The parable of the snake and rat
By Sam Omatseye

When the story of the President and the church broke into public scrutiny, I thought the President was going to say he had performed a miracle. He had played Jesus. He uttered a word about having a poor church in his subaltern hideout, Otuoke, and behold a 2,500-seater church.

Like Jesus who turned water into wine and urged his followers - President Jonathan included - to move mountains with their words of mouth, our President had turned a humble hovel of worship into a ‘glorious’ house of God.

But either the President had no faith in the power of his words or the potency of humour in the topsy-turvy world of politics, he came out through his spokesman to deny everything. It was not corruption, he said. He never gave anyone an order to build a church in his village. He only said the church did not befit his status as president of Nigeria.

If President Goodluck Jonathan understands the power of persuasion, he could have turned everything into a sort of high presidential comedy with a subtle apology and let the matter die a natural death.

The whole affair could have been hilarious if it was not so serious. What the President did is a reflection of either his naivety or wilful error. In either case, he has done the Nigerian people a grave wrong. It would be naivety, if he really did not know that what he did was an act of corruption. In his novel, No Longer At Ease, Chinua Achebe defined corruption as “improper use of influence.” Maybe President Jonathan thought that it would be defined as corruption only when he approached the Italian firm that worked on the church and asked them to hand him the money or if he asked them to directly build a church for him in his village.

If the President thought so, then he had failed woefully as Nigeria’s corruption czar. In this case, the innocent is guilty. If you are president, ignorance is no excuse, and the law does not recognise such innocence. Before mounting a throne as a people’s leader, you must know right from wrong. If the President meant that he did not influence the building of the church, then this is the sort of innocence we call naivety, and it is not an excuse when you lead over 100 million people.

We can see that the sort of donation he derived from the Italian firm is common among our political office holders, and that is why the President sees it as usual. A governor, a commissioner, a minister, a permanent secretary gives a contract to a business outfit, and the outfit looks for an opportunity to be grateful. The flourish of gratitude comes in different ways. It could be in the form of scholarship to the benefactor’s son, reconstructing the road leading to his street, buying him a $10,000 wristwatch or building a church for him in his village.

These things are common in the political and business worlds of Nigeria, and there is no doubt that it is wrong and it cannot be described other than as corruption. Those things come as influence. They are not necessarily solicited but accepted by some of our office holders. What Jonathan has done is not to keep their secret secret.

President Jonathan violated his oath of office. Some of his supporters say he is not the beneficiary of the church. Really? If he did not want to benefit from it, why did he complain about the lowly, decrepit quality of the place of worship? If he is a villager or habitue of the place on weekends and during vacation, was he not going to worship there? Is he not then a beneficiary?

The Italian firm, Gitto Contstruzioni Generalli Nigeria Ltd. (GCG), said it was an act of social responsibility. Social responsibility in Otuoke? If Jonathan were not president, would they know of a place called Otuoke? What other village have they performed their social responsibility? Is the firm not aware that Nigerians are not only Christians but also Muslims and worshippers of local deities? Why bring faith into the affairs of social responsibility in a secular state?

Not long ago, former Governor Timipre Sylva accused the President of overpaying the contractor who built the uncompleted Tower Hotel in Yenagoa and asked him whether the same contractor was not building a house for him in the village? If the EFCC is quick to dig into the affairs of Sylva, we should expect the same alacrity in the case of the President. At least we want to know the truth.

It was also disappointing that the Anglican Church accepted the gift. The Bible urges us to shun “all appearances of evil.” Like murder in the cathedral, the church donation is a living testimony of corruption. In Otuoke, it will become a monument to corruption.

When the President defended himself through Reuben Abati, what he did were two things. First, he gave an official stamp to the subterranean culture of corruption tearing apart the political and social fabric of Nigeria. He is saying, ‘yes, you can accept anything from a contractor or anybody you give a job in the course of performing your duty to Nigerians, even if not directly’. Two, he has shown that he is not fit to fight a battle against corruption.

The President has been described as a snake in this column, and that is as in regards to his political life. He plays the game, strikes his enemies with sly precision without regard to the consequence for the law and morality. That is why he violated the constitution in pursuing his dream in removing Sylva, sent soldiers to the streets of Lagos, imposed fuel subsidy removal, imposed Bamanga Tukur as party chairman, and a host of other absurdities. But he does not play snake with governance. He plays rat. The rat destroys without knowing the consequences. It nibbles at a wedding dress, leaves its droppings in the only food in the house a la lassa fever. In the analysis of evil,one philosopher refers to the rat that, in innocent hunger, bites a cable that eventually burns down an edifice, obliterating whole families and destroying documents compiled over a generation.

President Jonathan is the parable of the snake and the rat, one a subtle calculating marksman; the other an innocent destroyer just like the characters in John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, all of whom are weak and innocent but want to destroy those weaker than they. Whether as snake or rat, he has not ennobled us as a nation.

This is the first time we are having a story of corruption strike the bull’s eye of the church, which is supposed to represent the highest values. “The corruption of the best produces the worst,” wept philosopher David Hume. If the church is where we ascend to for comfort and protection from the buffeting of the world, and the Christendom is quiet about it, then we know that the Nigerian church is not of the ascension but of the descension.And the Presidency is at the bottom with it.


http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/columnist/monday/sam-omatseye/42494-the-parable-of-the-snake-and-rat.html

Great. Until we get to a point where we all agree on what is right and what is wrong, then we're not going to find a headway in Nigeria.

From Genesis, pre April 16, I had a premonition of †ђξ kind of President he will make and so far so good (and sadly too),I have not been un-disappointed!