THE car wreck of a saga of accusation and counter-accusation between an increasingly infamous Honourable (sic) Farouk Lawan, former chairman of the House of Representatives ad hoc committee on the fuel subsidy on the one hand, and Mr. Femi Otedola, chairman of Zenon Oil (who continues to bemuse with his pretence to being honourable) on the other, demonstrates once again how the filthy lucre – lustily deployed – has eroded what little vestige there might have been of honour, integrity and rectitude in governance. At that critical juncture, the interface between governance and commercial interests, we are witness yet again to an ethical-free zone where democracy is a hollowed shell, leaving in its wake an expensive and bloated husk; democracy’s detritus.

In response to the people voting with their feet in January’s fuel wars, a House of Representatives committee was set up to look into malfeasance in the operation of the government’s oil subsidy programme among the ranks of oil marketers et al. A phalanx of denizens of the downstream sector was frog-marched before the committee and asked what we thought to be questions intended to evince the truth. The ostensible objective of the committee’s very public proceedings was to ascertain the veracity of claims for subsidy compensation but, as we all well know, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip.

At the end of the process, a report was presented to a plenary session of the House for approval. After submission, the committee chairman requested of the House a correction that excised two of the names (one a company owned by Mr. Otedola) hitherto listed among the guilty on the grounds that further and better information had been provided, which established that those companies had been erroneously included on the blacklist in the first place. A unanimous House cravenly complied, without a piercing question in sight.

[b]Many weeks later (without a barking dog in sight) a righteous and triumphalist Otedola came out all guns blazing, casting himself in the implausible role of a latter-day guardian of transparency. He declared (and has yet to be contradicted) that in handing money over to the Honourable committee chairman, he had worked hand in glove with security agents with the objective of recording, for the public good, the culmination of sustained pressure from Farouk Lawan for improper gratification.

The political thriller, spiced with a heavy dose of mendacity and perfected by General Sani Abacha in Diya Begged Me, is the genre of preference in Nollywood’s Abuja division. This was the template adopted by Mr. Otedola and his cohorts from law enforcement in their production of Honey Trap; with the producer Femi Otedola as leading man and Farouk Lawan as the fall guy who collected a $500,000 bung on camera for a bit of “government magic”. The nation’s state security apparatus we are made to understand directed the production. Not yet on general release, it has been selectively previewed by the good and the great. The rest of us have had to settle for audio teasers.[/b]

Lawan, clearly caught on the hop, first denied all and described the film as a digitally doctored derivation. Once that piece of straw was seen to have no grip, there followed a lame attempt at donning the mantle of defender of the public good, engaged in gathering empirical evidence of Otedola’s attempts to suborn the House. This too went down like a lead balloon. Clearly the role of guardian of the nation’s moral rectitude sat shakily on his slight shoulders; it would surely have required him to immediately report the incident to the appropriate law enforcement agents and hand over the 500,000 pieces of silver with which an attempt had been made to induce him; he did not and he has not.

The Government-Corporate complex – [[size=14pt]b]an inexorable consequence of our penchant for crony capitalism – has allowed the growth of an oligarchy of favoured sons that have amassed such stupendous wealth that they imagine themselves a law unto themselves. [/b][/size] That disposition is encouraged and enabled by the weaknesses of our institutions and the porous walls that encourage a blissful symbiosis in our version of the doctrine of separation of powers. It is therefore unsurprising though ironic that it is a beneficiary of that crony capitalism that has chosen to be (or offered himself as) an avenging angel.

With apoplectic rage, the House of Representatives elected to define the incident as a full-scale attack on its person, engineered and orchestrated by the Presidency. It has barely been able to contain its distemper and, were it not for the blatant conduct of a ranking member, their response would likely have been more virulent. The lack of composure displayed by the Honourable Gambo Dan-Musa, Chairman of the House Committee on Ethics and Privileges, showed the degree of frustration many members of the House must feel. So angry was he when giving his version of the manner in which Femi Otedola declined to give evidence to his committee in camera that he failed to speak with the kind of decorum we have every right to expect from our representatives.

The collateral damage to the report of the Lawan committee has become the litmus test of what exactly the bribery scandal portends. Hitherto the report had been seen by the disenchanted as an opportunity to stick the boot in to the oil marketers and their official co-conspirators who are perceived to have profited profligately from the deliberate failings of regulatory oversight; failings perpetrated with malice aforethought. As many voices have been raised in demanding that the report is acted upon as have demanded that it be binned as damaged goods.

We are with good reason greatly wedded to conspiracy theories. The division between those that want the report dead and the necrophiliacs trying to perform a Lazarine miracle has become the principal political fault line. Was the sting operation conceived as a means of saving those indicted by the Farouk Lawan committee? Given how high the contamination in both public and private places goes, it is far from implausible that if the report was officially accepted, heads regarded as too sacred might have had to roll.

We are between Scylla and Charybidis. Because of the committee chairman’s inordinate greed, the positive light cast on the committee’s work has understandably dimmed. How many guilty corporations were never listed? Was the committee congenitally disposed to solicitation? How many innocent companies refused to bow to what can only be described as organised crime? How many other committee members had their own scams going? How many soft spoken scoundrels are there out there seeking to seduce us with sweet words while their minds are steeped in sophistry? The answers to these and other questions are grist to the mill of those that say the credibility of the report is irredeemably denuded.

On the other hand, the scale of the malfeasance (up to N1.7 trillion) beggars belief. Even if the figure is overstated (and many feel that it is understated), surely such staggering pillaging cannot be swept under the carpet. Can we not pursue the report as is and leave the courts to sort the wheat from the chaff? Can we afford yet another committee? Won’t those named and shamed in the discredited report have time to regroup and refine their responses the second time round? In a country so corrupt, should such an opportunity as this to make examples of those that stole public money be passed up? Surely we ought not to let our Jerry Rawlings moment pass unfulfilled.

There is, sadly, at times, a dysfunctional embrace between faithful adherence to the rule of law and the need to enthrone justice; yet society requires both. What the rule of law assures us of is the dispensation of law according to the law rather than the dispensation of justice according to the law. While their paths may occasionally converge they do not always do so. This is a quagmire that is difficult to pull away from and those that would deny such a bifurcation are entombed in theoretical purity. The rule of law requires us to conduct the adjudicatory process in accordance with laid down rules that are both predictable and impartial; whether those rules advance the cause of societal justice or not is, depending on the peculiar circumstances, a moot point.

Enthroning justice often requires that the Gordian knot between the two imperatives be cut, and the principal imperatives become the greater good. In our desire to be compliant with the tenets of democracy we often threaten the critical quotient that ought to drive effective governance: the greatest good for the greatest number. Confronted with a disconnect between long-term goals and short-term necessities, we take refuge in pre-determined choices. Often what is required is that we make a choice to seek justice at any price because the cost of injustice is far worse to contemplate.

As I gaze upon the monumental mess that this scandal has dropped in our laps, I am seized by a thought. If it is indeed true that there can be no atonement for sin without the shedding of blood, how many heads must roll for Nigeria to recalibrate? As a metaphor this particular one resonates loudly and strongly with the anomie of our time. How can we expect the reforms we so clearly require to emanate from elite (political and commercial) who repeatedly refuse to even grasp their leading role (by omission and commission) in our denouement?

[size=14pt]The president gives the impression of a man occupying a position seriously above his pay grade. He is long on words but derelict in his failure to actualise the weight of those words he so steadily deploys. Government is about governing and what we have in place is not a set of people that govern but rather a class that will fight to perpetuate itself whatever the cost to the country.

The rank shamelessness that allows the most despicable of scoundrels to disavow their antecedents and strut around like so many Nelsons on the nation’s deck is the price we pay for a political system that glorifies in being unattractive to men of honour and integrity. The lessons of history are ineluctable however; it is its speed that is far less easy to discern. The tide has turned; while there will still be ebbs and flows, its direction is undeniable and those that fail to learn the lessons of history are destined to be swept away by it.[/size]