Members of the National Assembly are among the few privileged Nigerians who live well above the ordinary concerns of their compatriots. Thanks to a stupendous budget they approved for themselves, they do not have to worry about groceries, transportation, gas, malaria, air fares and the cost of inflation on our daily existence.

Apart from making laws for the order, peace and good governance of Nigeria, they also play supervisory roles over industrial sectors, the executive arm of government, its agencies, parastatals and corporations, in order to ensure through their oversight jurisdiction that the executive arm is implementing the laws, regulations and social rules in accordance with legislative expectations, past and present.

It is by its performance of this secondary role that the House of Representatives gave us Lawangate, having constituted an ad hoc committee to investigate the prosecution of the former Oil Subsidy policy of Nigeria.

To play these roles effectively the leadership of both houses constitute them into committees. It is no news that Senate and House Committee members are patronised heavily by the sectors and industries they supervise.

What appears to be news is that these folk who enjoy welfare budget that is a quarter of the whole country’s budget no longer connect with the concept of limits. It appears they would go to any lengths to sponge and scrounge out the least penny they can eke out of the system to augment what is already an annoying package of remunerations.

Let us not think otherwise, these people work in groups to undermine our common heritage. They give tacit approvals through agencies they supervise to airlines that are unqualified, companies that have not demonstrated pre-qualification and keep out qualified investors who do not do their bidding.

By these acts alone, they send Nigerians to their early graves; those who manage to stay alive are impoverished, their dreams scuttled. Men, women and children have been murdered by companies granted pre-qualification licenses by unscrupulous Nigerians whose only motivation was to live above the stations apportioned them by their intellect.

What is frightening for me is the seemingly unending breadth of the net of culpability in these matters. Who were the SSS officers who took part in entrapping Farouk Lawan but neglected to arrest him immediately after he purportedly took the $500,000.00 from Femi Otedola?

Who are the bosses of these SSS officials and if arresting crime was not their motive, what was? Future blackmail material? Who approved the sting operation? On Lawan’s end, why did the office of the IG not act upon receiving the purported report filed by Lawan?

Why did they arrest the complainant alone and not the bribery suspect reported to them? Who is protecting Otedola and for what reasons? The true answers to these questions would expose this country’s government as a web of rogues.

The executive arm of government, beaten nearly comatose by the operatives of Boko Haram, may be seeking some vengeance against an arm of government that went rogue by electing its own officials independent of the PDP apparatchik.

It is the executive arm that qualified marketing companies to participate in the oil subsidy bonanza; the discoveries they pretend to be making now about excess payments made to marketing companies are a sham as they knew of these acts of economic sabotage long before they were hatched and allowed them to enable them deploy the data gathered for political advantages at the right time.

What would indicate to the average Nigerian that government is sincere about bringing the dramatis personae in this Lawangate saga to book? Femi Otedola, the man who initiated or played along in this crime should be arrested and thoroughly investigated in the same manner as Lawan.

He should name all the SSS men who took part in this crime and archived it for selfish goals. All the SSS men who took part in it should be arrested, questioned and prosecuted. The corpus of the ad hoc committee Lawan and his secretary represented should all be investigated.

Were Lawan and his secretary acting for themselves alone? Maybe but let the police and the courts come to that conclusion. If the Inspector General was briefed about the bribery saga as the correspondence between that office and the House of Representatives suggest, then the Inspector General should resign and be investigated, alongside with all the police officers who were officially aware of this matter.

Did the presidency know about this from the office of the Inspector General or the Directorate of the SSS? If yes, then the president and all the officials who knew of this should resign and face trial.

Are these rather farfetched or unrealistic in a political climate such as Nigeria? Maybe but until we start taking ourselves seriously, until we key in to standards that have become norms internationally and until we enthrone a just, transparent and impartial system of social justice that avails, punishes and protects all, we still have a long night to wait for the foreign direct investment that is now streaming in to Sierra Leone like the waters of the Niger.