Looting with Integrity

Bukola Saraki, Senate President. Yakubu Dogara, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ike Ekweremadu, Deputy Senate President. These men are not saints. They are far from it. Nigerians may not now appreciate how indebted they are to these three men and to the tendencies they represent. However, if Nigeria as we know it today still exists tomorrow,the roles played by these three men in containing the executive recklessness of the Buhari Administration and in stabilizing the nation will ultimately gain recognition.

One thing that can be said with authority about Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari’s ghastly administrative style is that he dreads making key personnel changes irrespective of actual performance.I stand to be corrected, but I strongly suspect that by the time President Buhari leaves office in May 2019, he would have set an unparalleled record as the first Nigerian President to complete a four-year tenure without reshuffling his cabinet.

If you are a Buhari appointee to an official position, you can take it to the bank that your tenure is guaranteed so long as Buhari remains in office. Naturally your chance of getting an appointment under President Buhari becomes amplified to the extent that you are a family member, a Fulani, or a Muslim, in that order.

If you do not fall into any one of these categories, and yet you have appointive ambition, I am sorry. Your only remedy is to join the brainwashed ‘Personality Cult of Buhari’ and even at that, you must queue up and await your turn, sometimes behind the dead.

Yes, I mean dead ‘personality cult’ members who in the past received appointments under President Buhari and thereby earned this administration the appellation of ‘Government of the Living and the Dead.’ By the way, Nigerian youths labelled by Buhari as lazy, cannot grow, because older ones such as Buhari’s appointees, will not voluntarily retire even in the face of dwindling productivity or even death.

The problem with sticky-appointments, and I am referring here to appointments that persist regardless of actual performance in office, does not just lie with the fact that they are suggestive of hegemonic tendencies and are therefore completely inimical to progress, growth and development.Sticky-appointments areequally suggestive of collusion to perpetrate and perpetuate evil,andconcealment of previous felonious conduct.

Nowhere else is collusion and concealment better illustrated than in the apex positions of Nigeria’s lopsided security architecture.All the highest positions in Nigeria’s military and security apparatus except for one or two, are populated by people who have ethnic, or religious, or geo-political ties to President Buhari and yet there is no security in Nigeria.

In fact, to the contrary, there is indisputablesuspicionthat the Buhari Administration is instigating, arming and some would say directly deploying Nigerian military and security assets to assist the Fulani herdsmen-terrorists trying to loot ancestral lands recognized for centuries past as belonging to the various Indigenous Peoples of present-day Nigeria (IPON). This has since been buttressed by well-informed personalities including Lt-Gen. T.Y.Danjuma rtd., former Chief of Army Staff, former Minister of Defense and former superior officer to Buhari in the Nigerian Army.

There is no trick in the book that the Buhari Administration has not deployed to loot the ancestral lands belonging to the Indigenous Peoples of Nigeria for the ultimate benefit of itinerant Fulani herdsmen-terrorists who by his own admission were trained by Muammar Gaddafi. From the ill-fated grazing reserves bill, to the aborted cattle colonies bill and now to the equally ill-fated Waterways bill, every administrative ploy has been deployed to loot other peoples’ lands by Nigeria’s acclaimed ‘man of integrity.’

Each of these maneuvers ultimately met their waterloo at the National Assembly. It is in this light that the contributions of Bukola Saraki, Yakubu Dogara and Ike Ekweremadu, and the tendencies they represent in the National Assembly, in frustrating Buhari’s land looting spree must be appreciated and recognized.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the overriding strategic objective of the Buhari Administration is the looting of indigenous peoples’ lands for the occupation and resettlement of Fulani herdsmen-terrorists drawn from all over Africa.

Critical observers have taken note that no sooner was the Waterways Bill frustrated in the National Assembly, than the Nigerian Police sensationally accused the Senate President Bukola Saraki of being the sponsor of the recent gruesome bank robberies at Offa, Kwara State which left scores of innocent citizens dead.

The proffered evidence? The confessions of the suspected criminals as being Saraki’s boys. Then the observation that one of the criminals attended Saraki’s daughter’s wedding. As well as the observation that one of the criminals was in Saraki’s entourage when Saraki paid a condolence visit to Offa town after the robberies.

Assuming all these observations are true, does that make Saraki the sponsor of the Offa robberies? No. The only thing that these observations prove, if they are factually correct, is that Saraki keeps very questionable company, period. Is keeping questionable company bad?Yes. Is it criminal? Not necessarily. Except it can be proven that Saraki bought weapons, handed them over to the robbers, mandated them to go and rob the banks, shielded the robbers from justice and crucially instructed them to render the proceeds of the robbery to him.

Critical observers have also taken note that in the wake of Saraki’s unfortunate ‘scape-goatism’, the Presidency thinking that they have got their target (i.e. Saraki) where they want him, boasted that they would push ahead with the Waterways Bill currently in the National Assembly.

Talking of keeping bad company, which politician in Nigeria does not keep bad company? Name one. You cannot be a politician in Nigeria without keeping bad company, knowingly or unknowingly. Politicians are like magnets, they attract both the good and the bad. That is why ‘reputational risk’-averse people do not venture into Nigerian politics. Even Nigeria’s acknowledged Mr. Integrity, keeps very bad company – the Fulani herdsmen terrorists who have killed and are still killing innocent Nigerians as I write.

Not only does Mr. Integrity associate with the Fulani herdsmen terrorists, he shields them from justice, refuses to label them as terrorists and attempts to use his position and authority to loot the lands of the Indigenous Peoples of Nigeria on their behalf. If guilt by association has become a crime in Nigeria, Mr. Integrity should be the very first to be indicted, impeached and relieved of his position.

As a writer-citizen, I have experienced and agitated against all sorts of errant Administrations in Nigeria with my pen. From the Sani Abacha Administration for his brutality, to the Olusegun Obasanjo Administration for his unconstitutional Third Term bid, to the Goodluck Jonathan Administration for turning a blind eye to corruption. The present Buhari Administration is the worst of all. Every evil identified in the named previous administrations,is present in this one, either in actuality or in potentiality, and much worse. Nigerians deserve far much better than this.By the Grace of the Ever-Living God, the Buhari Administration will be kicked out.