Just before the inauguration of the new administration on May /29/2023 there was a frenzy of stealing government items in offices.
In a brazen and insensitive way generators were stolen from hospitals without qualms of the consequences of the action.
People are really getting more daring as some officials took their old television to the office and exchanged it with the new one. Likewise some exchanged their old set of chairs with the office’s better ones.
What does this say about us as a people? This disgraceful behaviour by government officials is a sad commentary of everything that is wrong with Nigeria.
The corruption has graduated from underhanded activities to outright stealing by physically taking what does not belong to you, even if you exchange it with your own it is still wrong since nobody gives you the permission to do so.
I started with this because it is new unlike where you hear of an outgoing governor or his wife taking everything with them from the Government House.
Even during the military regime there was a story of a governor’s wife that took curtains and even spoons.
However it seems that a Government House has to be renovated and new furniture, curtains and so on must be in place before a new governor moves in. Though, during the military rule a governor moved to the Government House as soon as he was posted, but still there might be some form of renovation.
In any event, where are the old items kept? Are they auctioned? Or do some government officials take them? Or loot them as their own right?
Maybe because they have the Government House renovated to their tastes, some governors feel they have to take everything with them as if they are afraid of poverty though they are not poor.
This makes people angry as they could not see any reason for them to take furniture and utensils with them. They feel it is beneath the status of a governor and it is disappointing.
In a phone-in programme on Vision FM in Gusau, the governor of Zamfara State Dauda Lawal, said the former governor Bello Matawalle took seventeen cars from his office and his deputy’s office , claiming they were his own. Others include office equipment, television sets and cookers from the government house.
The former governor is from the All Progressives Congress (APC) while Governor Dauda Lawal is from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and he defeated Matawalle in the election.
There is a likelihood that if a former governor and a new governor were from the same party or if the former governor has ‘installed’ the new governor, no amount of looting in the Government House would be made public.
All the same, looting of offices underscores how unaccountability emboldens people to do as they like, they take government’s property and they don’t expect to be interrogated. They take it as war booty.
The government should go after them, prosecute them to make an example of them. It would not be enough just to ask them to return the items.
One would wonder what such looters would tell their children in terms of morals. If their child brings some item home that they know they have not given him, would they demand an explanation or look away and see it as their type of habit?
Somebody once told me that in one university the children of top officials could be heard arguing that “My father is a bigger thief than yours.”
Is this the type of legacy parents want to leave for their children, the legacy of corruption and looting where even their children accept that they are government thieves?
But if it were in a society where accountability matters the children would bury their heads in shame as their fathers would be cooling their feet in prison.
We should do away with the era of accepting corruption in whatever form and we should not accommodate this type of looting and any type of looting for that matter.
