October 18, 2000
Ever since July 17, 2000, when the Kuta panel was instituted to probe contracts in the Senate of the Nigerian National Assembly, that body has been paralyzed with claims and counter-claims.
For three months now, while these senators have been paid their sumptuous salaries and allowances, they have done practically nothing to ease the pains of our suffering people, their constituents, other than throw brick-bats at each other and defend themselves and each other from one accusation or the other.
Chuba Okadigbo has given way to Pius Anyim as President of the Senate, and the leadership of the Senate has been swept clean, except for one or two cobwebs that have returned.
The House of Assembly is also catching the same disease, with daily calls for self-probe, and with Speaker Na'Abba and Deputy Nwuche on the hot seat.
Like in the Senate, there are suits and counter-suits in our law courts, with no end in sight. On top of all of this, the indefatigable and mischievous Francis Arthur Nzeribe, "enfant terrible" of the Senate and member of the Kuta panel, has instigated the Inspector-General Musiliu Smith of Olowogbowo to call in 61 National Assembly members for a "chat" over Nzeribe's direct charges of corruption stemming from the controversial Kuta report.
61 top legislators out of 109 senators, or a total or 569 National Assembly legislators are a lot of legislators, when you add that each one would have one or more supporters in the wings barking for blood!
The speed with which Nzeribe's charge was answered by the police with an invitation to "chat" raises an eyebrow of executive interference - but this is neither here nor there, if in fact the invitation is constitutional.
Certainly, no legislator is above the law and should be callable to chat. Nevertheless, natural justice and dignity of office - the little there is - demand that there be well-established "prima facie" reason for such an invitation, and wisdom demands that the benefits of such a direct (and possibly humiliating) action be balanced with the costs of paralyzing legislative activity, and destroying executive-legislative amity which is so badly needed.
To every action, wisdom demands that the reaction be assessed.
This leads me to wonder: if the suspicion is of legislative corruption, why does not the Auditor-General of the Federation do his job and move in to do a THOROUGH AUDIT of both the House and the Senate once and for all, and let the chips fall where they may?
Would that not be acting more thoroughly than the earlier two-day PROBE done that seemed to have triggered off the Senate probe?
Could the Auditor-General not then next move to the Executive arm, starting from the presidency and move to the Federal Ministries and other parastatals?
Why must there be insistence that the Police talk with the Senators at this stage, when the Executive arm that should establish a prima facie case for financial impropriety - that is the Auditor-General's office - has not done so?
Certainly, that office did not ask for further criminal prosecution after its earlier two-day probe, and could, after a more thorough one, ask for one later on if there is justification for it. After all, despite all the hype, what the Kuta probe basically established in the Senate was the number of contracts, the contract type and amount, the contractors, whether each contract was by open tender or not, and their status of completion.
Corruption stemming from the contract amount (whether inflated or not), the contractors (whether there was conflict of interest or not), the tender situation (this merely throws up suspicion if majority is not by open tender) and differences in reported completion status can best be established by eagle-eyed PROFESSIONALS of the auditor-general's office, not by colleague-politicians with possibly many axes to grind.
In the meantime, one would hope that in the midst of all of these shenanigans, there is a group of individuals working out an iron-clad "modus operandi" for initiating, awarding, executing and monitoring projects and contracts THROUGHOUT our government system that would shield legislators, executive members, civil servants, contractors and the Nigerian public from these constant accusations of bribery and corruption.
One just feels that this systemic approach of solving our perennial corruption problem is not being properly addressed, rather there is constant fighting for turf, a "gotcha" mentality and calls for vengeance, all leading to general governmental logjam and restlessness by the masses, leading to occasional violence on our streets.
Quite honestly, I just don't understand why we make life so difficult for ourselves in that our dear country.
It just makes one's scalp to bleed occasionally as one scratches it in wonderment.
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