By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

I did not intend to write this small article, but the responses I got due to the earlier article I penned and posted kept on coming. Some of them were NEGATIVE while others were positive. There may be others who for one reason or another, prefer not to express their feelings about, ‘Kwaskwaro: The Type Of Politician We Need In NASS’. I wrote and posted the article on 6th August, 2024, and since then I have been inundated with calls and responses. That is to be expected.

But what I did not expect was to be accused of ‘encouraging’ corruption in Nigeria, as some people insinuated in their calls and responses. Many of such people are my good friends, who, I must say, have not reacted in bad faith. But I think they have not been following me through my writings. And if they do, then they must be missing the points I was making. So often, I have pointedly made it clear that Nigeria is a country ridden by corruption, in which none of the contemporary grown ups could be free of blame.

However, these positions could have been worse. I say this with all control of my emotions, because I cannot see why not, if your own very close bloodline could be so rascally against you, as mine were against yours sincerely.

Anyway, it is to be understood that I am by no way encouraging corruption in whatever form. I say what I said not because I thought Honourable Surajo AbdulLahi, a member of the Katsina State House Of Assembly (KTSHA) was a saint, but as I pointed out, he did what even some National Assembly (NASS) members could not do.

“In a country where the passion among politicians is to get as much as possible from the Commonwealth and give back to the society as little as possible, even though they know that they cannot take the money they so amassed with them at the end of their lives, the gesture of the Katsina State House of Assembly member is highly commendable and worthy of recognition by the governments, at both federal and state levels”, is what, to me, is poignant in what I wrote about him.

For the purpose of emphasis, every conscious Nigerian must know that the members of the National Assembly, at both chambers, receive what what is regarded as ‘humongous’ amount of 

money as salary and other allowances. The bulk of the millions they receive is for their so called constituency projects. Many of them get even as much as one billion naira ((1 billion Naira) or more, according to the admission of some of them. This is in addition to the very expensive motor vehicles each one of them gets from the Federal Government, and the additional millions they make from the committees where they perform another so called oversight duties.  Most of them keep the money for themselves, by the way.

So to think that a member of a state house of assembly, who distributed millions in cash and kind, did not do much, because the source of the money is government itself, is really not encouraging our representatives to assist their constituents in a very big way. At least this is like giving back to the society, what companies call ‘corporate responsibility’.

As for corruption, most of us are corrupt. Give many of the trenchant anti-corruption's fighters the chance to ‘also come and eat’, and before you know it, such people would change their world view about corruption and become one of those they were previously wont of accusing of being corrupt. And, in many cases, they turn out to be more corrupt than the others. And mean too, to go with it.

 Last time I regaled my readers with the tale of how a colleague and friend stopped answering my calls and replying to my text messages as soon as he became ‘one of them’. He was given an appointment as the head of a very important federal commission.

Apart from the suspicion and innuendos that writing about individuals in high places bring to the author, there is pretty little else. In many cases, like yours sincerely finds himself, there is absolutely nothing to it. Not even a thank you from the people you are supposed to do a ‘PR’ on, or their Public Relations (PR) people.

The episode reminds me of another friend (though I am by far older than him) who never acknowledged the many positive articles and equally many positive references I wrote and made in other articles about his boss. But on the day that a simple typographic error appeared in an article about his boss, he quickly called me to point the mistake to me. It was an ‘auto correct’ mistake, which was later, in the same article, corrected. But he was perhaps too hasty to call and point out the mistake I made, he failed to notice it.

So, I became not too pleased with his attitude of NOT being grateful, but only ungrateful to the positive articles I wrote about his employer, most of which I penned because I knew he was there, and would appreciate them. 

His action reminds me of a classroom comedy where the teacher purposely wrote a wrong answer to a mathematical question. Many students in the classroom shouted that the teacher was wrong in his answer. The teacher calmly replied to them that he knew that the answer was wrong, but he only placed it to test their gratitude to whatever positives they get from life. All the time he was with them, he had never been wrong and they had never commended him, only now that he made one mistake and many of them pointed it out with glee. He said so to the students, and all those who pointed at the ‘mistake’ became ashamed.

Not unlike I pointed out before, the job of unravelling the human mind, which guides the action or inaction of some compatriots, rests with a very good brother and friend, Alhaji Sanusi Gambo Rumah, who is the answer of the modern day Nigeria’s Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst of the 20th century.

May God give us the courage to persevere and trudge on with what we are good at, even without any benefit, for His sake, and the benefit of our country.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Katsina.