Edgar Hoover, Nuhu Ribadu And The Imperatives Of Selective Amnesia

By

Ahmed Joe

ahyajoe@yahoo.com

 

The human equivalent of a dog wagging its tail in hollow self congratulation after a spate of growling is vintage Mallam Nuhu Ribadu. Dogs better known for their perception, loyalty and dedication are even suggested by those that revere them as demi almightiness when the word dog is spelt backwards.

 

Anyway it is said that all former US Presidents die twice. They first die when they leave the White House (at the end of their term) and when biological clocks eventually stop ticking. The trappings of surrounding splendor and sheer affluence presidential residences exude including the Aso Rock Villa is normally indicative of the high horse trading price associated with getting there in the first place.

 

J. Edgar Hoover , pioneer Director of the FBI who was called “ bulldog” out of earshot largely determined who got into the White House between the late 1920s right up to  May 2, 1972 when he slumped and died in office at age of 77. He started his public service career as a messenger boy at the Library of Congress from where he read Law during the night at the George Washington University. The FBI under Edgar Hoover started as a highly professional crime busting and internal security outfit which by 1959 had 489 well trained and committed special Agents working on a motley of cases and a mere 4 for investigating the entire Mafia in the United States, Mr. Hoover was obviously very selective on who in the underground was holding America prostate. The EFCC strongman, Malam Nuhu Ribadu unlike Hoover does not however have the luxury of a monopoly determining   who should run for public office as evidenced by the doctored EFCC advisory watch list which nevertheless is Nigeria’s first compendium of officially sanctioned malfeasance. F. Delano Roosevelt once said that “in politics nothing happens by accident and if it does it was planned exactly that way”. If so was the timing of the EFCC list a political masterstroke or a genuine attempt at cleansing our political process ? Back to Roosevelt, the latter day President knew what he was talking about because many people then thought the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic then on its maiden voyage was merely a navigational mishap or  “An Act of God” as we say in Nigeria.  Certain influential passengers on board were vehemently opposed to a privately held Federal Reserve Bank the political destiny of which was tied to the forthcoming elections later in the year 1912. JP Morgan (the owner of the ship) had helped draft Roosevelt into the Presidential race (as a spoiler) which ensured the Democrat Woodrow Wilson winning the race by 43% of the vote, incidentally 80 years later Ross Perot will help split the vote to allow Bill Clinton win by the same margin but that is a matter for another day.

The question now is who on the EFCC list is a spoiler or their easing away will facilitate a spoiling through a barrage of judicial interim injunctions ?

 

Hoover’s background in the Library of Congress helped mould his proclivity for indexing individuals he considered a threat to the American way of life with the notable exemption of Mafia , Americans till date will continue to pay for this monumental but calculated oversight. If those deliberately exempted from the EFCC advisory list think they have made a clean break with destiny they must be giving on the Moon – a future more nationalistic government will always exhume their dealings after all the Obasanjo Administration is akin to a Jos museum locomotive driven downhill by a frustrated Grand Prix freak , whether you get on it or it runs over you it will still crash. But before then it is yet still unclear on who between the Presidency and the EFCC  is the falcon or the falconer. The nauseating all time high stench of corruption in our political process is rooted to as far back as the Buhari-Idiagbon days when some LOOBO former Governors were convicted for facilitating graft to prop up the “ideologically superior UPN” then clean sweep Gen. Buhari proclaimed his regime as an off shoot of the Murtala-Obasanjo junta, a certain chicken farmer hurriedly disclaimed any such link which helped strangulate Nigeria’s first anti-corruption crusade. This was at a time Nigerians were grappling with emerging facts from the infamous “Lagos-Ibadan axis of the Nigerian press” on a “General” who was not officer enough to even don his battle fatigues on the fateful Friday 13 1976 till a troop of loyal soldiers rescued him from atop a ceramic armitage shanks water closet of a guest toilet located in a private Ikoyi residence kilometers from Dodan Barracks. Till date mammy market small talk amongst unsettled military pensioners has it that worried neighbors had made discrete enquiries to Julius Berger on how best to fumigate the said premises.

 

A January 1964 FBI memo on the Civil Rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King stated in part – “It should be clear to all of us that King must at some propitious point in the future be revealed to the people of this country and to his negro followers as being actually what he actually is a fraud, demagogue and scoundrel. When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such should be enough if handled properly to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence”. The memo’s suggested replacement to be engineered into position was Samuel Pierce who later served as Secretary for Housing under President Reagan in the 1980s - substitution by proxy in popular participation is therefore hardly a Nigerian innovation.

 

The extremely eccentric and power drunk Hoover who enjoyed humiliating his “betters” was raised in abject poverty and social dislocation. In fact his father had a mental breakdown and died in a public asylum. In recent history, Imelda Marcos also from a hard up family was known to have attended both elementary and part of high school barefooted, her legendary shoe wardrobe eventually helped make up for the blisters. Back in the 1930s a lad from the backwaters of the gentle rolling Abeokuta rocky outcrops despite the mass availability of quality missionary education was so stunted to have aspired to be a motor mechanic, if our lad having made good beyond the wildest divination of any itinerant babalawo without peering down the hood of a Bedford or  sliding under the carriage of an Austin Morris decides to tinker with our country’s democratic future with a doctored list in a fit of his emerging senility one can understand. Ribadu once disarmed a gang of rag-tag armed robbers verbally during his Kongo years; today his self-destructive heroism is at cross-roads

 

Hoover however helped install 8 presidents who were to frightened to sack him while our lawyer and policeman is still making out with his first.

 If Niccolo Machiavelli had been a Nigerian with an unlimited access to a “bank loan” to acquire shares in a conglomerate he oversees its incubation as an elected public servant he probably wouldn’t have said  “… it must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out , more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things. For the REFORMER (emphasis mine) has enemies in all who profit by the old orders”.  Just recently the Minister of Air Transportation was given a suspicious clean bill by his boss over some misapplied funds in circumstances not unlike the alleged PDTF transfers.

In South Africa, the maximum privatization of Government stakes in such enterprises as SAA, ESKOM and DENEL is 30%,  the Government there does not sell its properties it gives them out on long term leases and stubbornly refuses to even sell certain establishments at all preferring as responsible leaders would private sector initiatives to manage them commercially and of course profitably. The corporate excesses of blue chip Cadbury and its unethical overstatement of accounts, Loretta Mabington’s money laundry and the VPs very precise and damning allegations against certain political appointees contained in his PDTF testimony all seem to be in gobbledygook as far as the EFCC is concerned. Mallam Nuhu Ribadu reportedly said that the best thing that ever recently happened to Nigeria is Obasanjo – Good. We also know he collected Nigeria’s first Jumbo loan that accelerated our economic decline and aggravated our morbid dependence on imports. Chin Shi – Huang was also the best thing that happened to China. In fact the country was named after him, today Chinese bloggers bandy around their most favorite description of him which reads “……a bellicose and unfettered  megalomaniac with a waspish nose, eyes like slits, a chicken breast chest and a voice like a jackal”.  

Our leader has had the good fortune of being a “democrat” of having only a gun –the surreptitious OBJ 006 at the moribund DICON named after him (apologies to Comrade Kalashnikov) but what would future Nigerian bloggers describe him as?

 

Every Tuesday afternoon convenient US vice president Dick Cheney has a working lunch with his boss George W in a window less dining room adjacent the Oval Office without the characteristic obeisance of exuberant aides. Such executive camaraderie no thanks to countless EFCC reports will obviously have near fatal consequences in the siege mentality Aso Rock Villa of today.

 

In 2003 a mutiny took place by a wide section of the Philippine Armed Forces. Their aim however was not to capture power but to expose the institutionalized corruption within its upper echelons. They alleged that their superiors regularly traded off military hardware to the Mindanao Muslim separatist guerillas. They further alleged that senior military officials and defense ministry bigwigs instigated hostage takings and bombings to pressurize and help persuade the US government to increase financial aid to the country for its campaign against terrorism.

 

The multi-billion naira extra-budgetery intervention by the Oil and Gas majors to ameliorate the Niger Delta imbroglio is happening when the Minister of State for Defense, the Army Chief and Joint Task Force commander are coastal rain forest indigenes caught in a crossfire of returning to their “send down the rain” mansions at retirement surrounded by amphibious plank shacks inhabited by their angry kinsmen.

 

In 1978 the jumbo loan earlier mentioned was obtained by the then Nigeria Government remnants of which was said to be in the rumor mill  parting gifts to the boys going back to the barracks and cozy retirement for others later in 1979.

The current bazaar is one challenge to the EFCC to help redeem its Scotland Yard image if any unless of course the replica of the Bobby’s helmet on Malam Ribadu’s desk in his office is for sanctimonious decoration and not deep seated inspiration.