The fear of prosecution

As the seconds tick away the minutes and nights bring us to the proximity of the expiry date of the sixteen years of hopes betrayed, the incidental issues of the 2015 electoral campaigns remain rush back to mind like naked wounds. Both President Jones and his wife appeared to have had morbid fear of what […]

As the seconds tick away the minutes and nights bring us to the proximity of the expiry date of the sixteen years of hopes betrayed, the incidental issues of the 2015 electoral campaigns remain rush back to mind like naked wounds. Both President Jones and his wife appeared to have had morbid fear of what happens when they turn their backs on the Rock earlier than their set date of May 2019.
As they look into their own future out of power, they keep seeing the prison. While campaigning in Enugu in January, President Jones faulted Buhari’s stance on corruption. He queried a military tribunal’s verdict that jailed Jim Nwobodo for stealing less than the cost of a ‘tear-rubber’ Peugeot 504, the vehicle du luxe back in the days before Ayo Oritsejafo bought a luxurious limousine for his wife and a jet for inter alia, incidental arms runs.
It would look as if every time the first family looked into their future outside the Rock, what they saw was not that mansion built by the Italian company Gitto as their Otuoke retirement home, but the soggy insides of a prison wall. That’s a horrible prospect if your annual feeding allowance is enough to run a republic. So palpable was this fear that his wife bought into it three months later.
In March, while campaigning for her husband in Ekiti the western stronghold of the PDP, Mama Jones reiterated that; “If you vote APC you will go to prison. How can you jail somebody for 300 years? I’m not ready to carry food to my husband inside prison.” At that time, the prospect seemed ludicrous. But with the crumbling of the ruining party’s house of corruption and deception, the prospects are glaring. But they are not the only ones having this phobia of prisons, members of the inner caucus share their phobia.
Madam Globe had to rebut news she was seeking asylum rather than face real audit of the headquarters of sleaze she is accused of running. She did so with curses for her traducers. Her sister-in-the-troika that allegedly ruin Naija; our de-facto Prime Minister has been running a media campaign to buy our collective sympathy. The fact that she became the first female minister to build an enviable legacy and then returning to tear it down with her own hands is the reason she suffers prison-phobia. With each passing day, we are regaled with news about her health.
Not long ago, she revealed how she survived cancer. As Yagba elders say, you are bound to sympathise with a cancer survivor even if you have dined on the diet of a tortoise’s head. But cancer survival has now given way to high blood pressure. Ostensibly this is not induced by the irredeemable fall in the value of our naira; not in the failure to explain the scarcity of diesel and aviation fuel which subsidy has been totally withdrawn under this regime. Not because of the scarcity of PMS for which billions of subsidy has allegedly been paid. This week, she found the time to teach the Trust editors a thing or two about media ethics apparently from the NOI Handbook on Media Ethics where the press must do as it’s told.
Life suddenly looks humane when you realise that we all bleed the same when slashed. The icing on the cake was Sunday’s outburst at the church. Most of us are used to hearing President Jones making policy pronouncements on the pulpit as if he is the vicar of the church called Naija. But not many prepared for his prediction of hard times outside office. He sees no rest of mind for his ministers outside office- indeed he sees persecution a strong word with ecclesiastical connotation. Grammarians have been at each other’s throats trying to decode the esoteric parables associated with possessors of Port Harcourt Degrees and Okrika lexicographers and patented by the first family. Did President Jones mean prosecution – as for the crimes of commission and omission committed under his watch with his tacit approval or persecution for things he did not do?
Yours sincerely found the answer in Genesis 4:6 after God had rejected the offering of Cain in favour of his brother Abel. In line with the arguments supra, it would read something like this – Then Buhari said to President Jones, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you have done what is right, will you be persecuted? But if you did not do what is right, justice is crouching at your doorstep; it desires to have you, and you cannot escape it.” Under our laws, only the guilty are afraid of prosecution as our laws leaves no room for persecution.