Legislative Thieves At Work By Bayo Oluwasanmi

By Bayo Oluwasanmi

Albert Camus yearned for a country
that an honorable man could love
and love justice too. Majority of
Nigerians are convinced that Nigeria
is not such a country.
There is a widespread
disillusionment among Nigerians
about Nigeria. These are times of
dramatic conflict between the forces
of good and evil.

All who are not lunatics are agreed
about certain things: That it is
better to be alive than dead. Better
to be adequately fed than starved.
Better to be free than a slave.
Selfish people desire those things
only for themselves, their families,
and their friends. They’re greedily
content that others should suffer.
Fact is, we as a people have become
so connected and intertwined that
we cannot insure our own prosperity
except by insuring that everyone
else achieves the same.
If you wish to be happy yourself,
you must work to see others are
also happy.
There aren’t many issues in Nigeria
today that incite and excite public
outcry with untamed anger as the
looting of our treasury by both the
Senate and House of
Representatives – the National
Assembly.

The ravenous hunger for stealing on
the part of the assembly members
is demonic. The competition to out
thieve the thief in a theater-cruelty
style is unmatched.
Our common sense is outraged and
our decency violated by the
spiritually harmful influence of their
chronic stealing syndrome (CSS).
It is unduly fastidious and punitively
grinding to attempt to abbreviate
the extent of their misappropriation
and malfeasance. No one is sure
how much has been stolen from the
nation’s coffers.
Many if not all of the brazen –faced
thieves of the looting spree in a
coordinated exodus escaped the
dragnet of the impotent EFCC, the
government anti-graft watch dog.
The National Assembly members
have made us smug and content
with stealing because people do
what people see. They’ve made
stealing fragrant and sweet.
Vanguard’s sarcastic editorial of May
12, 2011 titled “It is our Turn to
Eat” aptly summarized the objective
of the Abuja law makers.
Our politicians believe stealing is an
additional perk to their unjustified
outrageous pay. Their jumbo pay
and allowances are scandalous as
well as criminal.
They’re paid for everything from the
absurd to the ridiculous: Allowance
for wardrobe, for furniture, for car,
for sitting on committees, for
sneezing, for absenteeism, for
eating, for personal hygiene, for
having sex with their spouse and
concubines, for fighting same set of
lovers, for talking on the phone, for
lying, for bribery, and for corruption!
The governor of my state of
Maryland in the US makes $
150,000 per year while the police
chief of Washington, District of
Columbia is paid $250,000 per
annum. The highest paid governor
in the US is the California governor
who is on $173, 987 per year.
As of 2010 US Senators and
members of US House of
Representatives make $174,000 per
year.
Nigerian senators and reps make
millions. No one is sure how much
they’re paid. Their salaries and
other illegal fringe benefits are
monstrously humongous. They’re
scared as hell to disclose it hence it
is shrouded in diabolical secrecy!
Time and time again, the assembly
members beat the broken drums of
tantalizing, teasing, and mocking
sounds of promise and hope. Their
meaningless and ineffective drum
beatings have isolated and
discredited them from those they
feign to represent.
Their political pendulums oscillate
between romantic illusions to
blindness and cruelty. The attitudes
of these intellectually and culturally
sterile law makers will light the fire
next time.
Their representation is often
secured by fraud, bribery, and even
murder. It’s no wonder they employ
and deploy the powers of their office
for selfish and mercenary ends.
Agreed the president is known for
his crass incompetence, criminal
negligence, and astonished
cluelessness. What about the
assembly members who are
supposed to represent the interest
of their various constituencies?
Of course, they too are
handicapped. The majority of
assembly members are loosely
controlled criminals and ex-convicts.
They have been neutered by greed,
fraud, and corruption. They’re
partners in crime.
Their insensitivity to the needs of
the people that sent them to Abuja
makes the people’s faith grow dim,
and hope ceases to illuminate the
future.
Sometime ago, some fools among
the legislative thieves with a couple
of Aso Rock idiots went overseas to
lure as it were, investors to Nigeria.
These brainless Abuja thieves forgot
basic economic requirements of
factors of production and factors of
location of industry.
Who wants to invest in a country
ruled by armed robbers, rapists,
kidnappers? Who wants to invest in
a country that boasts of 24/7 black
out?
Who wants to invest in a country
without road networks? Who wants
to invest in a country without
treated water to drink? Where there
is no safety and security? Where
you have to bribe the high and the
low?
Of what use are the legislative
thieves who claim to represent the
people? The Lagos-Ibadan road was
build over 34 years ago. No road in
the world that I know of has eaten
so many human lives like Lagos-
Ibadan road.
Yet, the callous legislator-thieves are
proud to represent the
constituencies under which the road
falls. The same goes for Benin-Ore
road, Aba-Port Harcourt road,
Maidiguri-Minna road. The list goes
on.
With their incurable disease of CSS,
the welfare of their constituencies
takes a back burner. Their primary
assignment in Abuja is to chop and
steal till they drop!
In order to curry corruption from
the president, they have completely
ceded their constitutional powers to
the president. The president is the
chief legislator; he’s the chair
tender’s board for contracts.
The president is the oil and gas
minister, the agric commissioner,
the aviation minister, the health
minister, the voice of Nigeria, the
funeral director, the telephone
minster. In short, he’s the
executive, legislature, and the
judiciary.
Then one wonders, what the hell are
the zombies in the national
assembly doing? Where is the
separation of powers? Where is the
check and balances? The assembly
voted additional N63 billion the
president doesn’t need or ask for in
the 2013 budget.
The passage of the budget was
done pronto without scrutiny or
pruning.
By now, with the killing feast
perpetuated by the Boko Haramists,
one would have expected the
legislative thieves to summon the
president to intimate them what his
plans are to liquidate the blood
thirsty villains.
In the assembly of real humans, the
toothless and gum-less EFCC the
anti-graft government watchdog
would have been scraped and
replaced with an independent body
free from any interference from Aso
Rock.
They have no solution to the greed
and violence, distrust and spiritual
apathy that are eating the very
heart of our nation because as evil
characters they are held captive by
their sins.
All good store managers periodically
take stock of their inventory. They
carefully examine their goods to see
what they have on hand and what
they don’t.
What they need to buy for their
shelves and what they need to
throw away. And they do this at
regular intervals.
When was the last time the
legislative thieves took inventory of
services to their constituencies?
When was the last time they felt the
pulse and pain of their home base?
What bills or proposals have they
initiated to restocking the shelves
for the people’s needs?
What job creation programs for the
army of the unemployed in their
respective constituencies have they
suggested, debated, discussed on
the floor of the house?
What has been their reaction to the
moribund health care system of the
country?
What’s their answer to the sagging
education standard that is falling
faster than the power outage of
PHCN?
The only bills initiated and passed
into laws are appropriation bills, gas
and oil bills, jumbo allowances,
hyper inflated budgets, and other
dubious statutory allocations.
The people’s business has never
been given the priority and
importance it deserves. Most of their
time is spent junketing the globe for
weddings, funerals, birthdays,
awards, lectures, seminars, retreats,
and other frivolous and stupid
engagements.
How much really do they need to
construct good roads? Provide
treated water? Build hospitals for
humans? Construct 21st century
schools and equip them with
internet? Create jobs? Provide safety
and security? Construct decent
public housing? How much money
for God’s sake?
Look at what they’re doing to our
people:
They steal their land by moving the
boundary markers.
They steal their livestock and put
them in their own pastures.
They take the orphan’s donkey and
demand the widow’s ox as security
for a loan.
They pushed the poor off the cliff.
The needy must hide together for
safety.
Like wild monkeys in the wilderness,
the poor must spend their time
looking for food, searching even in
the desert for food for their children.
All night our people lie naked in the
cold without clothing or covering.
The poor are soaked by showers
and they huddle against the rocks
for want of home.
They snatched a widow’s child from
her breast taking the baby as
security for a loan. The poor harvest
food for them while they themselves
are starving.
The poor press out olive oil without
being allowed to taste it.
The groans of the dying rise from
the city and the wounded cry for
help yet, they ignore their moaning.
There are three flavors of foolish:
simpletons, fools, and mockers.
Simpletons are naïve, usually
because of their youth; fools are
morally numb and mindless, and
mockers are aggressively defiant
and cynical.
But they’re all alike in one way: they
pay no attention to wisdom and
suffer consequences.
For once, can the legislative thieves
apply some wisdom and just do
something right for the people who
elected them? In the words of
Rodney King “Can we just get
along?”
Now is the opportunity for them to
right historical wrongs and leave a
legacy of service, justice and
fairness.
What is to be done?
The answer lies with Richard John
Neuhaus:
“Truth spoke to power and power
was deaf. Love appealed to power
and power was heartless. Humility
petitioned power and power was
cruel. Reason argued with power
and power was stupid. Now violent
power must address violent power.”
No other choice!

byolu@aol.com