by Eze Eluchie
One Federal
agency Nigerians seem ever willing to lampoon for corruption and gross inefficiency,
is the Nigeria Police Force (NPF). This is not unexpected, considering their presence in our
nooks and crannies and the highly visible profile of the Police in our polity
and the injustice inherent in our polity (with the Police as the primary
contact of the ordinary citizen with the injustice).
Time and
time again, however, when confronted with evidence of corruption in their
midst, the Police Force has remarkably acted with dispatch and alacrity, as
exhibited in the dismissal of their personnel recently caught on camera
negotiating a bribe.
When
policemen get dismissed, realizing that the game is up, they go.
This cannot
be said of other segments of our polity. When professionals, the Lawyers,
Medical personnel, politicians and our ‘almighty’ civil/public servants (or
more appropriately 'masters'). When these others are caught red-handed with their
hands deep in the public till or enmeshed in acts of corruption, all hell is
let loose. Not only is no one punished, but the society is forced to undergo despicable charades in the guise of an unending legal process which will gradually fade away when public attention is deviated by yet another large-scale crime by another 'high-brow' thief.
Rather than
accept responsibility for his misconduct, a senior appeals court judge caught
corresponding illicitly with counsels and parties in matters before his court opted
to throw up tantrums, accusing everyone else, inclusive of the Chief Justice of the Federation, but himself, of corruption; rather
than go and bury his head in shame, criminals who defrauded the Banks they once
presided over as Directors, have engaged the country’s legal system in an
endless hide-and-seek game; rather than go out in peace, public servants who
stole criminally converted their agencies pension funds placed in their custody,
Politicians who loot public treasury resort to age-old ethnic sloganeering to maintain
a strangle hold on our collective psyche - in one sickening instance, a politician currently serving a prison sentence abroad for corruption recently had a lavish birthday celebration with 'religious' leaders and politicians in attendance .
The
willingness of the generality of the populace to accommodate, and often times
glamorize corrupt public office holders will be our undoing as a society. When
we do not look upon corrupt persons with the disdain and scorn they deserve, we
only, wittingly or unwittingly, encourage corruption. We actually become
accomplices to the crime of corruption when we condone corrupt persons in our
midst.
We do not
have to look far to see the dire consequences of our complicity in corruption
in our lives, our environment, our polity.
We have a choice;
we can continue to condone and thereby participate in corruption and continue
to exist (not live, because where corruption thrives, people only exist) in it’s
after effects or simply say ‘No’ to it, individually resolving not to be
accomplices to corruption.
NB: This post in no way deviates from my often reiterated views on the impropriety of the continued retention of MD Abubakar as the head of the Nigeria Police Force by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
Video: The Police officer negotiating a bribe in this picture was sumarily dismissed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4xeLjLReQ
Picture: Nigeria Police Emblem
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