It is near pointless to have to state that if that organ trafficking case had happened in Nigeria, Ekweremadu would never have been investigated, let alone incarcerated.
By ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN
Nigeria is up to its eyeballs with issues of insecurity that it feels like the dark days of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, when terrorists were running amok in the country. Since the government has appeared ineffective in almost every aspect, we have turned to seeking help from abroad. From churches to political gatherings, Nigerians are asking the US president to come and save them. Since the instruments of administering justice at home are no longer trustworthy, they take foreign intervention as providential. On the one hand, international scrutiny is forcing our leaders to do some self-accounting. On the other hand, the interest is also raising the stakes for the bandits who—keenly aware of their notorious international reputation—seem to be taking advantage of the moment to ramp up their global profile.
Amid the mayhem in a country being consumed by angst, our government’s priority is to see convicted former Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, repatriated to Nigeria from a prison in the UK where he is serving a sentence. So urgent is this desire that the Bola Tinubu government sent a delegation led by Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, and the minister of something called justice, Lateef Fagbemi, to meet UK Ministry of Justice officials. It might look separate from the issue of insecurity, but what connects that mission to our present chaotic condition is this characteristically Nigerian attitude of never being able to punish because nobody is disciplined enough to confidently enforce standards.
Nigeria is being overtaken by bandits who put machine guns to the heads of poor villagers and force them to sign “peace deals”. We allegedly have a commander in chief, but in some rural communities right now, some bandit leaders are busy assuming sovereignty over territories and daring our leaders. Their impudence is a consequence of the years of tolerating lawlessness through negotiations and appeasements. Rather than stand up to them, politicians advocated “amnesty”, sponsored foreign education, and cash transfers to bandits who had long passed their stage of reformability. All the years of wantonness by our negligent leaders have culminated in an untamable monstrosity that now insists on a power-sharing formula with them. The bandits and their fellow terrorists are the bastard children bred by the incestuous marriage of a weak state and its morally spineless leaders.
That same attitude of inability to punish manifests in even supposedly minor issues, where people who should be punished for offences are appointed as ambassadors for the very cause they violated! On the rare occasion that a politician is convicted of corruption, they are quick to issue a presidential pardon to free the person of any residual shame. We pretend it is rehabilitation, but it merely expresses our lack of confidence in enforcing standards.
It is near pointless to have to state that if that organ trafficking case had happened in Nigeria, Ekweremadu would never have been investigated, let alone incarcerated. In fact, it is the small fry who dared to tackle the powerful man who would be marinating in his own bodily juices in some cold and dirty cell somewhere after the police had beaten the life out of him. We are not a society that can be said to have a strong sense of what constitutes justice, and Tinubu—a characteristically weak-willed leader—is not helping. He is slowed down by his heavy burden of illegitimacy, which contributes to his lack of leadership self-confidence. It is not merely that Tinubu feels some shame about how he is perceived as the very personification of corruption in contemporary Nigeria, but the perception also makes him indecisive on matters on which he should be standing on his two feet. He cannot speak boldly about lax standards and corrupted procedures without the irony blowing back in his face. It makes him weak, spineless, and elastically tolerant of the nonsense that should not be heard of among a leadership class that wants to be taken seriously.