Abacha Wasn’t A Thief After All

“OLD boy, now you know the truth.”

“What is the truth; which truth?”

“Now you know that the man you take delight in calling a thief wasn’t one after all. You may continue to call the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha, any name. But you can’t any longer call him a thief.”

“If Abacha wasn’t a thief, who then is?”

“I don’t know. But those who should know have said that the late maximum ruler - to use your expression - did not steal anything. Or, will you know a man more than his wife? If Mrs. Maryam Abacha says her late husband wasn’t a thief, by what authority will you insist that the man was a thief?”

“Oh, if I were a robber, and I took my loot home for my wife and children to enjoy, you expect that my wife (who is the first and biggest beneficiary of the loot ) to go to the street and proclaim me a thief?”

“Ok, if you don’t believe the testimony of Mrs. Abacha, how about those of the three former Heads of State who declared that the late Abacha was not a treasury looter? Is it likely that Generals Mohammed Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdusalaam Abubakar would all at once lie? Come on, the truth is the truth. Why not let the truth set you free?”

“Your naiveté is amazing. In a criminal gang, isn’t mutual self-defence and protection natural? When a robbery gang is in operation and the police shoot down a member of the gang, don’t you see that the rest of the gang always strive to carry the fallen member and escape with him - even if already dead? Why marvel if the surviving members of a criminal gang defend their fallen comrade-in-crime.”

“The analogy doesn’t click. You can’t say because the former Heads of State defended Abacha as not being a thief, they are therefore thieves even if you eventually prove that Abacha actually was a rogue. If they were, why do they still walk free?”

“They walk free because the man who came after them was like them. The one who is there now, touted as a honest man, was put there by the one who was like those who were like Abacha.”

“Wait, wait! Don’t complicate this matter. All these people came after one another. The simple fact is that none of these ex-rulers has been tried and convicted for stealing.”

“That precisely is the point. They have not been tried because no one different from them has mounted the stage. In fact, the atrocities committed by the one who just climbed down the stage and those who were in the cast with him make Abacha look like a miserable pick-pocket.

“Just last Sunday, a national newspaper published a story on how the $8 billion Railway modernisation contract awarded by the last government to the Chinese was inflated by a whooping $5.5 billion. The actual cost of the job was put at only $2.5 billion. The billions of dollars scam in the power sector is there in addition to others yet to be fully accounted for in the NNPC. What is the little above $1 billion recovered from the Abacha loot compared with those ones?”

“Eh hen! Good that you now agree that Abacha was not a thief. That, I believe, is the point those defending Abacha were making.”

“There you go again. The fact that I said that those who came after Abacha were bigger rogues than he does not say he wasn’t a thief. A thief is a thief no matter how small or big the thing he/she stole. That some gang members could gather themselves together to re-write history and call the bad good is a sign of the times we are living through in this country.

“If not for the akotileta (the prodigal and improvident) that was president, who had the greatest opportunity of cleansing this country but blew it because of his meanness and pettiness and who when the time came to leave the scene sold the land to the directionless and compromised bunch who have neither the will nor the ability to recover the land from the locusts, caterpillars and cankerworms who have been eating and destroying the tender shoots of the land — the mindless gang that now insults our collective intelligence wouldn’t have been in a position to do so.”

“You talk with so much bile. There is no quarrel in this matter. You talk as if it was Abacha who stole all the resources of this country. When he died, did he take a thing that belonged to this country to his grave? That’s the point his wife and former colleagues were making. Abacha, as you can see, wasn’t a thief after all!