By  Muhammed Adamu
THE ‘do-nothing’ advocates on corruption say that unless Buhari is able to net corrupt persons all at once, he has not the moral right to net any corrupt person at all.

That if he cannot catch them all, he must free them all. They say: ‘do not arrest anybody, unless you can arrest everybody’. Or put another way, ‘unless you can arrest everybody, you must not arrest anybody’. Which is as dumb for example as saying that unless you can arrest all armed robbers, you must not arrest any armed robber.

And by the way, since they have also argued that virtually ‘everybody’ except Buhari is corrupt, maybe what they are advocating by default is a ‘government-by-one puritan, for all’. Or if –as others insist- Buhari himself is corrupt, maybe then what they are advocating is an ‘auto-piloted government’! Isn’t that wonderful? A nation of sinners with a hypocritical mind for the puritanical. They will neither be governed by any with a chink on his moral armor, nor one with a blot on his moral escutcheon!

Now even a thieving NASS arrogates to itself a moral edge. It has placed an asphyxiating stranglehold on the jugular of Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade –sourly therefore invoking the adage: ‘if you do not know how to catch a thief…’Now it is thieving lawmakers that are on the pulpit thumping like anointed ‘men of God’ that: ‘except his righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, Magu shall by no means ride the anti-corruption sputnik over us!’. It is as good as saying that the anti-corruption crusade is not to the diligent; it is to the sinless.

Nothing more advocates for ‘doing nothing’ against corruption (in a nation where ‘all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God), than the hypocritical search for the biblical ‘saint’ of Jesus’ specification -who alone should be the one to ‘cast the first stone’! Ironically it is the NASS , the very hub –nay the nest above all nests- of corruption, that now -with righteous indignation- thrusts itself as the self-anointed anti-corruption Caesar of Nigeria– warning Buhari not to come to the throne of its ‘equity’ unless his hands are clean. Now it is the NASS that is about to exalt the nation. Halleluiah!

And every ‘do-nothing’ advocate is saying yes, ‘no sinner shall take our confessions!’You can always tell ‘do-nothing’ advocates on corruption by the questions that they ask: ‘why Metuh, why not Tinubu?’; ‘why Dasuki, why not Dambazau?’; ‘why the Army Chiefs, why not Amechi?’; ‘why Jonathan’s government, why not Yaradua’s?’ In fact, a certain ‘nut’ from Kaduna recently said that unless Buhari was ready to go as far back as 1966, he does not have the moral legitimacy to probe anybody. It is the ‘do-nothing’ advocates that say ‘innocent’ Dasuki must be granted bail even though they’ll not speak for the ‘innocents’ awaiting trial  in police and prison cells.

They are the ones who say that a ‘righteous’ Saraki should be allowed to keep his ‘loot’ and ‘his seat’ even though they’ll not speak for workers un-paid by corrupt governors who take lifelines from a compassionate Buhari but put them in their private bank accounts;  and they are the ones who said that a ‘virtuous’ Metuh should not be handcuffed, although they never condemned the jungle justice daily meted to petty pick-pockets and phone-thieves.

Those who are happy Diezani has escaped the long arm of the law with billions of dollars of our patrimony are the same who insist that a dutiful Magu must be punished for living in an officially-furnished quarters duly allocated to him. Those who want the banks to unfreeze the many private accounts in which Fayose stashed the stolen patrimony of the people of Ekiti, are the ones shamelessly on the moral high-ground chastising private businessmen for paying ‘offensive amounts’ as dowry for their suitor-sons. Those who say that ‘corrupt judges’ have a right to free every politician accused of corruption, are the same who are eager to score Buhari’s anti-corruption war low committing none yet to prison.

Those who are ‘intelligent’ to believe that Patience Jonathan’s late mother was rich enough to bequeath to her a whooping 15million dollars, are those who say that it beguiles all common sense that Aisha Buhari should afford two return-tickets to the United States for her daughters –bringing home yet another sour adage that ‘prejudice although it sees what it pleases, it ignores what is plain’. It reminds of Adlai Stevenson’s hypocrite who would ‘hew down a rosewood tree and then mounting the stump to make a speech for conservation’.

Buhari  alone is up against a self-righteous legislature that robs the nation of its patrimony even as it makes laws strictly for its own protection. Buhari alone is up against a pretentiously-indignant judiciary that gives justice only to the highest bidder, even as it demands to be reverenced for being the last hope of the common man. Buhari alone is up against geo-ethnic and ethno-religious bigots of the North even as he is up against geo-ethnic and ethno-religious bigots of the South –jingoists whose only definition of  what is right is the rallying call ‘to your tent Israel’.

President Buhari,Ibrahim Magu and Bukola Saraki

The  Buhari temerement

Truth is Buhari must be our ‘sword’ and our ‘avenging angel’ first before he can be the ‘shield’ or the ‘knight’ and ‘shining armor’ that we crave. He is in the habiliments of battle and cannot be expected to bear the comeliness of victors until the war is won. We should not expect Buhari to mind the wet mattress when the whole edifice is in the grip of a rampaging flood. He cannot be laden with the weight of arms and be the democratic defender of laws which may not conduce to victory in the end. ‘Silent legis’ jurists say, ‘inter arma’: ‘the laws are silent amid the rumbling of arms’.

Besides there is a Buhari temperament that we cannot change but have only to live with. He is taciturn and inarticulate and therefore cannot be expected to smooth-talk an agonizing citizenry out of the excruciating pain of economic recovery. Yet he makes up for that by being Shakespeare’s ‘plain-dealing villain’ –from whom you get ‘only what you see’ and you see ‘only what you get’ Buhari is not your ‘honest-flattering man’ from whom ‘the more you look, the less you see’, or ‘the more you see, the less you understand’.

He may not be your ‘medicine man’ with the requisite Hippocratic empathy, yet it cannot be denied that his healing mojo works. He may not be deft in the art of political governance, yet it cannot be denied that he knows where not to turn the rudder of the ship of state and where to pull the mighty engine to a desirable anchor –a virtue which cannot be said for the many touted as experts who have brought us where we are.

Pro-Buharis believe that ‘of  sufferance soon comes ease’, anti-Buharis bicker over wet mattress when they should focus on efforts to halt the raging flood. Pro-Buharis keep the calm in the eye of a storm -which is not to suggest that they do not know the gravity of the situation-, anti-Buharis claim to know the gravity of the situation but have not the stamina to keep a steady mind.

Pro-Buharis although hated the decadence of yesterday, still believe that omelet cannot be made without breaking eggs; anti-Buharis although many were beneficiaries of the profligacy of yesterday, still believe in the Quixotic that ‘you can eat your cake and still have it’. Anti-Buharis measure the heat of their livers with the bitterness of their galls; pro-Buharis believe their agonies should not rule their ‘reason’.

The best-run capitalist economies have suffered recession. Some even depressed. How much less an economy run by Jonathan and his army of thieves. It is to the credit of Buhari that we are still away from depression’s door. Our recessive economy will recover when it will recover; and we all have a role to play in it; even if that role only requires the humility of our patience or the courage of our endurance or maybe even merely the charity of our silence –especially if we have nothing important to say.

Postscript

Buhari, beware of this eerie dance

YEARS  back, a strange ‘serum’ developed by a Nigerian physician, Abalaka was touted as cure for the dreaded Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS. Yet like a rejected prophet, we dismissed the man as a medical heretic. Good enough also, even the medical world paid no heed to the storm in our little pharmacological tea-cup that Abalaka created. But strangely the formula was raising many Lazaruses from the dead. In fact, AIDS-ravaged victims on taking the ‘serum’, were bouncing back to life with chubby-cheeks like choirboys. The Army, the hardest hit by the plague then, in open endorsement of Abalaka’s strange cure, had detailed a regiment of soldiers to guard the doctor -as he was said to be on a contract to raise their many ‘deads’.

Alas what Abalaka’s formula did was merely to scotch or disable the virus and not kill it. The ‘serum’ would knock the virus into a prolonged coma necessitating a sudden ‘ease’ to the ‘dis-eased’ host-victim who would now miraculously manifest a sudden regenerative recovery; until the comatose virus itself regained full consciousness; and now with the anger and vengeance of a wounded lion fought back; and it was now said to hit at its host victim so hard that the celebrated convalescence suddenly became a perplexing relapse that he never ever got over from. And so everyone was amazed how no sooner than Abalaka’s patients were healed and fleshed-up, than they were also dead like dodo!

Abalaka’s ‘serum’ ended up merely reminding us about a simple rule of self-defense or self-preservation: ‘never let the enemy recover  from the impact of your first  assault’; or better still ‘do not take on the enemy until you are ready to take on the enemy’. The moral is like getting the  iron-fisted Klitchko ‘down’ on the canvass but not completely ‘out’ in the head. It is called scotching the snake but not killing it. First you’ll need prayers so that Klitchko does not survive the referee’s count. And if he does, you’ll then need prayers so that he does not survive the time keeper’s bell which will end a round in which your opponent is supposed to be drunk with the impact of your punch. Because again if he survives, you might now have to deal with his fists and his fury.

Buhari is the proverbial challenger in this anti-corruption title fight. The victims of his feeble anti-corruption jabs now seem to be fighting back as much with loaded fists as with hearts full of hate and charged with fury! Unless the President ups his jabs above the subversive gambit of his angry opponents, his anti-corruption formula might just prove an ineffectual Abalaka ‘serum’ which the more it purports to kill the more itself is inviting death. The Judiciary is already on a tactical ‘rope-a-dope’ with Buhari. And now with the NASS throwing its sullied hat in the ring, the fight of two arms against one can only get nastier.

And you bet, even against the grains of law and morality the NASS is always ready to draw. Buhari is constrained by both law and morality not to deploy without tact and without circumspection. It is such an unfair rule of engagement that whereas the devil may hit below the belt, the avenging angel must be compassionate in both offence and in defense. The bad guy may use ‘fair and foul’ to subvert society, but the good guy must be slave of a hamstringing due process. “Pity” as Shakespeare would say “that the eagle should be mewed while kites and buzzards pre at liberty”!

And now like Michael Jackson’s scary ‘Thriller’ in a mystical night of vengeance, the zombies that the Buhari anti-corruption ‘serum’ should long have killed, are breaking free from their gory sepulchers. They have been in an eerie menacing dance that started with mass defense and is now coalescing into mass attack. Yes, a thriller night it may seem, but a decisive one at that. Will these scotched demons return to the grave or will the  anti-corruption war itself at last be entombed! Only Buhari can tell.