USA Africa Dialogue Series - On Brother Buhari’s second term against corruption…

Expectations are great! But, realistically, heaven is not to be found on this planet, heaven is on another planet/ loka

I don't know how you feel when you read that $1 trillion was looted in Nigeria between 1960 and 2005 ! And what about the period 2005 – 2015 when the price of Bonny Light was at its highest height? Has there been any justice done? If that kind of money had been channeled into national development probably, no Nigerian of today would be drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, on the way to a future life in Europe, there would have been nothing like a brain drain and Nigerian presidents and their wives along with the rest of Nigerian citizenry would not be flying to Europe and to India for medical attention or for life prolongation treatments…

On the whole,  except for the most corrupt sons and daughters of the soil (and some sons of bitches) the rest of the Naija nation would like to see Brother Buhari wipe out transgression (fetid corruption) and we know that it's not only corruption in the highest echelons, politicians getting kick-backs, clientelism, bank managers seizing peoples' hard earned cash and so on; we know that there is now a culture of corruption that permeates some of our African nations from the  top to the bottom.

The late Ahmad Tejan Kabbah preached against it and in more recent times it's still rampant, more than that, it's uncontrolled, and the corrupt ones now "bloom like grass."  

Considering its effects on national development the corruption ratings in the world league is alarming, robbing whole nations of their potentials for a better future. It's out of such concern that Comrade Mugabe (a Roman Catholic) could ask a rhetorically meaningful question such as, "Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach your pocket to get anything done?" – a question which seems to have angered the most innocent of Nigerians…

So, it's a matter of wiping out the culture of impunity that's now part of the warp and woof of some of our African societies – at least at the cosmopolitan level. Teju Cole himself tells us that for those flying in, it starts at the airport – just as it started for me arriving for the first time in Port Harcourt in February 1981, at a time when Nigeria and Cameroon were on a war footing  over Bakassi:

1. Unfortunately, perhaps because I was wearing a suit since I had left a wintry Stockholm, via a wintry London,  it must have been the suit that gave the impression to the porter at the airport that I must be loaded with money, and that's why I lost my whole packet of cigarette's to the first airport worker who asked me for one  - I gave him one and to my surprise  he took the packet from my hand  - but I was not about to start an argument about ownership , not after kissing the tarmac at Port Harcourt Airport just  like Pope John Paul II, except that for me, I was kissing and  thinking " home again!"

2. There was a mad stampede to get through immigration and customs , so I decided not to join the mob and was therefore the last passenger out  - when they opened  the suitcase  of the guy right in front of me  - the suitcase was full of weapons, guns, automatic carbines – as a result of which I found myself lying flat on the floor  when pandemonium broke loose and I feared that there might even be an exchange of gunfire …

I might as well add

      3. A few weeks later walking from Anan Lodge to the MaryAnn Hotel  I was detained at the downtown roundabout on Aba Road, suspected of  being a Cameroonian "Spy" , since my  best  Nigerian Broken English was adjudged as corresponding (roughly speaking ) not with the Naija Broken , but with Cameroonian Broken. I was probably saved by Mallah who was then Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly - a friend and faithful Scrabble companion - had interceded on my behalf  - it was at about midnight  and he happened to have been driving past – no doubt on one of his nocturnal prowls ,  but I had refused to jump into his car because the Police Officer in question had told him that he was detaining me because I had called him  a " black monkey"  which as you know, yours truly could never have said when in fact my own mother is blacker than him  - and who knows the colour of our Heavenly Father? The Quran asks in Surah al Baqarah, Ayat 138: "We take our colour from Allah, and who is better than Allah at colouring?" So I refused to jump in to Mallah's car until the police officer apologized  and to my distress, Mallah drove off and left me there – to the tender mercies of the police officer who probably was only fishing for a bribe – but he didn't get any.  By dawn I had converted him (Sunday) to Pan- Africanism and we had become best friends. In fact he invited me to the party for Sani Abacha at the officers mess, in early December 1983 – a few weeks before the 31^st December 1983 coup  - yes  the master-mind coup plotter Sani Abacha must have been down to Port Harcourt for the sole purpose of  coordinating things  and I was thinking about this  when I read  the errant Adepoju's claim that "SANI ABACHA BECAME NIGERIA'S HEAD OF STATE THROUGH A COUP RULING FROM 1983 TO 1985"

And now, from the anecdotal to what may sound like a radical proposition:  The Death Penalty for certain kinds of corruption - or better still, a Lifetime of hard labour at e.g. some agricultural station, some road building, and heavy construction labour…

Like Danny Glover, I'm morally opposed to the ordinary death penalty, but these are very extenuating circumstances when you have a whole nation hemorrhaging because of corruption- with-impunity and in some nations the commanders-in-chief being accused of being commander-in-thief

So the death penalty could serve as a deterrent to pernicious corruption! It's the sort of punishment that could instill the fear of the Almighty in some of the mighty – the mightily corrupt whose corruption is to the detriment of the shuffering and shmiling masses…

No sooner said than done. Should Brother Buhari thus maximize the punishment for corruption by raising certain forms of it to the level of treasonable acts, in no time at all some of the hack writers and some people in this forum who I choose not to name, will be raising the hue and cry that the Brother is a dictator – even if the death penalty is legislated into law, not by decree but by due democratic process of legislation…

 There are those who say "peace always" and probably don't want a war against corruption

 Consider these recent lines by Tomas Tranströmer:

"I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

       "We do not surrender. But want peace."

Could well be, we do not want corruption, we want peace…

Cornelius

We Sweden

 

 

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