The Nigerian Senate is reputed to be the most expensive legislative institution of the state. They produce little but are rewarded abominably! Concerned Nigerians (including the radical presidential candidate of the AAC, Comrade Omoyele Sowore) are calling for the scrapping of the upper and lower legislative chambers. The huge resources invested in maintaining the two parliament should ordinarily be channeled towards other developmental needs of the nation.
The Senate and the House of Representatives are notorious for the outlandish emolument and other constituency projects shelled out by the federal government for their maintenance. We would not be party to the call for the abrogation of the parliament were the members stellar in their performances, formulating laws that make governance effective or efficient.
Nigeria, given the present dire circumstances, does not need two legislative institutions gulping fiscal resources of the state yet we are hardly making any progress in our quest for national greatness. In the upper legislative chamber (Senate) you have all sort of criminal characters, charlatans et al, working hard to defraud the system. You have retired conmen, retired drug barons and addicts, thieves and looters. You have got those seeking immunity from economic and political crimes committed while serving themselves as Governors, Ministers and First Ladies or concubines.
The Labour Party presidential candidate in next year’s general election, Peter Obi, recently delivered a scathing remark about our national political condition. Speaking eloquently as a guest in the Men of Valour conference organised by the Revival House of International Church (RHOGIC) in Abuja Obi lambasted his fellow politicians, describing some of them as lunatics that have taken over the asylum!
He zeroed in on the stolen 80 billion Naira by the arrested Accountant-General of the federation, Ahmed Idris. The former Anambra State Governor made it clear that Nigerian politicians steal what they do not need in a lifetime likening it to ‘sickness’. Of course, many politicians in our clime are sick. They worship money and do everything, including committing murder or paying allegiance to Lucifer, to acquire power through which illicit funds flow.
The LP presidential hopeful could not have put it more aptly or succinctly by describing the politicians ruining our collective lives as ‘lunatics’ running an ‘asylum’ that is Nigeria. The man from Anambra who may be President is good at calling a spade by no other name. Nigeria is the only country, as the late heroic winner of the June 12 1993 presidential poll, Bashorun MKO Abiola, had put it then, where those who had never managed any thing productive or innovative in their entire lives suddenly become leaders by coup d’etat or connections in high places. Or through ethnic or religious or regional favouritism or cronyism.
Our system is broken because politicians are criminally serving themselves to the detriment of the general good and national interest. But there is hope for a better future if Nigerians (especially the youths) decide to take back our abused country by organizing an electoral revolution, come February 2023, that would send our oppressors to their early retirement.
Senator Ike Ekweremadu was recently in the news globally for shameful reasons. The Specialist Crime Team of the Metropolitan Police in London had dutifully arrested the Enugu-born former Deputy Senate President and his wife, Beatrice, in the British capital city. The couple were apprehended at the Heathrow Airport in London en route to Istanbul in Turkey. They were accused of conspiring to bring a child from Nigeria, a 15-year-old boy named Ukpo Nwamini David, to harvest his organ! The teenager was promised a better life!
Senator Ekweremadu was arrested with $20,000 cash in his possession which had been seized by the British authorities.
They were charged to court reportedly with conspiracy to arrange or facilitate the travel of another person with the aim of exploitation, namely organ harvesting. And remanded in prison custody pending the final determination and conclusion of the matter in weeks to come. The court learnt that Ekweremadu’s daughter had been battling with kidney failure and had been on dialysis for a while and needed a kidney transplant. So, the boy was brought in to give one of his kidneys to the daughter!
The prosecutors told the court that the former Deputy Senate President procured a passport for the boy and claimed he was 21 years old but it was discovered that he was just 15 years old!
The questions then arise: did the boy know in detail the ‘deal’ he was involved in? How much millions of Naira was he promised as reward for the donation of his kidney? Were his parents back home in Nigeria aware of the ‘deal’ and the journey to Turkey?
The organ harvest scandal is one that brought shame and opprobrium to a nation struggling to right the wrongs of a Buharian presidential pestilence. Yesterday we heard how Hushpuppi and the incarcerated ‘super-cop’ nay super criminal, Abba Kyari were invoved in billions of Dollars internet scam. Daily Nigerians are being arrested for cyber fraud or cocaine trafficking! We are regaled about prostitution rings around major cities in Europe. And how baby factories exist and how much a boy-child or a girl-child is sold to those in need of same!
Yet it must be admitted as a fact that the Senator from the coal-city state is not the first politician or parliamentarian to be enmeshed in a national, nay international, scandal abroad. Way back in 2016 three Nigerian lawmakers who travelled to the United States were accused of sexual sequestration. A member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, Hon. Mohammed Gololo Garba representing Gamawa Federal Constituency of Bauchi State in the House of Representatives, the PDP ‘s Hon. Samuel Okon Ikon representing Etinan/Nsit Ibom/Nsit Ubium Federal Constituency of Akwa Ibom State and Hon. Mark Terseer Gbillah, representing Gwer East/Gwer West Federal Constituency of Benue State in the House were involved in the sex scandal.
Besides, two former Governors, the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa and James Ibori of Delta states, were once arrested and convicted for theft and money laundering in London. Alams died an ex-convict though he had been post-humously pardoned by the state. Ibori still grandstands as the ‘leader’ of the PDP in Delta state despite his history of fiscal larceny and other sundry economic crimes against the oil-rich state.
Senator Ekweremadu must assume the consequences of his abominable action. If found guilty he must be jailed to serve as a deterrent to other executive criminals using their filthy lucre to make their lives and those of their families better. And upon his return to Nigeria the man must be arrested and charged for the same offense.
Citizen David Ukpo is lucky to have survived what amounts to an arranged kidney transplant for a fee. He may have been promised a better life after succumbing to the Senator’s arrangement whose detail he may not have known. Now that he is in London his life may never be the same again.
What Ekweremadu and his family promised him may have been gotten legitimately through divine, nay British, intervention.
SOC Okenwa
soco_abj_2006_rci@hotmail.fr
