By Sam Omatseye
The Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) must be the boldest association in the country. They committed a public wrong but everywhere they claim to be the holy nation.
In their last meet in Enugu, they thrived on the people’s amnesia, or so they thought.
They collected money from Rivers State but would not refund it, and would not even admit it was wrong. It is what Joseph Conrad calls the “the bravado of guilt.” What I want is not just the refund, but a public report of their auditor’s breakdown on how that money was spent.
One of the charades came in the form of Obiageli Katryn Ezekwesili, the unabashed Obidient, who was a speaker at the event.
She was also speaking economics that must be her forte.
But she faltered when she was saying she accepted that President Tinubu should remove fuel subsidy and collapse the exchange rates, but that it was too radical – my words.
Tunji Ojo, interior minister, said what she and others were calling for was applying analgesics to a deep problem. She is now our angel of analgesics.
It is the professional perfidy of such assertions that worry this essayist.
It all shows that Oby and people like her are not following what they have believed all their lives because they don’t like the person who is doing what they believe. They are frowning at their own mirrors.
Oby was in OBJ’s government and wanted all Federal Government schools to be privatized. She was part of the government that hitched itself to the IMF and World Bank now hailing the Tinubu approach.
She honed her career behind the portals of those organisations. Now she wants to apply Band-Aid to a sore, to deoderise a sty. She was weaned on the sanctity of the market, a doctrinaire laissez-faire expert now clad in a new theology.
That was the spirit of the last NBA meeting. They invited the multiple hate speech convict, Julius Malema from South Africa, because the conference was to evangelise hate. And hate dripped from every pore of the conference.
It was the Sultan of Sokoto, Saad Abubakar III, who chastened them and reminded them about their justice as a commodity.
The NBA itself has become a commodity. It was not a conference of rumination. With all the reports of carousing and arousing, no one expected it to empower ideas.
