When the news of the passing away of the erstwhile Governor of Bayelsa-state, DSP Alamieyeseigha filtered in, it came abruptly as a shocking news, interrupting the peaceful flow of an apparently tranquil Saturday evening.
For minutes, it remained a difficulty to get the information settled in, given the fact that it wasn’t too long ago that Ibe held him on TV, gyrating with other Bayelsa-state PDP faithfuls, at the selection ceremony of the Party’s current gubernatorial flag-bearer, Mr.Seriake Dickson.
When the news finally found a place in my subconscious, several questions immediately began to fight for space in my mind. Amidst the encircling thoughts, one was principal, one that continued to hit at the emptiness of man’s mortal rat race to acquire all that he does not need, onlyto exit the stage like a snake that has just glided across a mountain with nothing to celebrate.
Amongst these questions, the principal query was, “Whatis it with life that ordinary men, mere creations who came from dust will continue to misbehave, thinking they can buy the entire world, only if they steal more?”.
It cannot be gainsaid that the country Nigeria is where she is today, because of the night business ventures, and the criminal enterprise of the likes of Alamieyeseigha and his other comrades in the political class, who from independence have deployed every opportunity given them, to murder the sleep of an infant nation, causing her to be severely dehumanised, turning her into a rickety nation for their own pleasure, and criminally impoverishing their fellow citizens, where in turn they have caused millions of Niger-Deltans to become slaves in their country and thousands of harmless northerners to be rendered IDPs in territories that they should ordinarily call their home.
These wicked men who continue to manipulate the levers of power have, and still continue to shatter the record books of stealing, by embezzling billions of naira that should go into providing social amenities, stockpiling it both home and abroad through their legion of greedy businessmen allies and coterie of political contractors, building mansions on the graves of those they had murdered in their primitive accumulation of wealth, only to start running from pillar to post trying to escape the law, not knowing that even if they escape from every other thing, their wealth does not have the muscle to buy them any escape from death.
These are men who at every nook and cranny are celebrated as the stars of the society, buying up awards from far and near, while at the same time becoming the toast of leading Newspapers, who endlessly shower them with the now notorious “Man of the Year” award,even when as Lilliputians, they remain nothing but nobodies before Jehovah God.T
o please this class of men, some have even taken the infirmity to the next level by deeming it fit to add the prefix “Golden”, to the so-called”Man of the Year”, to produce what they call, “Golden Man of the Year”, all in a generation where it has now become fashionable to find the Gold medal dangling on the neck of even pigs.
These fellow inmates in the prison-yard of greed have seen no shame and destruction in why they must lend themselves as RPGs in the hand of the devil, while also continually competing amongst themselves to get first team shirt in the Football team called,”Rise & Fall FC”.
These are Men whose humanity died a long time ago, and whose mortality no longer has what it takes to leave any meaningful mark in the sands of time. They are the dictionary meaning of corruption andhave become synonyms for the word greed and insanity.
After all, anywhere one finds greed, one can be sure that insanity will only be a stone’s throw away,except that as it is the rule of life, death must inevitably emerge as the Referee to settle the quarrel between the greed of men and their insanity.
The death of DSP Alamieyeseigha and the peculiar mess of the Nigerian political class must move us to press those hard questions that many consistently choose not to ask, and draw those painful connections that others would rather refrain from.
Assuming for a minute, that we try to delete the sad memories of Military rule from our reverie, has our experience since the so-called return to Civil rule not been a case of simply transporting ourselves from the frying pan into the fire?
Since 1999, nearly if not all of those who have held political office across all political parties,alongside their other accomplices in the Military, the Police, and in all other Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government at the Federal, State and Local government level, have all conspired to plunder Nigeria to ruins, causing the people avoidable pain and misery.
Much of the history of the 4th republic, has largely been one of a long and blind amorphous struggle between the people’s hopes, and the greed of their leaders, all accompanied by its swirls, stagnancy, and vicissitudes; a struggle in which the people have been made to suffer as permanent victims. It has been a dispensation too unheroic and inconsequential to bear any telling.
Thus, from Osun to Akwa Ibom, from Borno to Rivers, from Plateau to Delta, from Niger to Oyo, and from Kwara to Enugu, it has been looting unlimited and stealing incorporated.
As the stealing boom grew,the country also continued in her free fall to ground zero, losing greatly in any sort of imaginative force, having been rendered the ATM of her drunk and erratic leaders who remained lost in their quest for material comfort and multiply personal amusements.
The last 16 years has been a vicious circle, where as these members of the political class, who are only just privileged to be in leadership are rewarded with one office after the other, moving from one party to the next,their greed is the more quickened while in return the remnant of their humanity is further mortified.
It became so bad,that by the beginning of 2015, the nation was already tottering dangerously on the precipice, with the Nigerian political class having become a terrible figure of reptilian fascination and of very slippery elusiveness when it comes to making personal sacrifices for the common good or advancing any sensible nationalistic idea. For these wicked ones, they would rather that the people eat from the dustbin, than they losing a penny from their multitude of fat allowances. Yet they still kept stealing tons and tons of money.
Perhaps now we can press those hard questions and these are questions which must include the following – Why will just one person, in a strange and bizarre move, steal so much money, money running into billions of British pounds, something that ordinarily would have been enough to fund all public universities in the country to world-class standard for the next 10 years, only because she is crazy about shoes and bags?Why will that same person spend a staggering 10billion naira just to charter private jets in a year, when the same 10billion would have been enough to complete the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway?
What did she need in life that she did not get, given her bogus salary as a Minister of Petroleum and other fat allowances that accrued to her office? What if Alamieyeseigha had taken a different path, the path of honour and dignity and spent the billions he looted,to develop Bayelsa state and worked tirelessly towards changing the lives of his people for the better, even when he may not have had more than one house,wouldn’t he have been better celebrated both in life and in death?
What if Alamieyeseigha’s loot, that was again looted by those charged with its safe-keep, had been spent on all Nigerian Teaching Hospitals, wouldn’t we have saved the hundreds of lives that keep dying every-day in our Hospitals, from the simplest of ailments, and perhaps save Alamieyeseigha himself from the jaws of death?
What if the close to half of the State’s allocation that was stolen by Ibori in his 8years of kleptomaniac rule, was invested in massive infrastructural development of Delta-state, wouldn’t the average Deltan be better off today?
What if Tafa Balogun had judiciously spent the more than 17 billion naira that he looted, in further equipping the Nigeria Police, wouldn’t we today have far better policing and a more advanced security system,as against the current shameful state of affairs, where even the Police cannot secure its own Police station?
Apparently, there are so many ‘What. These are questions that are of such character, that they form a very long and
historically generated dirty list, a list that cannot be exhausted in any known article.
Viewed fastidiously and from a very critical angle, it would be seen that the Nigerian political class has prove’ dover and over again, that they are more comfortable repeating the country’ sugly past, than rewriting it.
That is why anytime any good man shows up to take radical steps aimed at repairing the country, the result of years of being a poor nation will quickly show forth, with many who are afraid of losing their ill-gotten wealth quickly masterminding different conspiracy theories from the angles of ethnicity, religion, and pure mischief, to frustrate the drive towards a better country. With the departure of Alamieyeseigha, we require anew jurisprudence that would be geared towards arresting the affliction of thepolitical class, the kind of affliction which continually cause them to stealso much and die with it.
While we commiserate with the people of Bayelsa on their loss, we must pray that the Lord causes his family to be strong and help them find comfort at this time and as at when due.
We must however not also fail to stress that, at least for the right-minded ones that are still remaining, it is only trite to say that Alamieyeseigha’s death must provoke what I call, ‘both retroactive and future rebuke and reflections’, in the minds of the many others who still continue to submit themselves as tools for the plundering of the nation. We must not equally fail to hope that the necessary lessons will be learnt, lessons that will help stem this profession of heavy stealing, which consistently produces a regime of political thugs,cronyism, and the use of offices to share political power and the national cake through corrupt and pre bendal institutions.
As closing remarks, we must remain watchful, and hope that the next breaking news won’t be that the UK Police has again arrested some Government officials from his state, who were caught while trying to escape to the UK with another set of billions budgeted to Alamieyeseigha’s burial.
As a footnote, let us set this reminder, that whether someone successful escapes from the UK disguised as a dead body, or another refuses to leave the self imprisonment of his villa so as not to be extradited to a faraway country for trial, surely and notwithstanding the many tricks of men,there will always be that Referee called death, to separate men, their greed,and their insanity.
———————
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Olusola Adegbite,Esq. is a Lecturer inthe Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
