The list of public servants who have fallen under the president’s hammer is growing into a long list.
The strike of the hammer, a “partial fulfillment” of the president’s electoral promise to clean the Augean Stable, serves as an obituary notice of those men and women, gamekeepers, appointed by power to protect our collective game, barns, harvests and to make the rest of us happy, if not happier, by delivering on the terms of their appointments, but who end up as poachers and killers of joy and happiness.
There is that other aspect for which any subsequent action taken by the president would be seen as the “final fulfillment” of his electoral promise.
It is common knowledge that the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption headed by Professor Itse Sagay is currently working to shape the framework of that promise, and sooner, if the present strike of the hammer points to what is to come, there shall be the gnashing of teeth, breaking of eggs to make omelettes for citizens who demand the cleaning of the Augean Stable.
Surely, there will be no limit to the number of eggs that will be broken. There will be no escape for those who privatize the commonwealth, who live off the labour, toils, sweats and blood of the masses of our people, who hurl up criminal values that are incompatible with the nobler society and who will be remembered for the infelicities of our age. The hammer strike is karmic- only the impure of hearts will pay for their sins!
A few days ago seventeen permanent secretaries were sacked. No reason was given for the sack, but the speculation was that they were sacked because they did not demonstrate commitment to the moral basis of the new change.
A mild way of saying that the permanent secretaries did not distinguish what was Caesar’s from what was theirs. They cornered what was Caesar’s. The refusal to distinguish what belonged to Caesar from what was theirs, or accept that breaking eggs in order to serve omelettes to the greatest number is what modern public service is all about, lies at the heart of the culture of impunity that has reigned for too long.
A few days before the sack, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Lamorde, was relieved of his duties.
Coming on the heels of Lamorde’s sack, the National Judicial Commission (NJC) announced the dismissal of Justice Lambo Akanbi of the Port-Harcourt Division of the Federal High Court over allegation that he collected one hundred million naira to facilitate the judicial removal of twenty-two Chairmen of local councils in Rivers state.
While Justice Akanbi was publicly named and shamed, the suspicion is that Lamorde fell under the president’s hammer because of the damaging allegation of impropriety and the improper handling of monies recovered from DSP Alamieyeseigha.
The allegation against Lamorde as far as I am aware is what it is: an unproven allegation. But there is no smoke without fire, as they say in this part. While Lamorde can be given the benefit of doubt, there is a sense in which truth emerges like the smoke billowing from the fireplace.
It is needless to search for the fireplace when the poor conduct of public servants undermines public trust. The point I make, here, isn’t about negotiating the line that separates innocence from guilt, but it is also about appreciating how the wrongness of crime is established and punishment is served as an example to the rest of society.
That the corrupt judge was found out, for instance, highlights two incontrovertible facts: first, that our governance environment can only be cleansed when individuals, who, think that they personify our state institutions and the rule-based system, turn the public realms into their private estates, are shown the way out.
Ask His Lordship! Second, that those who infringe public service rules are disciplined not only by established rules of behaviour but by the discipline of authority. And for others that power keeps on its good sides, they are disciplined when they fall from its good sides! Ask Lamorde.
However, in this new era of change, we must guide against naked power and vigilante justice.
Public service is a call to duty, to serve the public rather than being served by the public. There is something Promethean about our public servants who reject the appointed order and work government in a manner that guarantees them benefits good governance would ordinarily gifts citizens and ordinary folks.
For this tribe, sufferings are the inescapable lot of we, the people and not they, servants of the public, who feed fat on public resources, who appoint or elect them as custodians of our collective trust.
It is from this contractual relationship of appointment and election good and service proceed, we gauge the moral worth of public actions, that the fullest potentials of citizens can be achieved.
The extraordinary dynamic between public and service is what our public servants deny, in the sense in which they take service out of the public, and replace it with the self and the personal, game the system, and neutralize internal framework, so they can steal or CHOP AND CLEAN MOUTH.
The struggle over juicy committees in the House of Representatives is a sad example of how service has been hollowed out of the public in our country. Can the president hammer service back into our public? Will the discipline of authority or what many have rightly termed the body language of the president return our public servants to serving the people for the good of our nation?
There are good public servants in our public service and there are many others outside the public service who diligently and conscientiously serve our homeland, who shed tears for us when we weep and who carry the burden of building a just, humane and egalitarian nation that we all carry.
We must promote these good public servants as exemplars of what is good in us as a nation of people.
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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
Article written by Abdul Mahmud
