On Wednesday September 9 2009, a member of the House of Representatives, Chinyere Igwe, reportedly assaulted and battered a security official attached to the National Assembly because, in the words of the member, “he has just embarrassed me and I won’t take it”. The incident that led to the shameless display of violence by the “honourable” member was that the security official had asked the Representative to identify himself as he (Igwe) made to enter the National Assembly complex. He (Igwe) was quoted by The Nation newspaper as saying afterwards: “Imagine that boy. How could he claim not to know me? Does his duty not include recognition of faces of members? He has just embarrassed me, I won’t take it. This case will not end here. I will take it to any length, including the National Assembly Service Commission, where he would be disciplined.”
The above isn’t a story someone just made up. It happened for real. In fact, I wrote a newspaper commentary in the then NEXT newspaper condemning the incident and demanding the House of Representatives to act to protect the rights of its staff and discipline its member. As usual, and as I predicted in my article then, the House did nothing. The battered employee was left to suffer alone.
Fast-forward to April 2016 where last week, the House of Representatives reported that one of its members, Onyemaechi Mrakpor, was allegedly assaulted and battered by aides of the Controller General of the Nigerian Prisons Service, Dr. Peter Ekpendu. According to the representatives, who brought the issue for discussion in plenary, their female colleague was battered in the precinct of the National Assembly when she drove her car and overtook the convoy of the Controller General who had come to the National Assembly on invitation to appear before a committee. It appears, from the account of the lawmakers, that the aides of the Prisons boss were enraged at the affront of Mrakpor who overtook their convoy. Further newspaper reports on Saturday say the Prisons boss has denied any involvement of his convoy in the alleged incident. Apparently, we now have “unknown convoy”, just like we had “unknown soldiers” who destroyed the late Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s home in the 1970s.
We wait to see the face-off between the Reps and the DG of Prisons, who has in fact been summoned to the House to explain why he should not be committed to prison. Who else wouldn’t chuckle at such pun? The Reps reportedly classify the attack as one on a parliamentarian in the course of her duty, since it occurred within the premises/precinct of the National Assembly. That is said to be a breach of the law on parliamentary privileges and protection.
There are so many ways to look at the incident, assuming it happened as elaborately described by the Reps. Any act of assault and battery to any human being is condemnable, just as I did in the 2009 case. That this present incident involves a privileged member of the society does not make it in any way special, more so when parliamentarians themselves are known to exert violence against one another, seemingly as part of their identifiable modus operandi.
Perhaps, if the House of Representatives was known to stand up against previous acts of assault and battery involving ordinary citizens, they may have obtained our sentiments and sympathies when the violence was brought upon one of theirs. But that is not saying that one justifies or is happy about this shameful incident. I have at different times called attention to the tendency of privileged citizens (mainly public/government officials) to abuse their privileges by riding roughshod over the rest of society in an audacious display of lawlessness.
We are stuck with seeing more and more of lawlessness of this nature to the extent that our society focuses much on categorisation, classification and stratification of citizens. I still recall the huge waste of time the National Assembly plunged us into in 1999 or thereabout when they were debating a bill on the Order of Precedence. The country spent so much time talking about who should get what number and ranking such as numbers three, four, five citizens etc. It is such inanity that translates into which state official should move about with a convoy of vehicles, sirens and security details. It is equally the reason many of this privileged ones move about breaking road traffic rules and rules of public civility and decorum, with impunity.
It is important for us to have a common or fair understanding of why sirens are in use in the first place. I don’t think siren should be used as a symbol of authority as we have now reduced it to. That is why public officials and anybody who feels he or she is important enough goes about with a convoy of cars, police personnel or security aides and sirens. Suddenly, we have armed forces and police personnel as well as heads of virtually all the paramilitary and quasi-military agencies with convoys, with the attendant menace we see on the roads. The list is almost endless and include the heads of the Fire Service, Immigration and Prisons services.
Sirens, I opine, should primarily be used as warning of an emergency which requires us to yield the way for persons responding to the emergencies such as ambulances or security operatives on a hot pursuit of criminals. In such a situation, it makes sense to allow reasonable room for the movement of such vehicles. But ever since public officers started using sirens to clear the way for themselves as a show of importance, we have seen so many abuses. There seems to be a convention of giving way to such sirens no doubt. But the problem is that too often, those who go about with sirens expect and demand the rest of the society to give them that right of way, willy nilly. They are too callous to understand that sometimes there is no reasonable way to give anyway just for them to pass without untold consequences like accidents. Nigeria has in fact recorded so many of such accidents, including fatal ones in the past.
There is something terribly wrong when the privileged citizens see these privileges as entitlements the society owes them. That is why they demand and even take them by force or without minding the consequences to the rest of society. This sense of entitlement is part of what breeds corruption or scandalous spending of or use and abuse of public resources. See for instance how members of the National Assembly jealously guard their privileges. They also claim entitlements to use state-of-the-art cars, reminding us that they are ‘superior’ (on the Order of Precedence) to the ministers who use more and “bigger” vehicles anyway. It is this same sense of entitlement that makes members of the executive arm to keep the same high profiles in what they do including several travels with large retinue of aides.
It is this same sense of entitlement that leads citizens who share the same diversities with a person in public office to think that their community owns and is entitled to a share of the spoils of such offices. This is what is called prebendalism. It is so deeply rooted in our psyche as a people such that even a community would express disappointment if their representative in government fails to oil this pattern of corruption.
We need to change our narratives as a people. We must develop and embrace a culture that has the interests of citizens at its centre and those citizens as equal in the eyes of the law and the state. We must learn to rally behind victims of acts of violence against their more powerful assailants, even when they are powerful government officials otherwise we would keep seeing acts of violence and impunity as the instant case.
PUNCH
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