KEN UGBECHIE

As a Nigerian, are you not worried? Does your inward wrench not threaten to riot over the open show of shame by the nation’s two most illustrious(?) political parties? We have put up with political perfidy. We have endured tomfoolery and shenanigans unleashed on us by the nation’s political class including the military oligarchs but never has a whole nation been treated to such holocaust of hysteria as we have it now from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It is a weird matinee of inebriated thieves and robbers who have no sense of shame and whose self-worth and personal dignity have been traded for lucre and larcenous savagery.

Such open show of unvarnished shame over who looted what stands Nigeria out as a nation that has lost her sense of dignity. I had to pinch myself to be sure I am not in dreamland. Suddenly, we now have Looters’ Club of Nigeria, I mean an official list of looters. Looters’ lists are being compiled by looters themselves; something akin to a toad dismissing the frog as ugly, or the kettle calling the pot black. The APC has its own list of looters, all of them members of the PDP. The PDP countered with its own list of looters, all of them members of the APC. It is a combat between robbers and thieves.

Strangely, both the accuser and the accused still fraternize openly as free men, as lawmakers, ministers, governors, high net-worth citizens and as statesmen. Lai Mohammed, the minister of Information and culture was the first to treat Nigerians to the strange menu. He reeled off a list of supposedly vile men all of the PDP whom he accused of looting the national till in those days when PDP members were in office and held sway as though tomorrow would never come. But they forgot that time is always pregnant and right from its belly spews forth surprises and shocks. Time is a mysterious mistress, full of twists and turns. It can humble the proud; it can promote the humble. The PDP that boasted to remain in power for as long as they wanted underplayed the potency and treachery of time. For all their projections to bask in the brassy throne of power for as long as they wished, time could only permit them 16 years.

And it’s this 16 years that APC is bandying as the period of the nation’s sojourn in captivity for which they have come to set the captives free. This notion of being both correctional and redemptive is the reason APC is under pressure to deceive the people that it is actually fighting corruption. It’s not.

The Nigerian anti-corruptive chronicle is still same of same. The looting culture has been of old right from the days of the military goons. The only difference is that now in a democracy, we can ask questions; we can pry into affairs of the state. In the military era, it was not so. The jackboot was a symbol of power and oppression and nobody could ever dare. Those who dared got their fingers burnt. Till this day, no military man, serving or retired, has been able to explain to Nigerians what they did with the huge budgets of defence and agriculture, health and education.  The manifest achievement from our long years of military rule was that it produced a long list of money bags, men who became billionaires just by their passage through the military ranks, not by enterprise. Enough of the military.

The politicians seem to have produced over the years a master class handbook in looting. And they are bold-faced about it. No shame, no remorse. To them, looting public treasury is an entitlement, a prerogative of public office. This explains why APC and PDP can trade claims over looting. Both parties have their respective lists of looters and they are not ashamed to make a public show of it.

Yet, there is a halo of hypocrisy hanging over both parties. APC list contains only the names of extant PDP members but carefully precludes former PDP members now taking refuge in the fortress of APC. But Nigerians are not deceived. The difference between APC and PDP is the difference between thieves and robbers. How could the APC list of looters not contain the names of David Babachair Lawal, the disgraced ex-Secretary to the Government of Federation (SGF) who undertook a landmark grass-cutting exercise; how could it not have the name of Abdulraheed Maina, former Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms and the ministers serving in Buhari government who aided and abetted all the misdeeds associated with him?  Why should the APC list avoid the names of the thieving clan of politicians, some of them ex-PDP members, who bankrolled Buhari’s campaign and election? There are too many wrongs in the wisdom of APC to compile a list of looters without first clearing the cluster of cobweb in its closet.

The PDP comes with an equal measure of hypocrisy. By pointing at ex-members of the party now fully nestled in the bosom of the APC as corrupt men, PDP, ipso facto, admits that indeed it is a party of looters. PDP argument is not that its members are not looters but that ex-looters within its fold have joined the APC with their loot which they used to further the political trajectory of a broke Buhari. In this case, nobody wins the argument. The accuser is as guilty as the accused.

But the loser in this game of robbers versus thieves is Nigeria. The nation loses. The people are starved of development, they are robbed of their future when all they could see around them are lists of looters, looters who ought to be in jail after forfeiting all their illicit dainties but who end up wielding more political powers and stalking the political space with swashbuckling aristocratic gait.

Another big loser in this anti-corruption blitz is President Muhammadu Buhari. It is not in doubt that he may have set out to fight corruption genuinely but he must have realized how impossible it is with the type of hangers-on around him.  You cannot preach anti-corruption when you are surrounded by persons of questionable character; men and women whose aggregate financial worth exceed by far all their legitimate entitlements in their public life and service.

And here is the deal; neither APC nor PDP can offer Nigeria good leadership; no not with their present configuration. A third force has become inevitable and imperative at this time. Such third force must be all-inclusive, young, focused and willing to stand up for what it believes. It must be willing and ready to wrench power from the present crop of geriatrics who have nothing new anymore to offer except flaunting list of looters.