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First published in 2006

No Bullshitting!!! (By Harry Agina)

YOU CAN NEVER WITCH-HUNT A CLEAN SUSPECT

Greetings!

I am Harry Agina, and this is No Bullshitting! I asked before, and I ask again, who ever heard of witch-hunting an innocent man into guilt? Certainly not I, no, sir, no ma’am! As far as I am concerned, a man is either guilty of a crime, or he is not. If he is not guilty, all he must do is prove it. And if he is guilty, then, for crying out loud, he needs to shut the heck up and hide his face in shame. If he must open his criminal mouth at all, then it had better be to apologize to the nation for his evil deed, and not to give us some bullshit witch-hunt crap.

Anybody that does not want to be witch-hunted should simply stay clean, period. If you were clean, any witch-hunter would be shamed in the end, which would make you walk real tall. I see the witch-hunt bit as a defense that can only make good sense to the looter in question, and the people that benefit from his evil deeds.

What I am saying here is, I am sick and tired of listening to Nigerian crooks whose only defense when they get caught is to tell us that Obasanjo is witch-hunting them. I am even more sick and tired of listening to some of our sold-out ‘opinion leaders’ who go about blabbing in defense of looters of our country’s treasury with this stupid “witch-hunt” bullshit. Indeed, I find some of those opinion leaders, or whatever you call them, more criminal than the looters. Why? Not only are they indirectly looting the treasury by aiding and abating the looters, more importantly, they grossly betray the trust of their people.

They manipulate the masses that trust them to lead them aright, and sell their blind support to the highest bidder who may be good or bad, right or wrong, armed robber or clergyman. And then they sit back and live like kings in their billion-naira mansions with their ill-gotten wealth, while the hungry ignorant masses that they brainwash and send into the streets unleash all sorts of mayhem against the nation.

I put it to you that nobody would spend so much time and energy campaigning for ‘witch-hunt’ sentiments from the public if they had any honorable defense to offer, period! If the relationship of a criminal with Mr. President goes sour, and Mr. President suddenly remembers that he has been letting the criminal get away with murder, and then he decides to bring him to book, every Nigerian should thank God for it.

Lets face it, without bullshitting; everybody knows that baba allows everybody in his good book to get away with murder, literally. But one step out of line, and you are a goner. Indeed, baba is a master blackmailer, and everybody knows that too. What we should all pray for is that baba gets into more fallouts with more of our so-called political and opinion leaders who have been looting us blind. Unfortunately for us, that seems to be the only way we can actually see any progress in the anti-corruption war, and we should embrace it very tightly. Baba’s blackmail game does Nigeria good in this case, for a change.

Some pertinent questions that any patriotic mind should ask these shameless looters in our midst are: Is His Excellency, Mr. Governor actually His Excellent-Thief as claimed by EFCC, or not? Is the so-called Honorable Senator or his brother in the lower house actually dishonorable, or not? Did Mr. LGA Chairman do the crime, or not? In other words, are the so-called leaders stealing us blind, while we suffer in the midst of plenty?

Now, if the answer to those questions is yes, then what is all this bullshit about witch-hunting? Are they saying that Obasanjo witch-hunted them into stealing? And if not, then all they are actually saying is that baba used to let them get away with murder when they were in his good book, now he is after them because things have fallen apart.

So I ask, what the heck does it matter to us the reasons that Obasanjo and EFCC have to suddenly decided to go after them for their crimes, after a long time of looking the other way? If you ask me, and in fact even if you don’t ask me I still say that the most important thing to any well-meaning Nigerian should be that the mega thieves in our land are finally being punished. If they are guilty, I’d say get them, luck them all up and throw away the doggon keys.

And if they are not guilty, then they do not have to worry about anything, do they? No amount of so-called witch-hunting can hurt an innocent man. Any idiot knows that it would cost much less resources to prove somebody innocent, than it takes to create the witch-hunt diversion. Truth does not cost much money, and it will always prevail. On the other hand, fabricating falsehood such as the witch-hunt crap costs them a lot of money, our money, by the way.

A SEPARATE ISSUE

Sure, we can, in a separate bid damn baba and EFCC for lack of ethics, or damn them for flouting our constitution. Indeed, if Nigerians want to push for baba’s impeachment, and God knows he has committed more than enough impeachable offences, I am all for it. All I am saying is, lets do so on a different platform entirely, and not mix issues. Lets not do it when somebody is being punished for looting, because the wrong message is sent out to the public. Are we saying that anybody in this country should go ahead and do whatever they want to do, since baba is bad? Or, are we saying that baba is so bad that we can never give a nod to anything he does, no matter how great? I say no to both questions. And I go further to say that the looters that seek to hide under the “witch-hunt” scam are simply manipulating us to cover their deeds. And if they succeed, then they laugh at us all for being fools. I’m sorry, but my mama didn’t have any doggon fool! Did yours?

By supporting the witch-hunt scam we are, in effect, saying that the looters should be left alone, and, our only excuse is that Obasanjo is witch-hunting them. What an excuse! For crying out loud, their hands were caught inside the proverbial cookie jar, stealing the cookies, and they want me to ignore that and buy their “witch-hunt” scam. Did Mr. President witch-hunt their hands into the cookie jar? I ask.

I maintain that rather than sit back and listen to the witch-hunt bullshit, Nigerians should actually urge baba to fall out with more looters. That way we may recover a whole bunch of our stolen money. We all know that the best time to catch crooks is when they disagree among themselves. Lets take full advantage of baba’s disagreement with some of his cohorts, I say.

I am truly sick and tired of living the life of a millipede for these guys. Or is it the centipede that laments that human beings are mean? Mr. Centipede, you know him, the crawly little guy with thousands of tiny legs, who lives in composts or someplace like that. He laments that humans step on him, crush him to pieces, and then they turn around and curse him for splashing his ‘blood’ and guts on their feet. The poor centipede that actually got trampled to death or badly wounded still ends up with the blame. These guys must be calling themselves clever when they whip up the witch-hunt sentiment to treat us like the centipede and distract us from the real issue at hand.

Fortunately for them, there are always Nigerians who are ready to sell their own souls for money, who get paid heavily to see white and call it black in broad daylight. I am not much worried about their kind, however. I know that they will always be around in our society. My real worry is about those of us who should know better, and yet we let these scammers think that they are fooling us with their childish scam.

It is always the same old bullshit song. Boy steals cookie and gets caught with his hand right inside the cookie jar. Yet boy turns around and cries foul. He whips up some silly sentiments and, somehow manages to sell it to some portions of the public, and bang! Suddenly we are no longer talking about the stealing of billions, because we are now too busy talking about the cleverly crafted diversion. Well, really, it is wrong to call the diversion clever. There is nothing clever about it. Rather, I am shocked that such childish plot is actually paid credence at all in a country with so many millions of intelligent people. It can only happen in Nigeria. What a country!

I offer no apology when I say that anybody who wants a looter to get away with all those billions that we hear them stealing, must have a hand in the deal somewhere. Don’t feed me that crap about witch-hunting, I say. We all know that the accused are guilty as charged, because they make no effort to hide the evidence. Sure, I know that an accused is innocent until proven guilty in the eye of the law. However, if the eye, or eyes of the law happen to be blinded sometimes by exchange of Ghana-must-go bags, are we all blind, too? If the eyes of the law cannot see what these guys are doing with our money, can’t we? Or have we all received Ghana-must-go bags? I can tell you that I ain’t seen no doggone bags, have you?

In any case, if the law had been blinded by the exchange of Ghana-must-go bags, and it did not see the loud evidence that these mega thieves parade all over the place; and if we were all mesmerized to submission by these con artists, the EFCC has opened all our eyes now. We all need to wake up now and smell the coffee, I say. It is time to dump all those bullshit legal mombo jombo technicalities that heavily paid judges hide under to let these guys to get away with murder. It is time for somebody to find a way to sanction compromised judges very severely.

You know, I really do not mind following that ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ legal bit. It is a very good principle, which works reasonably well in every sane society. The problem is that the author did not have a mess called Nigeria in mind when he conceived the principle. He had no knowledge of how we abuse, exploit, and make a big mockery of everything. My point here is, let us go ahead and insist that ‘alleged’ looters should be given due process under the law, but please, pretty please, don’t give me that bullshit about presidential witch-hunting.

If we want to effectively address Obasanjo’s lawlessness and gangster style, then lets talk about how to discipline him too. The man is a civilian ruler, for crying out loud! We claim that we stopped the military from completely destroying this country, and yet we cannot stop an old man, a civilian from enslaving us and running the country like his own personal property. The man toys with our constitution everyday, controls our oil wealth like his own personal property, and our way of punishing him is to let mega thieves to get away with the little that he agrees to pass down to us. That is bullshit, I say.

Of course, we all know why Obasanjo is getting away with every sin that he commits against this country, but we are too passive to do anything about it. We have the National Assembly that is empowered to call baba to order, or impeach him. But the body does nothing, mostly because it is highly compromised. Baba has ‘the boys’ in his pocket, one way, or the other. They cannot do jack to him. He blackmails those whose hands are soiled to submission. When he cannot blackmail them, Ghana-must-go bags, billions of our money, change hands, and it is back to business as usual. We in turn sit back and do nothing. We all see the drama live on television, but we do nothing. And we possess the ultimate power of sovereignty to force the dishonorable men and women of our National Assembly to stop the bullshitting and do their job. But, we do nothing!

Once again, I say, let’s go after Obasanjo for his bad deeds if we are serious about it. We do have more than enough to nail him. But don’t tell me that we must let other looters to go free just because we are too weak to bring baba to book for his evil deeds. If we really have to polarize this country around those two options, I do stand behind baba on this one. Bad as the man may be, I would go along with him any day if he can clean up this mess called Nigeria. I am rooting for him all the way on this one, and you should too, if you know what is good for this country. I do not even care anymore if he breaks all the rules in the book to achieve it. The mega thieves he is after broke more rules, in many books kpaa kpaa, like a Yoruba man would put it.

Having said all that, I must conclude by saying that it actually beats me why anybody would go about violating the Nigerian constitution in going after these criminals that we call leaders. They are so easy to nail, going the constitutional way. The guys are so greedy and so audacious that their crimes stick out like sore thumb. Like the gold fish, they have no hiding place. I mean, how can a man ever hide tens of billions of naira, which everybody knows he acquired within a short period he has been in office?

Try to come up with your own answer to that poser, while my opinion cooks in my brain for another edition of…

…No Bullshitting!

Harry Agina writes from USA