When I arrived home from office early in the week and told my wife that the N20 Billion which the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the then Sanusi Lamido Sanusi insisted was missing from the government vaults and for which he was sent on suspension was said to have been traced to Zenith Bank Plc, she screamed: “it is a lie!”
In quick succession, I told her that General Muhammadu Buhari’s certificate which the Nigerian Army declared missing during the campaign for the 2015 election had been found, she exclaimed again: “it is a lie!”
It is not impossible that any other sane person that hears about the incredible news would react the same way, especially so soon after the election which the victim of the so-called certificate-gate, General Buhari won and long after the victim of executive brigandage, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi ascended the throne of his ancestors as Emir of Kano.
With these two unfortunate incidences, in addition to many others that might be in the offing, one is even hard put to ask a question: what type of country is Nigeria? Or, in other words, what type of leaders have Nigeria been saddled with all this while? Or, more appropriately, what type of system is Nigeria operating that breeds this kind of weird leadership?
Corruption and impunity have so permeated the society that no one, not even our leaders are ashamed of the bizarre nature of what they are doing. For, is it not a shame that just a few days after General Buhari won the election, the leadership came through the backdoor to announce that the N20 Billion has been found? One imagines if it was President Goodluck Jonathan that won the election: it is most likely that no one would have come up with the truth: that the money is there somewhere intact. And on top of it all, such falsehood and criminality would have thrown the integrity of the now Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II into jeopardy. The N20 Billion would have ended up in private pockets!
It is unfortunate that unnecessary religious, ethnic or regional and class sentiments have been played up for long, by the outgoing government, so much that many Nigerians were hoodwinked to think that the government enemies were made up of certain group belonging to other religious, ethnic or regional and class blocs.
Indeed, when the issue of missing money from the account of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was first mooted out by Sanusi Lamido, I was one of those who believed that there was element of truth in the allegation. My point of recourse was the fact that Sanusi Lamido had, before then, proved to be a gentleman who was committed to clean business of running the Nigerian financial resources: if you take a look at how he sanitized the banking sector and other financial institutions, you may understand my mood then.
Indeed, if President Jonathan had been on the same page with my thought and he was honest about pursuing the truth, he probably would have allowed Sanusi Lamido to carry on with investigation or asked an independent body to do the investigation.
But, because, as always, the forces that were in charge were so powerful, they led the President to throw the baby away with the bath tube.
Often times when you are on the side of the truth, especially in this kind of country, you are branded as ‘opposition’ and get treated with a lot of scorns. But, like the Bible says: “Truth will always set you free.”
While it is not too late for President Jonathan to render public apology to the present Emir of Kano who he so derided, downgraded and disgraced out of office as CBN governor and to appropriately punish whoever was or were behind this national shame, the same would also be said of the falsehood that was woven around the secondary school certificate of General Buhari, all in the name of politics.
The Nigeria Army, which Buhari served for years and rose through the ranks to become a Major-General, owes him public apology for not just embarrassing him, but driving the integrity of the force into the political mud, forgetting that power, on this earth is ephemeral and transient.
No one would have imagined that the men and women in uniform could have descended so low, obviously for the pot of porridge. Too bad this happened in Nigeria of our time. [myad]
