by Eze Eluchie
Question: How do you raise the billions in slush funds required to
bankroll the purchase of elective offices in a skewed democracy, such as monies to
hire thugs and bribe election commission officials prior to and during
elections and purchase favorable judgments in the event of loss at the polls?
Answer (as per a government led by an alliance of
professional criminals - APC): Enrich
your ‘leader’ with an obscenely lucrative 'infrastructural' concession agreement; then re-purchase same spurious concession agreement; reconvene the rubber-stamp State House of Assembly to speedily and with all due
claim to ‘urgency’, approve a ‘supplementary budget proposal’ which allows the
State government to approach the capital market to obtain loans (further
mortgaging the future of the State) to once more ‘buyout’ the ‘leader’! And pronto, you have enough funds to go into (s)elections and capture the votes!
In order words, use the people’s money to buy power to rule
over the people – wow, not even Abraham Lincoln would have anticipated this devilish translation of his eternal definition of democracy.
As election period approaches, there will be a noticeable
rush for various strata’s of governments in our various contraptions, as exemplified by the present dubious pursuit of the Lagos State Government of southwestern Nigeria, who having
exhausted public funds for non-existent or white-elephant projects and to fill personal accounts
in offshore havens, rush to the capital market, and in some instances,
international lending agencies, for financial facilities geared towards further
mortgaging an already impoverished and hapless population and sourcing funds to prosecute electoral campaigns.
The absence of regulatory mechanisms in our polity exposes
the peoples of our contraption to manipulation in the hands of smart alecs.
A fundamental question surfaces – is it possible to have a
democracy in a polity without established regulatory mechanisms? Could this be
why the concept of democracy has always seemed light years away in societies
where regulatory mechanisms are non-existent or extremely weak?
Again, I call on the Federal authorities to exercise powers
vested in it to checkmate the obvious bare faced criminality going on at the
State levels in the name of ‘governance’. The issue crops up, ‘’who checks
excesses at the Federal level?’
A restructured and renegotiated contraption will easily put
such smart alecs where they need to be – behind steel bars.
Picture: ©Alfredo Martirena cartoon
Corruption obviates democracy
No comments:
Post a Comment