Lucky but Shameless

Convict Igbinedion runs his mouth because, by plea bargaining, he escaped rotting in gaol. Lucky Igbinedion’s insulting crows in the media of late clearly shows the evil of legal technicality and the dysfunction of plea bargaining in the face of worsening sleaze and corruption.

Igbinedion, convict and best forgotten former governor of Edo State, has suddenly found his voice. He is no thief, he brazenly says in a new media campaign swing, simply because the state he allegedly raped was too poor to be stolen from! Disingenuous, isn’t it?

But it is not Igbinedion’s fault. It is the fault of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). EFCC abandoned a 191-count charge of alleged sleaze to hastily settle for Igbinedion’s guilty plea for not declaring the cash in an account no: 4124013983110, with an unnamed new generation bank, contrary to the provision of Section 27 (3) of the EFCC Act 2008.

In exchange, Igbinedion plea-
bargained to forfeit the N3.5 million in that account.

So, by that stroke of what looked like legal legerdemain, Igbinedion escaped gaol on  December 17, 2008, in Justice Abdul Kafarati’s court, even if the convict was a pitiful sight in the dock before the great escape.

Six years on, the convict has suddenly found his voice! In decent societies, even lucky outcasts should know when and how not to talk. Igbinedion may have been lucky to escape the monumental gaol his alleged humongous sleaze, if proven, should have fetched him.

But he is still a convict. So, he should not delude himself that he could go on a media binge to say whatever he likes, within the ambit of the law. That is the confine of spotless citizens, which Igbinedion is not.

Indeed, what Igbinedion said and how he said it were most insulting and unconscionable. Even the matter of his conviction: if his motives were pure, why did he, like a petty criminal, try to hide that he had N3.5 million in an account in his name? Selective amnesia?  Or petty but stupid lying?

And the scandalous evocation of the Zairean Mobutu in the local Edo economy!

Like Mobutu, the monumental thief who loaned his country money from the trove he had looted from it, Lucky claimed he borrowed money from certain individuals to run his bankrupt state!

Are these individuals then richer than a state with monthly allocations from the Federation Account, aside from locally raised revenue? By the way, were these loans receipted? What interest rates were paid on them — or were they interest- free, coming from super-benevolent patriots to a failed and banana state? And how did the patriotic prodigal repay the debt, after eight useless years in office — or was there patriotic debt forgiveness?

Whatever direction, Igbinedion’s claims stink — and he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Curiously enough, after Igbinedion’s tenure of infamy and the sorry bid of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to rig in a successor to cover his notorious tracks collapsed, new Governor Adams Oshiomhole suddenly found the golden pot the prodigal Igbinedion could not find in eight years!

Now, how does the scion of Edo feel driving on the enhanced roads and other renewed infrastructure of Benin, his hometown — like some useless child who, with contempt, points at his ancestral home with his left index finger?

Indeed, the alleged sleaze from which Igbinedion is trying childish pranks to distance himself, simply because he escaped gaol, is not unlike what the Jewish would call chutzpah: a child commits parricide by killing both of his parents. Yet, he has the satanic nerves to plead with the court to please set him free, simply because he is an orphan!

It was clear to anyone that the Igbinedion gubernatorial era was a disaster. He neither had the temper nor the gravity to be a governor of legacy.

Indeed, a tale made the round after his first term about his father, the Esama, reportedly pleading that even if his son had not done well — which was so clear he hadn’t — at least he should earn a chance for a re-sit, like a failed university student! It was probably an apocryphal tale. But it did capture the spirit of Lucky Igbinedion’s unlucky era of waste and purposelessness.

Of course, Igbinedion is well established in the infamous class of the PDP era in several states: Anambra, Ekiti, Ondo, Oyo, Osun — worthless governors who claimed there was no money to deliver services, only to be proved wrong by their immediate successors.

Between Igbinedion and Oshiomhole, the Edo people know who has raped and who has served them. Igbinedion should find other ways to exhibit his guilt complex, when his conscience tells him he should be in gaol. He should stop insulting the rest of us with his tales by the moonlight.

Nation