Senator Lawan’s servile Senate

In yet another pernicious episode confining Nigeria’s future to the garbage dump, the Senate, this week, approved the sums of $16,230,077,718, €1,020,000,000 and $125,000,000 as foreign loans for President Muhammadu Buhari. The alibi: funding his legacy projects. The Senate gave the approval following its consideration of the report of its Committee on Local and Foreign Debts chaired by Senator Clifford Ordia. After giving this servile approval, it then “asked the President to forward the terms and conditions of the loans from the funding agencies to the National Assembly.”

There you have it: approve first, ask questions later, a clear demonstration of legislative lawlessness anchored in self-deprecation. In November 2019, Lawan announced his career as a presidential palace courtier when he declared, quite unabashedly, that any request coming from Buhari was “good for the nation” and the Senate would take immediate action on it! It is a rather dense–no, despicable—Senate that takes immediate, meaning unmediated, action on presidential requests. Not even the Alaafin, ruler of the Oyo empire, could in his day expect such express approvals from the Oyomesi, but gone are the days of great men. If Joe Biden pulled any “express approval” stunt at the US Senate, he would be impeached long before he is able to say “Come on, man!” Donald Trump would be charged with treason and hanged at the Capitol. But Nigeria is another Orwellian animal farm, and Comrade Buhari is always right.

Let no one marvel that the Nigerian ruler, like the Napoleon of Orwell’s imagination, would always end his speeches with a reminder on the credo of the brainwashed: Nigerians must work harder and the Presidency is always right, maxims which every Fellow Nigerian would do well to adopt as his/her own. There’s no escaping Orwell: the remaining traitors in Animal Farm were rounded up in Nineteen Eighty Four, comprehensively debriefed, and made new, realizing that they loved Big Brother!

Sycophancy is a disease, but Lawan’s Senate is poised to take it to dizzying heights. O, how this Senate suits Buhari’s totalitarian temperament! Casting aside its responsibility to the electorate, it fawns for a living and, like all collections of sycophants, laughs heartily at the Presidency’s dry, criminally unfunny jokes. Gudrum, the Scandinavian sycophant in Soyinka’s A Play of Giants, tells the dictator Kamini after his request for a loan has been turned down by the  World Bank: “It’s a plot my Life President. It is part of their deliberate economic sabotage.” Alas, Gudrum escaped from the pages of Soyinka’s epochal play and spoke through Lawan in Abuja in June this year: “Our options are really very limited as a country. Nigeria is not rich, given the circumstances we live in…So, the only option left is for us to borrow, borrow responsibly, utilise it prudently and economically.”

Lawan’s “borrow responsibly” quip was like asking a man to “smoke responsibly” in the full knowledge that smoking causes cancer. As a public intellectual, Lawan knew that no nation had ever borrowed its way into prosperity but he had to please the emperor, a venture for which he must “throw questioners to hyenas” as Tanure Ojaide notes ominously in The Owl Wakes US. Dissent ferments in Lawan’s sorry Senate, suppressed by the threat of presidential persecution, but history already shows the ruins that lie ahead when the crimes of yesteryears receive the bile of rage. Over the centuries, many have panned Noah Webster’s dictionary, but it is a tribute to his genius that his words ring true even in 2021. The Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines a sycophant as “a base parasite; a mean or servile flatterer; especially, a flatterer of princes and great men.” Hence, “a sycophant will everything admire/Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire.”

Sycophants dot the pages of history and literature. During an illness early in the Roman Emperor Caligula’s reign, a commoner seeking undue favours vowed to lay down his life if the emperor recovered. Well, the emperor did and held him to his word, ordering him to be executed. Remember Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels it was who crafted the “Heil Hitler” salute and insisted on the “Der Führer” title. He drove the German Chancellor mad with flattery. Goebbels and his wife eventually committed suicide after poisoning their six children with cyanide. Back home in Nigeria, the demented dictator, General Sani Abacha, had his Daniel Kanu of the Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha (YEAA) fame. Kanu dug his fangs into the succeeding Abdulsalami Abubakar administration, but there was no Youths Earnestly Ask for Abubakar.

In literature, I cannot forget Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the ‘umble’ manipulator and high priest of false praise. We have already mentioned Soyinka’s Gudrum but if you wish to pursue the point, you can pick up a copy of Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow. In a fascinating contribution titled “Sycophants in a Cannibal State” (see Cultural Archives of Atrocity: Essays on the Protest Tradition in Kenyan Literature, Culture and Society), the Kenyan critic Wafula Yenjela avers: “Different types of sycophants who are masters of oratory and other hero-worship skills are pillars of dictatorial polities since they foster a façade of good governance in a space where everything meaningful that drives a society is crumbling.” How true.

In a 2019 intervention, I noted that the much maligned 8th Senate led by Bukola Saraki passed key bills, but President Buhari declined assent to them. Buhari, who under Lawan has been very effusive, sent only two executive bills to the legislature in Saraki’s four years, the worst by any president since 1999. These were the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill and the National Minimum Wage Bill. He withdrew what would have been the third, the Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Act (amendment) Bill, following the in-fighting between his Attorney General and the then EFCC chairman.  While serially disobeying court orders, he rated Saraki and Speaker Yakubu Dogara “very low on patriotism.” Apparently, he rates Lawan’s sorry Senate very highly. I don’t. The road to perdition is paved with sycophancy. Ask Goebbels.

YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE HEADLINES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

Buhari Urges MTN For Quality Service, Downward Price Review In Cost Of Data, Other Services

President Muhammadu Buhari Friday at State House Abuja urged the MTN Group to make the available top-of-the-range service to its Nigerian subscribers…

We Have Not Had Water Supply In Months ― Abeokuta Residents

In spite of the huge investment in the water sector by the government and international organisations, water scarcity has grown to become a perennial nightmare for residents of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital…

Selfies, video calls and Chinese documentaries: The things you’ll meet onboard Lagos-Ibadan train

The Lagos-Ibadan railway was inaugurated recently for a full paid operation by the Nigerian Railway Corporation after about a year of free test-run. Our reporter joined the train to and fro Lagos from Ibadan and tells his experience in this report…