THERE is a place called Sun City in South Africa. It is a land of prosperity where indigenes are almost on a par in terms of wealth and opportunities. In Sun City, you have no reason to be poor. The land in Sun City is ever propitious, as it carries a lot of resources in its belly.

Curiously, a Zulu prince who migrated to Sun City several years earlier, broke the record that the city proudly held by living as an aberrant. He ranked among the poorest that anyone could point at. Many people wondered why his case was so. The King of Sun City heard about his case one day and immediately summoned him to the place. It was the day Sun City was celebrating its annual festival.

“My Prince from Zulu, why are you still a pauper in my kingdom blessed with gold, silver, black oil, big markets and everything good you can think of? Your own father in Zululand was never poor. Why is your case different?

“Your Royal Majesty, sir, I have always found my life to be a great paradox. It happens that anything I touch really does not work. I have been trying my best to live big like others, but circumstances, and other encumbrances would not allow me get there.

“Stop lamenting, my Zulu prince. I, King Ndlove Thambo Zuki, will make you rich.”

In a jiffy, the king commanded his aides to give him one giant cup decorated with the most expensive ornament ever seen. It was a present from some Portuguese had paid him a visit on his coronation day 35 years earlier. “Prince," said the king, “take this and make a fortune out of it. You may never be poor again.”

The zulu prince grabbed the giant cup, bowed respectfully to the king, and immediately started imagining a life of extreme opulence.

The following day, he rushed to the main market, patronised more by expatriates in Sun City. He gently placed the cup on a table, sat in the opposite direction with a flurry of ideas running through his mind. His thought on what to do made him oblivious of the happenings around the market.

In his wildest thoughts, he imagined a white man picking the expensive cup at the sum of $200 million Rand. With that sum, he would quickly buy the most expensive house in Sun City, buy a car that the king never rode in before, employ white men as domestic aides, take the highest traditional title in Sun City, deal ruthlessly with friends, neighbours and others who had mocked him in the past, sleep with the most beautiful women in the city and then offer them paltry sums, and ...wait a minute, send for the first daughter of the king whose hand he would love to have in marriage!

On that thought, he changed position oh his chair so arrogantly that those around him wondered what was amiss.

He continued in his wildest thought.

“The king’s first daughter will come, and then I will ask her to go back home and return to my house with all her belongings. She dares not say no to me. If she says no, I will stretch my leg and them kick her in the buttocks to tell her she is nothing."  Deep in thought, the Prince of Zulu stretched his leg in demonstration of what he would do to the king’s daughter. When he kicked the air absentmindedly, his leg hit the table with the most expensive cup and his new world to be came crashing, and right in front of three white men who milled round it to make a buy, no matter the price. There and then, the reason the zulu prince had been a poor man came into focus.

Many Nigerian legislators are like the zulu prince, if the truth must be told. They are a set of politicians who rose from humble backgrounds to grab federal power and then turned it into a personal asset. In the past few years, it hardly occurred to lawmakers in the federal parliament that they were answerable to the electorate; the men and women who sent them to the Dome to change their worlds, using the federal contacts.

Getting into the Dome, the typical Nigerian legislator settles for a life of opulence, buys houses in Abuja, and foreign lands, and must  pay high taxes to foreign governments. Talk of cars, and you begin to find Hummer, Lexus, Toyota, Hyundai and other Jeeps in his fleet. He keeps hundred of concubines while he loves to carouse with desperate undergraduates who throng Abuja daily for greener pastures. He loves to make laws that would make himself and those in the government the only Nigerians who must have access to power.

Nigerian voters who had seen it all would always wait by the polling units to have their pound of flesh. That is what has just happened when many senators and House of Representatives members lost their seats during the primaries of their respective political parties. The truth is that the same electorate will vote many more of them out during the main election for National Assembly in April. By then, old members who will return to their seats may not be up to two-third. It may happen that the mighty men in the Dome who have fallen would return to their past lives like the Prince of Zulu!

From indications, democracy has started assuming its true meaning in Nigeria, such that the power of voters to deal ruthlessly with erring legislators (governor, president, etc) is being increasingly affirmed.