EBERE WABARA, [email protected] 08055001948
WHEN the US Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. James Entwistie, petitioned the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, over the lustful behaviours of three members of the junior legislature in Washington while on an official visit recently, I thought it was in conformity with the rascality of that level of parliamentarians. I never knew that even some of their senior colleagues in the upper chamber were as equally socially decrepit and morally bankrupt as their promiscuous juniors!
It is unfortunate that the escapade has predictably taken a back seat in tandem with our amnesic disposition to critical issues. This explains why most people who commit felonious infractions and misdemeanours walk free over time because of our amnesic attitude to matters of public interest. Issuing from this our collective senility is the tendency to sweep the disgrace of the sex maniacs in the House of Reps under the carpet, as we have moved on to another concupiscent bother.
I have consistently advocated that we do not need the present superfluity of legislators at all levels. They add no value to our provincial or national life. This bunch of sexually-depraved characters should be disbanded and a collegiate system of representative lawmakers enthroned and institutionalized for sustainable deepening of our peculiar democracy. The way we practise civil governance is not how civilized nations do theirs. Just look at the way former British PM, David Cameron, gracefully left office in a very seamless and dignified method that symbolized elevated existentialism—different from our crudity stewed in parliamentary erotica!In the past one year or thereabouts, all we have heard in the red chamber is either insatiability in demand for perks of office or the theatricals involving the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki. There has not been any debate on the country’s challenges or developmental trajectory. We can certainly do without these overfed, overpaid and spoilt adults who comic about as lawmakers.
Indeed, the current National Assembly has proved incontrovertibly to be the worst set of legislators in the country’s political history. Most of them since their inauguration have not uttered a word in the hallowed chambers!
All they do is to play truancy and when they manage to attend the sessions they end up slumbering or lost in bovine docility. If we must needlessly retain most of these randy lawmakers, they should be placed on small allowances. Of course, it should be on a part-time basis. We need to reduce the cost of parliamentary participation which fuels corruption and legislative deviancy.
Last week, one boyish fellow who had wanted to be the governor of Kogi State in the current dispensation, Dino Melaye, behaved irresponsibly by declaring that he would beat up and impregnate the wife of the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Senator (Mrs.) Remi Tinubu, because of a mere disagreement on the floors of the upper chamber.
Was Melaye going to rape his colleague or entice her with peanuts compared to her husband’s overflowing opulence? Was Melaye going to invoke supernatural powers and have intercourse in the dreamland? Would Melaye have deployed spiritual manipulation to bed someone’s wife? How did he want to achieve his hellish sexuality with a fellow senator? Did he think he was talking to one of those innumerable call-girls in Abuja that could be abused and battered after orgiastic indulgence?
This disregard for womanhood, marital sanctity and uncontrollable anger by Melaye has further confirmed that most of these chaps in the senate have no business nearing the gate of the National Assembly. Any man who cannot control his anger/temper shows weakness of character and not fit to be called a man.
If you are temperamental, it means the person has attained the summit of immaturity. In sane environments, this act would have landed Melaye in the hot soup before his prosecution would follow. I hope that Asiwaju Tinubu would not accept any preposterous apology from this bloke. He should be made to smell the iron to serve as a deterrent to his tribe of sexual slaves.
As I said here recently, if our senators and reps were not the highest paid in the world with no productivity whatsoever they would not be tomfooling with indecorous sexual matters and shamelessly summoning the AGF, Abubakar Malami, for justifiably looking them in the face and insisting that the forgery trial of their leaders must go on! Too much money and serial irresponsibility can make a man have malarial afflictions of sleeping with the Jagaban’s wife! Was querulous Melaye suffering from any spell from the village or having aggravated mental disorder arising from memory loss?
One of these days, these amorous lawmakers will contemplate immunity that will allow them to misappropriate any spinster or married woman they see in the street and the confines of the National Assembly! After all, they are already agitating for salary for life for their years of indolence and national disservice! With the exception of a few credible lawmakers, the rest are a bunch of people with unknown antecedents and reputational pedigrees.
The present legislature has become more notorious and scandalous than all the past ones put together. Matters are even made worse in the senate with its leadership embroiled in a political battle that has stagnated legislation and oversight functions. Can you imagine what would have happened that day if Melaye had immunity? The only way to curb lawmakers’ proclivity for sexual immorality is to make legislation a part-time affair with only sitting allowances payable. Let us make legislative assignment a service to our fatherland—and not a profit-making enterprise with lasciviousness as one of the perquisites!
For me, let us have a group of 37 part-time representatives drawn from the 36 states and the FCT with three non-voting functionaries totalling 40, all earning basic allowances. I can assure you that they will be more prudent with public funds, efficient and effective than the present chaos. Can you imagine the amount that will be saved from collapsing the two chambers with a redundant and selfish membership of 109 senators and 360 reps sleepily idling away!