It is a crying national shame, that while Nigeria is home to the largest number of the world’s poorest people, the main preoccupation of the Adams Oshiomhole-led All Progressives Party (APC) is allegedly how to raise humungous sums of money all in the bizarre bid to remove the Senate President, Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu through unconstitutional means; more by crook than by hook!
Methinks such sleaze funds would have been better deployed to pay the well deserved salaries and pensions of long-suffering workers across many APC states, create the enabling environment to kick-start mass employment of our jobless youths through well articulated empowerment programmes using Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs). And of course, set in motion poverty alleviation programmes for the vulnerable members of the society, especially the malnourished under-five children, orphans, old widows and widowers and the homeless citizens in critical needs of sustainable survival. But given our quasi-democratic dispensation that places all emphasis on filthy lucre, the opposite is what plays out, on daily basis.
For instance, a pro-democracy group, Movement for Democratic Goals, MDG, recently raised the impeach-Saraki- by -all -means alarm over what discerning Nigerians would regard as another ploy to leave the substance of good governance, to chase the increasing dark shadows of self aggrandizement . According to the National Coordinator of the group, Aliyu Abdulkareem, in a statement in Abuja: “We have been reliably informed by our sources in APC that governors and senators are holding several meetings to raise funds to begin several illegal processes that may force Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, out of office by a group of minority senators.
In a related issue, forty-nine Senators of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, have written to Senate President, Bukola Saraki, to inform him of their vote of confidence in his leadership, and that of his Deputy, Ike Ekweremadu.
These actions have been triggered by the recent mass defection of 14 senators, including the Senate President, Saraki and several lawmakers at the House of Representatives from the APC to the PDP. The untoward scenario was worsened by the sudden invasion of the legislature by hooded men of the DSS. But for the prompt intervention by the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who in a swift reaction, sacked Lawal Daura as the Department of State Services (DSS) Director General, for what the presidency described as unauthorised action, the ship of Nigeria’s democracy would have since capsized; no thanks to the raging storm of intra-party crisis.
One’s instant response was that of outrage and total condemnation, triggering of course the flaring flames of yet- to- be- answered questions. Is political association by force or fiat? Must all Nigerian politicians be coerced into the ruling APC? Is marriage by force or mutual consent? Is this move not an anomaly to the democratic principles, of freedom of association and given the multi-party system that boasts of 91 political parties?
It gets even more worrisome when the fang-bearing anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is openly deployed to commence investigations into the activities of perceived political foes. The recent experiences of Senate President Saraki and his deputy Ekeweremadu as well as Governors Samuel Ortom and Udom Emmanuel of Benue and Akwa-Ibom states respectively come to mind. That is one disturbing amoral trend of the evolving democratic experience.
The other is the unpatriotic and unconstitutional drama rearing its ugly head through the open disbursement of cash by political parties to lure voters for their preferred candidates. In the recent Ekiti election, the political fraud was given the name ‘see and buy’. It was so absurd that political party agents invaded polling units with bags of money! They approached voters who had PVCs and surreptitiously convinced them to vote for their candidates. The APC and the PDP were alleged to have taken the lead in this odious practice.
Even the legislative arm of government is not left out of the undue monetization of the polity. If it is not budget padding it may be some questionable constituency projects. Or the purchase of exotic cars they do not need. In fact, long before Senator Shehu Sani tore the veil off the huge sums of public funds that go to satiate the obscene, epicurean tastes of our lawmakers both the Economist Magazine of London and the IMF had raised alarm over it years back. Conservatively put at $189,500 per annum(excluding various allowances) it stands at 116 times Nigeria’s GDP and estimated as the highest the world over!
Can you imagine this happening in a country where 53.6 million citizens, or nearly one-third of the nation’s population, go to bed hungry every night? That is according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).As for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) the total number of people in full-time employment (at least 40 hours a week) declined from 52.7 million in the second quarter 2017 to 51.1 million in third quarters. It stated that total unemployment and underemployment combined increased from 37.2 per cent in the previous quarter to 40.0 per cent in the third quarter. The unemployment situation for Nigerian youth in the age bracket of between 15 and 35 has worsened as it stands at alarming rate of 52.65 %. This I have referred to as a ticking time bomb! Yet many of our political leaders are least bothered by such figures but rather how to hang unto power come 2019.
Unfortunately, some of those unemployed youth fall easy puns in the chess game of party poll-y-tricks! Some are used to carry out all manner of despicable electoral fraud including ballot box snatching, thuggery, falsified ballot paper thumb printing and assassination of politicians seen as rivals or foes. Sad to note that despite all these aberrations many of our unemployed youth waste their valuable time online (on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter) praising their very enemies to the highest heavens!
As one has repeatedly canvassed, we cannot have good governance or get patriotic politicians into sensitive positions as long as the emphasis is on money, money, more money and maddening materialism. We need a paradigm shift to policies and payments that less for the politicians and more for the people.
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