The initial shock and then excitement that heralded the grotesque revelations of how the $16 billion National Independent Power Project (NIPP) funds were practically wasted, is now ebbing. And as these things go, it would seem that certain realities are beginning to settle with us, one of which is in the question that people are beginning to ask. People have started asking: Will all of this not go the way of similar scandalous revelations in our recent past? Will the nation not grind through all this and relapse into her lethargical, devil-may-care usual self? People are asking, wont some things begin to change from this?

Such are legitimate fears and questions and you cannot blame those who bear them. We have seen all of this before; we have lived through similar scandals and each bout got every Nigerian excited. We were all pirouetting with such acid temper you’d think hell was coming. Those scandals got the whole nation in convulsive rage and for as long as our rage lasted, it was like a million furies burying their dead.

Yet, at the end of the day, what you had was all thunder and lightning – no rain. It was impotent rage. Indeed, people are apprehensive that all of what we are beholding today and which is causing as much national hysteria and indignation as the former episodes, may just peter out, leaving the people more psychologically and spiritually depraved; the social and economic consequences remain just as high priced. But the sadder report is that many more Nigerians are saying that all what we hear today, is just like an idle wind which will blow pass in the same way it came and they are saying so with such cynical resignation.

To be sure, scandals of such mind bugling proportions are not new to us. It is equally true, unfortunately, that those who have developed certain pathological indifference and pessimism to the thinking that the country has redeeming aspects, which will manifest in due season, have no blame whatsoever for their disposition. Let’s not go too far back into our history.

We will start from a date as recent as 2000. That was the period we thought we had a knight in shining amour in the person of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. That was our period of innocence and we were indeed innocent of the man behind the name, but we were not to blame because, in our desperate quest for a messiah of some sort, we could not discern anything untoward about him. We couldn’t see those gothic fangs and the twisted horns – we didn’t see the profile that morphed into an ogre.

Any way, as we said, that was the period of our innocence and that was when he put together the Oputa Commission. Obasanjo dragged the old, respected man out of retirement to run him through the excruciating and exerting, if mentally and emotionally demanding, exercise. With the commission, Nigerians thought that Obasanjo was a good man on a good mission. On the face of it, the principle was noble, because it started with the premise that it would be difficult for the country to move forward without reckoning with the past; that by knowing the truth of all the wrongs of history, the country could be led through a national purgation. The commission was to ascertain the truth of the atrocities of the state against individuals and groups. It is considered that state’s violence and repression against the people are often built on a fabric of lies and secrets. Therefore, exposing the truth about such atrocities has the redeeming power not just over the victims, but the society as a whole; it can have, as Yugoslav’s Vaclav Havel once wrote, “ a singular, explosive, incalculable political power.”

Based on that and more, Nigeria was literally shot down. Everything that meant anything to us was put into the investigation. It was exhausting in every sense, but we were satisfied that our sacrifice was worth it, or so we thought. Eight years after, nobody knows what has happened to the report of the commission. Nigerians are still living with the scar, if not the wound, of the tyranny of the past torture in their hearts. The past still hurts and many compatriots are still hurting. So, we have now seen that the Oputa Commission was one huge project conceived in joke and deceit – a sandcastle.

We are talking of our misadventures at the times when providence handed us a lever to effect the desired change from what we have been –a nation in virtual regress. Those who are pessimistic about a happy ending of all the present revelations, indeed, have good reasons for their pessimism. Let’s ask a few questions here. When the then Senate President and the Minister of Education, respectively Chief Adulphus Wabara and Prof. Fabian Osuji were webbed in a N50 million bribe scandal, Nigerians rose in arms. Now, what has become of the case today?

Answer: Nothing. When the woman of intransigence that goes by the name Patricia Olubunmi Etteh, stirred the cauldron with her N638 million-renovation scandal there was upheaval in the land for weeks on end. Beyond the fact that she lost her speakership of the House of Representatives, what happened to the criminal aspect of her indulgence? Answer: Nothing. The alleged $500 million NNPC fleece; the hundreds of billions of naira imports exemption and waivers whose proceeds were alleged to have been maneuvered into the Yar’Adua’s campaign armoury; the Wilbros and Siemens scandals; the national ID Card swindle and a host of others, what have we done with them? Answer: Nothing. The Schneider case in which we were told that Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello impersonated somebody or used false name, how far now? Answer: No far; nothing.

So, having been instructed by these, the bigger question people are asking, to which I sincerely have no answer, is, where will the confidence be derived that the NIPP scandal (not to talk of the Abuja land grab) will end differently? And that is a dangerous allusion. It is dangerous when a people do not have confidence in the way their country is run; when they do not trust those who ordinarily should be the champion of their collective destiny and more directly, of individual destinies. But the truth is that, that is exactly what we are experiencing right now.

The Nigerian people feel, and justifiably so, that they have been discounted. They feel that they really do not matter in the plan and programme of those who lead them. And the leaders are not making any pretence to the contrary. And just like the incidents that engendered these revelations, our leaders work heinous crimes against the people without blinking, after all, they always conclude that “this too shall pass.” And they do, always.

But, let it be said that, for every such crime against the people that passes, it is the country that pays at the end. For each one that passes, the country diminishes. In a society where anything is allowed and the illegal is ignored, such crass levity, if allowed to continue, will gnaw at the conscience of such a society until it is turned into a monster. At this point, a we-versus-them consciousness begins to manifest in the people toward those who govern them. It would seem that we are at that point now and the people are responding in the most callous and contemptuous ways.

They make reference to their leaders as to their enemies. They break laws with impunity, stand aloof and mock patriotism to its face. We witness such frightening psychodrama on daily basis now. We see it in the grueling lack of civic conscience and in the utter disregard for the humanity of the other person. Some believe that the Nigerian has become outrageously individualistic. It is true, unforunately, and that is a condition that was once alien to us.

Come to think of it, what sort of sentiment should a person dispense in a country where he provides for himself every social leverage – from electricity to water to security to road and each time he manages to raise his head from the burden of his troubles, he sees opulence and waste in his leaders’ sprawling homestead; he reads of millions of dollars of the people’s money which his leaders have criminally consigned to themselves, their sons and their daughters, their friends and their associates. And by the fact that he is helpless in the face of this, he helms in and unconsciously becomes patently cynical, which he visits on the society.
The man who is forced into that condition will, of necessity, try to create his own source of happiness, no matter what it is and how bizarre or absurd. And all of this is what we are witnessing in the tension and confusion that confront us today.

These tensions assault us daily in the newspaper headlines; they manifest as well in countless small, hopeless surrender that touch us personally in dysfunctional families; in acts of spiritual violence against a congregation by some church leaders. You see, many of those in church today are not there because they love God. No. They are driven in there because Caesar dealt wickedly with them.

Let me leave you with this: This country has been driving on the cutting edge of danger. This series of probes may yet provide another opportunity to pull us back to a safe drive. A country cannot go far (can’t even “go” at all) when the mass of her people are seething with lack of civic conscience and exhibiting so much pessimism as we can see; when her people distrust their leaders and the leaders themselves do not have confidence in their own truth and cannot run on their sincerity. Familiar spirit must be exorcised from our public administration. All these probes must have good and predictable ending – they must bear result.