A country where crime and corruption are rife is always thought to have reached its threshold until something else happens to disprove that fact and prove that such a country has a bottomless and, in fact, fathomless capacity to absorb the absurd and the abhorrent.
In the last week, the patience of Nigerians has been severely tested by some truly absurd drama involving the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC). It took the docking of Adeniyi Adeyemi, its so-called Director General, for the lid to come off the can of worms.
While Adeyemi has insisted that the council had the imprimatur of the presidency, the presidency has branded Adeyemi a generational scammer who has perpetrated a heinous heist against Nigerians.
The presidency has said the PFIC is fake and that Adeyemi forged an appointment letter from the Nigerian government.
The billion-dollar question many Nigerians are, however, wrestling with is how on earth a so-called fake or non-existent agency, as the case may be, bypassed the supposed strictures and structure of Nigeria’s budgeting to win for itself a large piece of the national cake to the tune of 1.3 billion Naira?
In a country where truth is easily stranger than fiction, stranger things could still happen, but for now everything about this case stinks of corruption at the highest levels of the Nigerian government.
It also Indicates that Nigeria is hardly a serious country. While Nigeria struggles for funds to fund its campaign against terrorists as well as pull more than half of its population out of humiliating poverty, scammers seemingly have more than enough to reward and fund their schemes because a country has made the catastrophic mistake of asking thieves to watch over its coffers.
It bespeaks the alarming gaps in the Nigerian system that one person would conceive a scheme of such proportions, set it up, and siphon public funds running into over a billion Naira before being found out.
Since the scandal became public knowledge, brickbats have flown ceaselessly between the presidency and the camp of Mr. Adeyemi. In any serious country, heads should already be rolling.
In any country that puts the sensibilities of its citizens above the siren of schemers and scammers, such scandalous evidence of official dereliction should already prompt a flurry of resignations and prosecutions. However, while the federal government has been swift to hang Adeyemi out to dry, it has forged a shield of steel around high-ranking government officials who clearly were involved in the scam.
Rather than constituting an independent and impartial investigation to rid the presidency of those who would fleece Nigeria dry, a hastily assembled prosecution against Mr. Adeyemi at the Federal High Court is being used as a sword by both Adebiyi and the presidency to deflect further queries from curious and weary Nigerians.
A government that condones the actions and activities of those who do not set their store by transparency or accountability is well a government of thieves and brigands. Such a government exists only to feather private nests.
Just like the damage done by Fulani herdsmen who drive their cows through Nigeria’s rural communities, stoking conflict and carnage, Nigeria continues to fatten sacred cows in its corridors of power. Because these cows provide milk and meat for Nigeria’s power mongers who feast while the masses they are supposed to serve starve, no one seems able to touch them.
Kene Obiezu is a lawyer and writer.
