Immunity to Steal a Country and a People to Death

Immunity to steal a country and a people to death

It is a travesty, mockery of rule of law, and of accountability that corrupt public officials can only be prosecuted long after their brazen acts of looting public coffer has been known. What is this license to steal called immunity clause? Public corruption is responsible for more than 95% Nigeria ills. Just think about it, almost everything that is wrong with Nigerian is either directly or indirectly link to poverty, national and individual abjectness. Even the most ill informed knows the direct relations between public corruption, especially corruption of capital flight, to both national and individual poverties.

The crimes of public corruption should be treated as treason, crime against the state because this is what is. Public corruption is the worse type of crime and the most violent against a nation and people. Think about the nature, victims and extensiveness of crime of public corruption and compare this evil act to any other form of crime and see the cataclysmic nature of this evil. Three other high crimes in Nigerian are armed robbery, kidnapping and paid assassinations. These three crimes though horrendous, pale when intellectually and logically compare to the crime of public corruption. Assassins and armed bandits during their life span and duration of their banditry, say thirty years, may kill or maim a thousand people (number highly exaggerated). But in just less than two years a public official could steal enough public fund that directly or indirectly kills a nation, a state and hundreds of thousands of people.

Most of the people who engage in the crime of armed robbery are young people and some university graduates, these young people have lost hopes and ambitions in life due to the actions of corrupt public officials. Think of high infant mortality and high death rates, dead public schools, kidnappings, poor state and inexistent of public infrastructures, poor and inadequate medical facilities and services, ill trained, ill equiped and poorly paid police force, and general insecurity just but to name few of the ills of public corruption. There is no doubt that public corruption is the worse form of crime and should therefore be treated as such.

What the so called immunity clause does is allow criminals veiled as politicians to loot public wealth under the cover of this law that protect these criminals at the expense of the general citizenry . These criminals play hide and seek game with the law because they know that the law’s hands are made short by this immunity clause. True democracies like the united State protects public officials from the accesses of the chief executives but not from prosecution for criminal offenses. The immunity clause in itself is criminal.

The only reason that the national legislatures would not abolish this immunity to steal statute is because many members of these two bodies do not have national interest at heart but like many state governors are partners or perpetrators of the crime of public fund embezzlement. But now that "a Jonathan Goodluck is in charge there should be hope that he will pressure the congress to abolish this legally sanctioned stealing of public wealth. Not only must Jonathan work to abolish this immunity 'curse' he must bring corrupt public officials to justice. Failure to prosecute corruption will not only make the president appear weak but complacence. Or bluntly, President's failure to prosecute corruption makes him and his administration corrupt. 

Voci Bawomanh