Matters miscellaneous

And so, 2016 rolls off this week, carrying away with it fulfilled dreams and shattered dreams. In this, it is like all the years before it since the Gregorian calendar became, as it were, the circle by which man measures his allotted time on earth.  There is always reason to celebrate an out-going year; and […]

And so, 2016 rolls off this week, carrying away with it fulfilled dreams and shattered dreams. In this, it is like all the years before it since the Gregorian calendar became, as it were, the circle by which man measures his allotted time on earth. 

There is always reason to celebrate an out-going year; and reason enough to lament it; to grit the teeth, trying to forget the cocktail of misfortunes visited on individuals, groups of individuals and families. All of us look forward to the new year, 2017, with renewed hope that what 2016 failed to give us, 2017 will more than wipe away our tears and end our groans. But we tremble because no one knows what the year has in store for us. Fortune or misfortune? Good luck or bad luck? The mystery is always buried in the dark womb to which only the denizens of heaven have access.

As I bid 2016 goodbye, let me make some candid comments on a few of the things that baffled me and confounded my old grey matter in 2016. 

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I was surprised, to say the least, to see the rotten eggs home in on the face of President Buhari. He asked the senate early in December to confirm Mr. Lawal Magu as the substantive chairman of the EFCC. He holds the position in an acting capacity. The senate rejected him. I thought it was foolish politics, as in pay back time. Not so. The senate has a very good reason for throwing the man back at the president. It found to its shock, I am sure, and the shock of the rest of us, that the man we thought was whistle clean had skeletons rattling loudly in his cupboard. In plain English, Magu appears to have been sucked in by corruption too.

The senate acted based on a DSS report it ordered for a thorough background check on the acting chairman. Neither the senate nor the rest of us find it funny that the activist chairman of the commission whose activities recall the days of Nuhu Ribadu, carries the burden of a rotten past. It has effectively turned his sparkling integrity into the dark colour of murk. 

Why did the president not do a thorough background check on him? I thought such checks were routine on people being put forward for high public offices. This, certainly, is well known to the president. He owed it to himself to satisfy himself that Magu was clean enough to continue to lead the war against corruption before asking the senate to confirm him. His failure to carry out this routine and elementary function takes something away from his integrity and his sense of public responsibility. Pity, he ended up embarrassing himself and Magu. 

Still, 2016 was the most active year for EFCC. More big fishes were caught in its net this year than all the years we have been tweaking the beard of the nation-crushing and reputation-destroying monster, aka corruption. 

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It seems to me there is a disconnect between a nation’s poverty and its ambition to raise a tower of self importance. The government tells us money is scarce; which is why we are trekking down the long and dark tunnel called recession. But take a look at the size of the 2017 federal budget. The figure, which has no meaning in the Idoma language, scares me, even to repeat it here. Are we really that poor? Well, does the government always level with the governed? 

Meanwhile we must buckle up and face the grinding poverty that now forces people to steal the freshly cooked pot of soup of their neighbours or give out their children as collateral for a bag of rice or corn. Poverty has made a short work of all our plans. President Shagari faced a similar problem in 1981/82. Sugar, rice, salt, milk, toilet paper, etc., were christened essential commodities. We lined up from morning until night to buy some of these commodities for our domestic use. Not funny. He introduced austerity measures to curb the excesses of the rich in order that the poor might survive. 

Never mind. This time, it is different. Buhari has a better approach to it. The size of his budget should serve notice on poverty that its days are numbered in our country. No, don’t expect to become a billionaire when you wake up from your nightmare tomorrow morning.

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In the run up to the re-run legislative election in the volatile state called Rivers, everyone who mattered preached peace. We all hoped the state would surprise itself by turning its swords into ploughshares and the politicians on both sides of the divide would be friends again and east fresh fish pepper soup from the same bowl. It did not quite work out that way. Blood and death still attended the election. It could have been worse, much worse. INEC must take credit for the low violence.

I do not think the national chairman of the APC, Chief John Oyegun, spoke responsibly when he reportedly told the APC supporters: “If they slap you, slap them back.” That was not the path to the peaceful conduct of the election. It was a call to war and variance with all the preachments for peace. I still wonder why this usually calm man chose to speak so belligerently.

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The gates of Her Majesty’s prison swung open last week. And Chief James Ibori, former governor of Delta State, became a free man. He had paid his dues for dipping his hands into the public till and helping himself and friends to it. The British recovered much of the money. I hope he has not become a poor ex-convict.

You could say a lot of good things about him but never credit Ibori with courage. His lack of courage drove him into the hands of the British police. Had he remained in his home town, Oghara, instead of fleeing to Dubai where he felt he would be safe, the EFCC could have done nothing to him. The commission would take him to court and charge him with 200 crimes. The case would never be heard, let alone be decided. He would never have seen the inside of Kuje or Ikoyi prison. He should ask his fellow former governors.

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And remember as you enter the new year, that we have been made the agents of the change that the APC promised us. Societal change begins with the individual. The magic sentence is: Change begins with me. If you cut down on your consumption of eba, you can be sure Nigeria will be a changed country in the time it takes to say, Nigeria.