And the thief became a titleholder (I)

The battle against corruption, since time immemorial, has always produced at least three contradictory spaces of existence among humankind. Such is the lesson that our Creator desires that we learn from the story of the Aylah (Jewish) community that was resident on the shore of the Red Sea during the primordial period. Our Creator commanded […]

The battle against corruption, since time immemorial, has always produced at least three contradictory spaces of existence among humankind. Such is the lesson that our Creator desires that we learn from the story of the Aylah (Jewish) community that was resident on the shore of the Red Sea during the primordial period. Our Creator commanded them to sanctify the Sabbath day and that they should refrain from engaging in fishing.

The Aylah community eventually broke into three camps. The first group consisted of those who could be described as the rebels. They rejected the injunctions of Allah. They dared the Almighty to visit them with any retribution that he deemed fit for their transgression. They continued to set their traps on the eve of Sabbath such that on the day after, they go away with the big harvest.

The second group that emerged within the Aylah community consisted of the ‘models’, the exemplars. Not only did they uphold the sacredness of the Sabbath day by not engaging in fishing as commanded by Allah, they also admonished the rebels to stop their transgression against Allah’s commands. They were conscious of the fact that rebellion against the injunction of Allah could only bring grievous consequences to the whole community.

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The third group that emerged within the Aylah community were those that can be referred to as the tassels. These were people who, though did not directly violate the sanctity of the Sabbath day but were unconcerned about the transgressions of the rebels. They even advised the models to leave the rebels alone. When eventually retribution from Allah came, both the rebels and the tassels suffered ignominy. They were visited with divine punishment that led to their transmutation into baboons. Only the exemplars were saved.

Allah says in Quran 2: 64-65: And you know the case of those of you who broke the Sabbath, how We said to them: “Become apes, despised and hated. And thus, We made their end a warning for the people of their own time and for the succeeding generations and an admonition to the God-fearing.

A careful contemplation of our society today reveals sharp semblances with the Aylah community. In Nigeria today there are millions of rebels against the will of their Creator. They indulge and relish the perpetration of corruption on earth. Whenever they are umbrage and reprimanded for their evil conduct and misdemeanours, they shout back at their traducers. They proclaim, like Firawn of the primordial period, that they are indeed the righteous ones on earth. Their circle keeps growing by the day. They are celebrated by their people even though they are known as perpetrators of malfeasance and payola.

I remember about two decades or so ago when one of the sons of the village nearby, the village that is very close to the city beside the lagoon, was sent to the gulag for presiding over kleptocracy in the agency that he was privileged to head.

It was not the case that the regime of theft, greed, and underhand dealings witnessed in the agency during his tenure was unprecedented. No. Everybody in the city knew then, as they do now, that the agency was one of the few ‘cash cows’ in the whole nation. To be opportune to serve as its supreme boss was to become a multibillionaire overnight. You need not engage in graft, sleaze, scum and scam before your bank balances begin to hover around the nine ‘figure-mark’.

Yes. That is the way the system runs. It is contrived in such a way that, unlike the education sector where for decades the salaries of a university Professor remains less than four hundred dollars a month, to hold any executive position in the agency is to bid poverty bye, and forever too.

Ironically, that applies to those whose watchword was contentment. Not the village boy, however. Despite the plum and plenty afforded him legally by the agency, he still went ahead to dip his hands into the coffers of the latter. He wanted to run it aground. Like the man who sought to satiate his thirst by drinking from the ocean, the more money he stole, the more he sought to steal.

Eventually, he was caught. He was jailed. Ironically again, the day he got reprieve and was released from prison, his kith and kin rolled out the drums to celebrate his return, to felicitate their hero. They danced. They sang lullabies. He was welcomed back to the village like a hero.

Unable to make sense of what he was seeing, a colleague wondered what the reason for the merriment was: “Are these people dancing and happy over the return of this jailbird?” I responded in the affirmative. “What has become of our dignity, our morality, and our sense of decency in this village”? he asked again. I told him emphatically “Your question is indeed the answer”!

My brother, that was over two decades ago. Since then, our nation has not ceased setting new records in humongous acts of corruption. Not a year has passed us by without the discovery either of a ‘snake’ eating away the funds of a government agency or a tortoise ‘feasting’ on the financial records of a government parastatal.

The most galling part of it has, recently, been the heads of anti-corruption agencies that were caught in the acts. Yes. Nigerians never knew that, except for a few, potential criminals have always been authorized to investigate the complex and dangerous crime scenes of corruption in our nation.