By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo

In a banana republic, big politicians are gods. They are not gods because they are bullies who arbitrarily ride roughshod over laws and moralities and decide the fate of men. They are gods because sane citizens adopt them as idols they must protect, promote, and worship.

It is the willful mass abdication of citizenship for serfdom that propels the transmutation of an ordinary unscrupulous, and thieving charlatan into a deity, the shepherd of zombielike devotees.

A politician is caught on tape describing in detail how he incorporated rogue companies to siphon the public treasury, and nobody, not even those that would reflexively lynch a petty thief at Oshodi, raise an eyebrow. Usually, on the eve of elections, politicians in democratic societies come under special scrutiny.

But in banana republics, where democracy is a slogan, damning evidence of past misconduct dug up on election eve can be dismissed as malicious blackmail by the political opponent. The indicted politician need not speak. His aides will go into the gutter and splash filth on anyone insisting on accountability.

The devotees of the big politician will jump out of the huts to form human shields around their principal, to deflect all the moral missiles fired at him, to prevent his desecration.

So it’s not shocking. Some time ago, a governor was jailed. When he was governor, he collected state funds and paid them into a private account. From there, he disbursed them to his family and friends. He said he gave his party an agreed sum to fulfil party loyalty. The money given to the party to defray its running costs was paid into the account of a strange company.

Then nobody listened to the beleaguered governor. He implicated the presidency, but the supporters of that noble presidency dismissed the accusations as the ranting of a wounded thief. Anywhere else, all the funds stolen from the treasury of that poor state would have been traced and recovered, and all thieves punished. But not in a banana republic. 

Now an aide of the former vice president has excavated long-buried skeletons. In a recorded phone conversation, the vice president of that implicated president could be heard discussing how he fashioned a special purpose vehicle named Marine Float Ltd to absorb the proceed of Crime and avoid detection. Marine Float was floated to fool the people and blind investigators.  

Since the scandal broke,  the man whose unmistakable voice featured in that tape recording elaborating how he committed sacrileges has been mute. He is contesting to be president. He knows that the voters are not listening, and even if they were, they would forget in a few days.

The only reaction from the camp of the busted man has come from a loquacious aide who has no regard for the bounds of civility. That aide who bothered to react to the damning allegations described the whistleblower as a hungry, unemployed mischief maker. He didn’t bother to deny the authenticity of the tape recording. 

If voters weren’t sentimentally attached to their political deities, a mass denunciation of a god would have taken place. But gods are infallible. When they are caught red-handed committing an atrocity, witnesses must look away or rationalize the act as inevitable or normal.

So special purpose wuruwuru vehicles are standard in banana republics. They are things gods use routinely to collect blessings for their subjects and maintain their divinity. So voters aren’t moved. The god feels no compunction. He might go on to win the elections, and his victory will legitimise corruption and silence whistleblowers.

If political debates were mandatory for major presidential candidates, gods would have been forced to answer some of these questions. The last time a governor was caught on tape stuffing bribe money into his agbada, he simply said it was a set-up.

To some devotees of that politician, ‘set-up’ meant an innocent governor was lured into collecting wads of money and stuffing his gown with it. To some other worshippers of that politician, ‘set-up’ meant the tape was doctored. When the president was asked, he said it was unbelievable.

Perhaps the national intelligence agencies who submit security reports to him deemed it inexplicable. So the governor escaped without any social, let alone legal, sanction. Today that governor marches around from one campaign podium to another, acting as a moral authority for the public. 

Nigeria practices western-style multiparty democracy with sleeping citizens too sentimental to bother with expositions of crimes perpetrated by a leading presidential candidate. So special purpose vehicles will continue plying the highways to the public treasury, carting away monies that belong to hungry out-of-school children into the pockets of greedy politicians.  

Fortunately, new laws demand that the alter egos of companies are declared. But the problem has never been the laws. Laws always need support from the public. Laws function optimally when a critical mass of political vigilantes exist in the polity. In banana republics where big politicians are gods whom millions of subjects deploy themselves as human shields to protect, the law is selective.