By Josef Omorotionmwan
IT is a common phenomenon that when an administration becomes bereft of ideas, it begins to dabble into everything. The loss of one genuine purpose would lead to the pursuit of a dozen pseudo purposes.

When the Federal Government is confused, nobody should talk about it. At a point the Federal Government became worried about the high cost of governing the country, particularly when that had become a topic for local and international discourses.

The Federal Government then set up the Steve Oronsaye Committee on the rationalization of its establishments. From the very beginning, it was clear that the desire of government was to prune the cost of governance by all means and at all costs.

Evidently, the Federal Government had been forced into a serious dilemma – to shed the weight with which it had become very comfortable and at the same time, check corruption, crime and criminality with which it had lived for so long. Government’s answer to this dilemma was simple: Just kill all the crime fighters so that the issue of the cost of running their formations would no longer arise.

In the end, the Oronsaye Committee made many recommendations some of which were far-reaching and some outright silly and laughable. To the latter category, belonged the Committee’s recommendation for the scrapping of the Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, ICPC. The reason advanced for this recommendation was that the functions of the three commissions overlap with those of the Nigeria Police Force.

What we see here is an immediate death sentence on our fight against corruption and our effort to reduce the carnage on our roads. Just when we were beginning to develop some measure of trust on these institutions, we are now being told that since the Nigeria Police Force came into being before them, they must die so that the Police can continue to exist. Put differently, let it be business as usual and corruption as usual. Listen to the Committee’s Report: “Even though EFCC and ICPC were established separately to address corruption, which the police appeared to have failed to do, successive administrations have ironically continued to appoint the Chairman of the EFCC from the Police Force… The fact that an institution is inefficient or ineffective should not be a basis for the creation of new ones”.

The strength of this argument is also its weakness. There is absolutely nothing wrong with replacing an aspect of a malfunctioning institution with a new one as has been done between the Police and the two anti-graft agencies. To think otherwise is to ignore the noble contributions of the EFCC and the ICPC in our current struggles against corruption. Have we forgotten so soon, where we are coming from? Without the two institutions, how else would we have known that our treasuries were being plundered with impunity at all levels – including massive loots of government treasuries, police pension funds, embarrassing self-enrichment by many past Police bosses, etc? In fact, the abolition of these commissions would simply tantamount to an open invitation to steal brazenly and to loot without looking back. There is no better way to legalise corruption!

One gets the impression that the Oronsaye Committee lacked sufficient guts to make the far-reaching recommendations it had in mind. If it wanted us to cut down on the cost of running government, it should have gone ahead to recommend the outright abolition of governments in their present day form so that we could return to nativity, as it were. Let’s face it: There is the firm belief in some quarters that, even without a government, Nigeria cannot be any worse than it already is. We could then proceed to abolish the Police Force since insecurity in the land is already at a crescendo. We would finally abolish the courts since crime and criminality have become a way of life for us. Only the unlucky few might be arrested and prosecuted outside this country.

Major critics of the anti-graft agencies are quick to point to their selective enforcement patterns. They claim that their principals use them to torment perceived enemies. What is really wrong with that? The fight-your-enemy theory in crime causation and control works this way: It begins with the premise that every thief is an enemy of the state. Among these thieves, the principals pick the enemies to fight. If each principal deals decisively with his enemies in the system, there comes a time when our stock of enemies shall be depleted and society will be the better for it.

This may have started playing out in this nation. In concrete terms, there is no gainsaying the fact that under a continued Obasanjo presidency, Ibori would not have been where he is today. Essentially, one President’s friend is another President’s enemy.

In spite of the fantastic job that FRSC is doing to reduce carnage on our roads, the Oronsaye Committee sees no basis for its establishment since its functions replicate the mandates of existing agencies like the Highway Department of the Federal Ministry of Works and the Nigeria Police Force.

Even when we should be seeking to reinforce these bodies for optimum performance, we want them dead. At a time when we should be looking in the direction of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary to shed their bogus weight, we want to kill the only good institutions that help in policing the Police!

Obviously, some people benefit from iniquities. Such would want the anti-graft agencies dead so that corruption could thrive unhindered. The masses could perish on the roads, who cares? After all, what business has fish with raincoat? The despots feel safe in the air but, perhaps unknown to them, nemesis also catches up with them!