RECENTLY, a minister of the Federal Republic fell into the hands of the House of Representatives. He was believed to have committed an open blunder, expectedly on financial matters. The legislators felt he was a thief and so, settled down well to make him climb down from his high horse to make atonements.

As usual, the House committee, which oversights the ministry, took up the task of booking the minister for an offence. Pronto, the committee chairman called a press conference and reeled out what he considered as an infamy noted of the minister. His next option was to summon the minister to a meeting to give his own side of the case.

On the scheduled day of his appearance, the hearing room, set aside as venue, was filled to the brim.

Nigerians who read reports about the event stormed the Natonal Assembly Complex in multitude to catch the glimpse of the supposedly thieving minister. Every member of the committee turned up for the hearing, all wearing forlorn looks. It was as if the minister snatched their wives one after the other.

The chairman called for appearances; it was a Director-General in the Ministry that turned up.

The chairman was livid with rage. “Where is your minister, Mr Director-General,” he thundered arrogantly. Without allowing the DG to make a reply, the chairman took to making a homily on the power of the legislature. He told the visibly shaken and confused DG that his boss had committed sacrilege by failing to turn up.  In a fit of anger, the chairman swore to deal with the daring minister and make him atone heavily for his sin. He gave the minister another 24 hours to report before his committee or else...

The following day, the minister again refused to turn up. The DG told committee members that that his boss was unavoidably absent because of a scheduled meeting with the president. In a jiffy, the committee chairman, who did not find the excuse by the DG funny, flashed a copy of the constitution and quoted Section 88 profusely.

“Tell your minister,” the chairman turned to the DG and pronounced with a wickedly mischievous tone, "that we here say he has been playing with fire. We are giving him the last chance to turn up in the next 24 hours. Otherwise, we would be left with no option than to issue a warrant of arrest against him.”

Interestingly, some correspondents in the House met the minister and told him that law enforcement agents were on their way to his office to arrest him, and then, asked for his response.

In response, the minister laughed, chuckled and cackled and was wiping up droplet of tears from his eyes, when he said, "Gentlemen, never worried about me, those people have no nerve to do it. The truth of the matter is, I have nothing to say and I don’t think what they called me for was serious enough to warrant any defence.” The journalists were about exiting from the minister’s office when he added, "And if any of you would be here in my office by 8.00pm today, you may come. The same people ,who were threatening to arrest me ,will be right here for something more serious.”

The minister sounded unbelievable, yet his prediction came to pass. The following day, no hearing took place, and no official of the Ministry turned up for anything. Case closed forever !

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo did not know how to marshal his point against the lawmakers so well, and so, he described them very gruffly as corrupt. Obasanjo only raised an alarm that if Nigeria would not take heed quickly, legislators will enact laws that would licence them to carry their greed to the extreme. Not too long ago, the federal parliaments raised their pay and each of them now carte home more than 40 million quarterly.

When he was in government as president, both OBJ and legislators were not seeing eye to eye. He had severally refused to implement annual budgets skewed heavily by legislators in favour of constituency projects. Yar’Adua and Jonathan had had causes to reject budgets passed by the Senate and the House on the basis that the budgets were inflated in their own favour.  This made Obasanjo to say “we cannot continue to have a National Assembly that is consuming a disproportional part of our resources and then expect that we would be able to make progress.”

Yet, the Minority Leader of the House, Mohammed Ali Ndume rushed to the press to give it back to the former President. He said Obasanjo instituted large scale pattern of corruption in Nigeria. And for that, he referred to him as the grandfather of corruption in the country. That may be true, but Ndume only appeared to be playing to the gallery by the lame defence he put up on behalf of the National Assembly. It was like the case of a kettle calling the pot black.

Now, if Ndume and others say that the National Assembly is not corrupt as Obasanjo alleged, let him and his other soul mates prepare a Bill for an Act to stop lawmakers from accepting gifts or special packages from Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) after every oversight functions they performed! It is then that we will know whether or not the Dome will continue to be a huge attraction to public office seekers.