There lived a vain Emperor as reported in ancient stories whose only worry was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed his dress almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people. Two scoundrels had heard about the Emperor’s vanity and took advantage of him by posing to be good tailors who could weave clothes that look invincible. In fact it is invincible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality. As it is customary for the Emperor to show off his new clothes to his people, a gala was organised to show off the new dress to the people just weaved by the two tailors. For any person not to have seen the Emperor in his new dress that person must have been a stupid and an incompetent person and so unworthy of his office or status. So to avoid that stigma, everybody pretended to have seen the Emperor in his new dress amidst tremendous applause.


The only person who did not pretend to see the Emperor in his new clothes was a small kid who shouted that the Emperor was stark naked. The Kid is right, the Emperor is naked! It is true. One person whispered to another, what the kid had said, ‘the Emperor is naked’ and the whole town cried out at last. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has to go on’. So he walked more proudly than ever, as his protégés held high the train that was not there at all.


Nothing depicts this story line more appropriately than Shema’s shamelessness in the face of the glaring hard facts put forward to him and his doubting Thomases. It is now confirmed that the state is indebted to the tune of more than N42b, with about N13b shrouded in uncertainty. Yet the Emperor is not naked but in his new clothes and wants the people to believe so. But with all the startling revelations and the information readily available in our domain, the people of Katsina state believe that he is stark naked. Albeit we are still astounded how he was able to stash away so much money from our treasury because the manner in which he did it would make for a bestseller movie as the details are actually stranger than any fiction. He realised how easy it was to steal our money from the treasury and perfected the scam to the extent that you can hardly see his hand directly involved. So primitive was the whole arrangement that the job of some security and other top government officials was to be bagging and re-bagging millions of dollars and other foreign currencies for the Emperor to stash away in foreign accounts. Many of those officials are now regretting their stupidity and very soon together with the Big Boss they will get their comeuppance. My fear is that this kind of pilfering of public resources perfected by Shema should not be allowed to go unpunished as that will send wrong signals to those with powerful connections who can act with impunity and get away with it.


Curiously, and most worrying in this whole saga, is Shema’s carefree attitude about the whole thing. Choosing to keep on denying is like treating the people like nonentities who have no right to proper accountability from a public officer. While the residual effects of the plunder and theft linger on and are there for everyone to see; never in our chequered history had stealing of public resources and property been so institutionalized as if that is the purpose of government. The fact that all the squandermania happened under his tutelage makes him culpable. So he should be the man he claimed to be by owning up and stop playing the Ostrich ignoring what is obvious and pretending that the issues will just fizzle out. No, Emperor! They won’t.

.

HungerBAD:
.

Chai! See your username.