhari.
Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, despite his tough composure, is considered featherweight by the impenitent horde occupying the nation’s legislative chambers. Thus their desperate antics to tame and bully him.
Conflict over the national budget and the legislature’s untoward theatrics beyond the bounds of its constitutional duties pit them at loggerheads with Osinbajo. The lawmakers seek to turn him to a parlour pet same way they domesticated his boss. But would Osinbajo roll over and play pup? Will he accept to be turned into a glorified puppet collared to the legislature’s cassock of notoriety?
There is no gainsaying that the National Assembly is currently infested by shades of poorly, self-centred characters thus the nation’s hope rests on the Executive – since the judiciary has established itself as highly unreliable and hostile to justice and national progress. Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, cuts another portrait of hope for the nation just like Buhari did before his demystification.
Despite his alleged distaste for corruption and predilection to truly serve, Osinbajo should understand that the government he presides over, ride on a great deal of presumption and moral baggage. Nigerians believed that Buhari and Osinbajo signified hope, prudence and inestimable opportunity to eradicate corruption but their team and All Progressives Congress (APC) platform, becomes the bane to the successful attainment of our ideal state.
Osinbajo should always remember that Buhari became conflicted in personal and administrative ethics hence the catalogue of failures and inaction already listed in his wake. For instance, he has been accused of nepotism, god-complex and intellectual languor. Will Acting President Osinbajo these pitfalls?
The presidential cabinet subsists with dubious change agents feigning a moral and growth crusade. Like many state governors and lawmakers operating on the platform of the APC and rival parties, they epitomise ethical deceit. They negate and reject the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves.
Osinbajo of course, must be aware of this bitter reality. Unlike his boss whose naïveté and duplicity goaded to grow bananas out of a pine tree. Nigeria needs Osinbajo to be tirelessly honest, decisive and humane. It doesn’t matter if his spell as ‘President’ is temporary, Nigeria needs him to stand as a man.
This minute, Nigeria flounders in a vortex of dysfunctional public institutions and organs of government. The legislature, executive and judiciary crush the hope of the citizenry and stifle the birth of progressive vistas of the future, in a cycle of incestuous cannibalism. 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; they bind iron thorns around her head and waist, pierce her palms and feet, and cut her heart out to make her feel the heat and frost of their inordinate hankering for riches and bloodlust.
They 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.
