Daily Trust - the online edition
| When probes are not enough |
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| Written by With Ibrahim Dan Gabas | ||||||
| Sunday, 27 April 2008 | ||||||
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It is exactly a year since INEC imposed a PDP government on Nigeria. Eighty per cent of those who today call themselves Nigeria’s leaders have neither moral nor electoral rights to those claims. It is now a judicial fact that INEC upturned the people’s mandate and imposed the most fraudulent electoral hocus-pocus on the people. Those who now parade themselves as elected representatives of the people could not have won elections if they were contesting against themselves. In some cases, the judicial pronouncements have proved this, in others; the judiciary have legitimised the illogical. Thank God for a largely lazy reportorial corps who goes to their beats to sleep and wait for press secretaries to issue them with press releases – members of the House of Representatives are shinning with their plethora of probes. Coming from the background last year when the searchlight of corruption was beamed on them, this year, they have upturned the apple cart beaming the searchlight on others. They have simply latched on constitutional rights to ‘oversight functions’ and are taking turns to rile the polity. Their inquisition has led to scurrilous newspaper headlines and satisfies the 60 per cent local content for the electronic media. In spite of the pronouncements on the power sector, we have no signs to show that things will improve now or this time next year. From power to FCT and now it’s the turn of the NNPC have been lined up for probes. The 20 per cent members who supported Patricia Etteh until she fell do not want to be seen with yesterday’s eyes, and so they’ve got the new guys to focus on the other members of the greater society. But it is very clear that even as far as these probes go, these people coming to equity have no clear conscience. The Elumelu clan, owners of banking fortunes are one of the bidders in the power sector – what happens if the IPP is undervalued and who buys it are issues that Nigerians will be looking at if Yar’Adua accepts that the power sector must be privatised. For now, nobody is talking about it. Iyabo Obasanjo is still a fugitive playing hide and seek with the EFCC who want her to answer for her part in the Health Sector Scandal. She says she is not guilty and we want to believe her, but why is she so reluctant to go and say it to the EFCC beats anyone’s imagination. So, we move to the committee on the FCT. We were savouring the headlines of how many houses/lands that Obasanjo has sold to himself and his chronies and for once, it appeared as if that was the only thing the committee will find until an FCDA staff came round to say that the committee Chairman, Abubakar Sodangi and member Smart Adeyemi had each received bogus numbers of plots. The duo had to play it down and thanks to Bassey Ewa Henshaw who shut the chap up and asked for certified true copies of the alleged plots. Both Sodangi and Adeyemi must thank their stars because I don’t know how they would have wriggled out of that disclosure. In a normal country, both members would step down from proceedings until they’ve cleared their names of bias. But no, they continued to sit on the panel and to make spurious statements and to rile on witnesses who come. For instance, Adeyemi, while grilling Ifueko Omoigui, the BPE boss had the temerity to say she ought to have resigned when Sheraton and Sofitel were undervalued as a good civil servant. What the cheek? Its not just that the pot is calling the kettle black now, it goes farther than that. We all know what the committee on petroleum will find. Obasanjo was the de-facto petroleum minister for eight years. We all know how he allocated oil blocs and revoked same to those who are either presumed friendly or otherwise. And to cap it all up, we have heard that in the eight years, the accounts of NNPC were not audited. So, for all you care, newspaper editors can go to sleep and come round in the evenings with their caption ingenuity throughout the next two weeks. Even NTA, successive government megaphone cashed in on the FCT probe to make funny remarks. When big problems get you down, small ones ride on your head! So, are these physicians in the National Assembly able to diagnose themselves? The answer could be found in a headline of The Sun last weekend. It tells us how the NASS members fleece the Nigerian economy. What it did not say is that while some of the headline-generating probes were diverting public attention, the 2008 Budget became a subject of controversy and that when President Yar’Adua was signing it into law, he knew he was not doing so with his full conscience. Are we saying that the probes are unnecessary, well, until we know how much it costs the nation, we cannot say so. But what we know is that the NASS cannot take these probes beyond the headlines – they cannot prosecute anybody except they make the executive look into it. Will the executive be ready to look into it? Well, that is the million-dollar question bearing in mind the burden of having benefited from the general morass that produced it. The truth is that nothing will come out of these revelations except perhaps to taint the integrity of a few men of honour ensconced in a bad system. This can only make noble men shun public office and hamper the needed reforms in the public sector. While we check our ears to make sure they’re hearing the right things, Nigeria continues to flounder. Power generation continues to be a mirage for most homes, our roads are still death traps and in the life of this administration, most parts of the nation witnessed two weeks of self inflicted but crippling fuel scarcity. Armed robbery, kidnapping, ritual murder and high sea piracy continue to soil Nigeria’s image and unemployment have defied solution – our consulting clinics are dead and even the president has to go to Germany to cure a cold. The campuses are set for elongation with ASUU threatening another round of strikes. These are certainly no time for boring and useless probes. If these reps are our reps, they should go ahead with the probes, but let us know what they are doing to make life and living more meaningful for Nigerians. What Nigerians would want to say to these reps is – close the circus and get back to work! Views: 1639
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