Our thieves are holier than yours

These are the days of utter disrespect, sacrilege and insolence. Disrespect for lawful authority and disgusting trepidation for stolen authority. I mean, the names some people call our politricians they would not dare repeat to armed robbers operating in their backyard. I confess that the last time an armed robber asked me a question I […]

These are the days of utter disrespect, sacrilege and insolence. Disrespect for lawful authority and disgusting trepidation for stolen authority. I mean, the names some people call our politricians they would not dare repeat to armed robbers operating in their backyard. I confess that the last time an armed robber asked me a question I had to quickly respond with a respectful ‘sir’ something I’ll hardly use in a conversation with President Jones. Most of the people who disrespect the hoary herd saying that age is nothing but numbers incidentally failed their O’ level mathematics. In times past, people in cassock and turbans earned automatic respect. When they spoke, they spoke with the authority of the divine. Those were the days when Arsehole Rock cassava bread and coffee had not corrupted the reasoning of the clergy.
Today people speak ill of monarchs for watching Abacha cinema and leading other monarchs in blessing candidates that the electorate has rejected. These are the times when people who have no money to buy titles replace the c in chiefs with a t in a bid to make the purchase of titles with stolen wealth look distasteful. We must have the knack for monumental insolence or be damned.
Just because we are talking of corruption in high places, some people think that it’s a license to call everyone thief. These people must have been on exile when Bishop Jonah Jang expanded the scope of divine tolerance by declaring that God has sanctified those who benefit from rigged elections. Today the critics of Jang have no title while the man sits in the red chamber as a sinator of the feral republic. I feel nothing but utter disdain for those who think and even dare say that there are corrupt people in the redemptive Asiwaju Peoples Congress, APC.  Now that their complicit goats are being investigated for the illegitimate consumption of communal yams, we are again expanding the scope and frontiers of forgiveness.
If a man has robbed his state blind for eight years and rose to become the financier of our change, wouldn’t it be obvious to anyone except the mischievous that their sins are forgiven them? If not that the bounds of the laws of blasphemy have been contracted, who among those pointing accusing fingers shall stand? People who drank, swam in and cooked with the political Rivers of PDP until they decamped are holier thieves than those who remained in the ship until it sank. These days, without a scintilla of proof anyone who ever kissed a political lip is smeared with the maquillage of corruption.
I have news for all the blasphemers – our thieves are holier than yours. If someone takes money meant to tar roads, provide drugs, build schools or rural infrastructure; then acquired sewage land and builds estates on it, we sure cannot categorize them as corrupt – they are builders. If they steal their state blind but inject a tithe of the proceeds into financing a party that upturned the 60-year illusion of another party, they cannot be accused of corruption by any stretch of definition. They may be thieves, but they are holier thieves and certainly holy thieves are not corrupt. Holy thievery is in. It is not to be compared with common stealing or goats eating yams. They should go and sin no more.
Now that we have agreed that N78 million is not by any stretch of imagination too much to build a responsive website, wailers have moved the translucent lenses of their sleazometers to Adamawa. They see everything wrong with the N200 million budgeted for marabou prayers against Boko Haram calling it economic haram. Yet it is a known secret that anytime a voucher is prepared, someone goes home thanking his Chi for being the fulfilment of prophetic prayers. Every day, religious profiles pronounce that people’s legitimate debts would be divinely forgiven; and that someone leaving their homes with nothing but the starvation diet of hope would return home as billionaires. Within minutes, the ‘amen’ chorus and shares reach farther than BRF’s N78 million website. This is divine.
Now speaking of forgiveness, I know the likes of Rauf Aregbesola, Gabriel Suswam, Abiola Ajimobi and Godswill Akpabio would be wishing that the workers they failed to pay for months would forgive them by not asking for the arrears. As they say in Yorubaland, iyen tun nko? Think about that? Like GEJ, those great democrats left everything and sacrificed their time and energy for their states although I know the wicked might say without proof that they looted their states. Let’s forget those unpaid salaries and start afresh. I hope that landlords, traders or school proprietors would also forgive debts and start anew – this too is change. What more, let’s practice the principle of advanced forgiveness, in case any APC goats plan on eating yams before they come for our votes in 2019. These thieves are holier than theirs.