Following the widespread reports of James Ibori's release from prison custody, Sanni K. Yusuf has faulted the huge fanfare that accompanied the news.

 

James Ibori after his release from prison

 

First, it was Bode George - convicted but celebrated after a two-year jail sentence over corruption allegations at the Nigerian Port Authority. #100m, I guess, which could have enriched hundreds of Nigerians, or which could have been expended on developmental projects, was allegedly avariciously peculated by one man. Some psychopathic sycophants, unfortunately including the then-incumbent civilian Head of State, threw an outlandish party to welcome the released prisoner.

 

James Ibori was the second celebrity-convict who enjoyed a similar vicious honour. Ibori was a Nigerian Governor who allegedly siphoned, laundered and embezzled billions alongside his wife and lawyer.

 

The rapacious State Principal, together with his crime allies, was nabbed, arraigned, convicted and sentenced abroad when Nigeria was corruptibly impotent to bring a thief of people's common wealth to book. Does it not defy logic that such a heartless bandit could be accorded a crowdy welcome from the victims of his thievery?

 

The last-incumbent did the worst when he granted state pardon to his Bayelsa brother and former superordinate, Alaiyemesia, who was imprisoned on various charges of corruption. That was an offender who made an attempt to evade justice by turning into a pretty woman overnight. That the embezzlement of people's collective sweats could be cluelessly trivialised along the untenable line of state pardon by one who was supposed to be much more angered was an indisputable attestation to his preposterous assertion - "Stealing isn't corruption". It worries me that an academic who has risen to the ladder of scholarship could not distinguish between sympathy and firmness.

 

Isn't it time a more stringent sanction was placed on convicts of corruption, rather than allowing them to spend a few years in prison, after which their return is accompanied by a jamboree? Why should they not roast in jail forever and are never considered for state pardon, no matter whose ox is gored? Why should they not be made to suffer a commensurate damage they inflicted on the poor masses on account of their pathological greed? Why should they not die? After all, they have indirectly killed, too.

 

It is rather unfortunate that those who have the statutory responsibility of making the aforementioned workable are equally potential culprits. Therefore, except if a messiah would surface, the suggestion may never see the light of the day.

 

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Written by Sanni K. Yusuf