Josef Omortionmwan
IN the real world, the aviation industry has been developed into excellence to the extent that plane crashes have become a rarity.

But because of our poor maintenance culture-cum-corruption, Nigeria is now the undisputed plane crash capital of the world, having recorded 13 plane crashes in the past decade – with two within 24 hours: the Allied Air cargo plane, which crash-landed in Accra, Ghana, after overshooting the runway and hitting a bus on the street, killing at least 10 people, in the evening of June 2, 2012 and the Dana Air crash at the Iju area of Lagos in the morning of June 3, 2012, which claimed the lives of at least 153 passengers.

I am not easily given to pessimism but all available indicators point to the ugly fact that the future is bleak and dismal. As more of the planes attain retirement age, many of them are likely to fall.

Like the rest of us, our leaders have lost fate in the system they helped to create. The only difference, though, is that they are able to purchase safety at all cost.

Soon after the last batch of crashes, a serving Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who had lost fate in local flights had to travel from Abuja to Lagos to attend one of these endless conferences the following day. He flew to London’s Heathrow Airport and from there, he took a direct flight to Lagos.

Instead of Abuja-Lagos-Abuja, his round trip was Abuja-London-Lagos-London-Abuja. It sounds abnormal but that’s what the rich ones now do. And it is the clear trend for the future.

Whatever aspect of life one is talking about, the investigations that follow the expected failure is an insult on our collective psyche. From the very beginning, the investigations are planned to fail. They succeed in making every serious person look stupid. When they push you to the wrong edge, they make you look like you are always defending the offenders in society. Our penal system is so fragile that it permits our being easily swayed off course.

Entrapment has become our new stock-in-trade. A few examples here will do: Recently, we set out to seek solution to our putrid energy system. Mid-stream, we suddenly changed course. The Elumelu Committee, which was at first the hunter, became the hunted. Elumelu became the issue. Meanwhile, we abandoned the original direction of seeking solution to our epileptic power supply in a way that seemed to suggest that the new crime was a solution to the old.

Certainly, bribery has become a way of life in our society but that does not remove it from the criminality index. If anyone accepts a bribe in the course of carrying out his official responsibilities, he should be punished commensurately.

If the offender needs to be beheaded, so be it. But by all means, let the new crime, which is a by-product of the original problem not replace that original problem.

We woke up one morning to find that our equity market was in shambles. We must investigate. The House of Representatives Committee on the Capital Market came handy for that purpose. As would be expected, the House Committee soon ran into muddy waters when the Committee was said to have been compromised. To my mind, the new development should keep our judicial branch of government sufficiently busy.

They should punish all those who were compromised in the course of the Committee’s assignment and the House must still go ahead to get to the root of the rot in the equity market. But in our case, as soon as a new problem arises, we would bury the old issue and begin to pursue the new problem until that one too runs into another hitch. And the probe never ends.

Yes, there was an ad-hoc committee of the House of Representatives which was charged with the responsibility for investigating shoddy deals on the fuel subsidy issue. The House adopted the report of that committee. We agreed that the committee did a good job, working virtually 25 hours a day, sometimes under the candle light when PHCN struck. It was clear that the nation suffered incalculable losses in the hands of those Shylocks.

What Nigerians saw live on public television should not be sacrificed on the altar of a private recording. That Farouk Lawan helped himself to some hard currencies does not mean that our missing petroleum subsidy money has been found. The Committee report should not die!

Fortunately, while Farouk Lawan is yet alive, he is alleged to have accepted some bribe dollars during the investigation. The determination here is for the judiciary or the criminal justice system should move in and do its work without jeopardizing the report of the committee.

Nigeria we hate (oops, we hail) thee. The world is watching us. This entire rumble in the jungle only leads to one end – self help! For instance, the Judiciary – the most enlightened, most educated and supposedly most cultured branch of government – could have been watching. At a point, it remembers that it is made up of men and women who have blood running in their veins.

At that point, judgements could be labelled, “For sale to the highest bidder”. Let the spoilt world spoil! What moral right would we have to complain that the judiciary is corrupt, when we are, indeed, the authors and finishers of corruption? Any wonder, then, that we are still where we are? And there is no hope!

All we are seeing may be beyond corruption; it may be a deliberate effort to make the already rich still richer. And that’s what they now define as neo- capitalism, the Nigerian style.