Pontius Pilate, NEMA and the truth

One reality Nigeria is facing in contemporary time is the blurring of the lines in the nation’s quest to tame corruption, the one evil that has been proven to be at the root of every other one of our problems as a nation. It gets bad to a point where the accuser easily becomes the accused and, in a nation where the collective memory barely transcends a four-day cycle, the table can turn on someone intent on doing good to an extent that their public scouring and crucifixion is a given.

The Director General of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Mustapha Maihaja must be forgiven for his naivety in thinking that good intentions and a patriotic zeal would make it easy for him to present NEMA as an organization that keyed into President Muhammadu Buhari’s anticorruption war. His idea is to make a quick win by promptly rooting out those that were sucking the agency dry and by extension making life unbearable for the block that NEMA is meant to cater to victims of emergency.

The zeal that propels Maihaja is best understood against the backdrop of a country where crises and emergency management have been converted into ATMs by the unscrupulous. These are people without qualms about stealing from the displaced, bereaved, the dead and the dying - including their own parents. It is a cabal that brooks no nonsense from any obstacles to an open season on the nation’s treasury. It does not matter the agency involved, the modus operandi is to crush anyone and anything that that threatens the bank credit alerts from beeping endlessly.

These are the people Maihaja patriotically took on in the belief that he was doing the best in the interest of Nigeria. That belief is not misplaced.