Not many persons, including this writer, believe that the committee President Goodluck Jonathan set up will ever indict Aviation Minister, Stella Oduah. Quite obviously, we did not hear, not from the president, nor any top government official, any statement of moral umbrage in the first few days of the scandal.
The media had to badger and the civil society had to roil first. Apparently cornered, we began to hear rhetoric of defence and promises of official action. Some facts were not in dispute even before the committee swung into being. First, the car was already procured. Two, the minister did not reject them; hence her spokesperson said the purpose was to offer security for Oduah in the light of threats. Three, Coscharis sold the cars. Four, First Bank anointed it. Five, the NCAA processed the buy. 
These facts, now available in the public domain, could not be invisible to the presidency.
Even if it did not condemn the minister, it ought, at least, to have condemned the purchase for its material exhibitionism, even if no one was legally guilty or erred in the process of procurement.
Matters of this moral magnitude did not require spokespersons’ voice. It hit the bulls’ eye of public service. So both President Jonathan and Oduah should have met the media and said something, or had question-and-answer sessions, however brief. Rather, both persons travelled to Israel to pray under the belly of the heavens. Even if the minister were not guilty, both should not have travelled together. It did not matter that it was to sign an inauspicious treaty about airspace with Israel. The president should have preserved the cathedral grandeur of the office unstained by any suggestion of partiality.
A leadership should lead by example. But here the presidency responded to morality and conscience from below. The tail wagged the dog. We have seen this too many times, whether in the case of the empress of oil, Diezani Alison-Madueke, or the extortionist pension saga of Maina or its clasping of unrepentant convicts in its bosom, or in the president’s rhetoric of surrender recently when he downplayed corruption as a major challenge.
The presidency waited for civil disapproval before, in some of them, taking token actions. In both Madueke’s and its convicts as well as in Maina, the presidency waited for the storm to fizz into silence. But a circus of scandal has emerged, and tragically it involves the President’s angels. They are four. The first lady, Dame Patience, the oil empress Alison-Madueke, the air hostess Stella Oduah and the Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. The fourth is an intellectual scandal, and that is the worst.
Okonjo Iweala reminds me of other top Harvard types who appropriate to themselves the superior answer to the African problem. She reminds me especially of Nicephore Soglo of Benin Republic who swept into power in the early 1990s in a landslide victory while flinty despot Matheiu Kerekou sulked. He marketed his Harvard pedigree but when he mounted the throne, he did not deliver. There have been others like that. They forget that Harvard and World Bank operate on an economic philosophery that applauds Western domination. So, her intelligence is servile. That is the scandal. How come we employ as our economic czar the slave of Western ideas?
They also forget that society determines economics and not vice versa. How much of Nigerian economic history did Okonjo-Iweala learn in the U.S.? And from what perspective? She is presiding over an economy that cannot pay its bills, and, under President Obasanjo, we paid heavy loans while we could not offer Nigerians dividends of democracy in roads, power, health care? Did she not know that payment of loans is not always good economics? Economics is for the people and not the people for the economy. She said in a Thisday interview that the economy is strong with vulnerabilities. What does that mean? Has she weighed the vulnerabilities against the strengths? If more youths are out of jobs and more roads out of joint, where are the strengths? Is she not presiding over an economy that cannot pay the universities now on strike for four months while wastage happens everywhere, including the recent car scandal and the empress of oil junketing around the world on a N2 billion bill?
The story of Dame is quite common? Governor Rotimi Amaechi has posed a question, how come a first lady has so much power as to preside over meetings and give orders to a commissioner of police? It is the tyranny of the President’s first angel. The sins are many, and they are common knowledge.
Oduah’s story is pathetic because she is not the first to inflate or benefit from inflated numbers. She comes across as a scapegoat to her supporters, and they may be right. What she has done happens everywhere in this country, irrespective of state or party. But the nature of the scapegoat is that it has to be sacrificed. Oduah has not helped matters with her failure to perform. She could say that the recent air crash was an act of God, what of the purchase of the cars? Are they acts of God, too?
But other than her own scandal, what of Coscharis? What company is allowed to sell two cars of that nature for N255 million? They are not Bentleys or any of the sort that James Bond exhibits, and even those do not cost that much. Is that not price gouging? Is that expected of any company anywhere in the civilized world? Economies are supposed to work according to ethical principles. If Coscharis sold it at that price, it is because it knows the government can pay anything for anything. What of the First Bank that presided over the transaction? Is it not supposed to follow strict ethical guidelines in approving such deals? The United States has nailed companies accused of taking advantage of a government-sponsored healthcare programme for profiteering. Did the bank find out the real value of the cars before accepting to finance them?
This sort of deal exposes the different legs of government corruption. It begins with the government official, then a private concern and, finally, a bank. The Oduah N255m saga is a metaphor.
The story of Allison-Madueke has been allowed to simmer to death. The peacock lady did not make any statement. She just ignored everyone. In the television series, Charlie’s Angels, it is Charlie the boss who sends the girls on redemptive missions. It is not clear yet, but it seems each of Jonathan’s angels is on her individual errands.
What we see here is called hubris, which means the exercise of pride to impose suffering on others. It is rooted in Greek mythology and history, and anyone found guilty of it was punished according to the law. It is not a crime in modern sense but its damage is no less immense. The opposite is called nemesis, which means pride goes before a fall.
What we see in Oduah’s and other cases is hubris. The people are calling for nemesis. But neither the query from, nor the committee set up by, the president gives any hope.
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