My Lord, Tell me Where to Keep your Bribe.

Prof Niyi Osundare boldly lampoons and ridicules Judges and the NJC in illustrative poetry entitled: My Lord, Tell Me Where To Keep Your Bribe

Do I drop it in your venerable chambers

Or carry the heavy booty to your immaculate mansion

Shall I bury it in the capacious water tankIn your well laundered backyard

Or will it breathe better in the septic tank Since money can deodorize the smelliesrime

Shall I haul it up the atticBetween the ceiling and your lofty roof

Or shall I conjure the walls to open upAnd swallow this sudden bounty from your honest labour

Shall I give a billion to each of your paramoursThe black, the light, the Fanta-yellow

They will surely know how to keep the loot In places too remote for the sniffing dog

Or shall I use the particulars Of your anonymous maidservants and manservants

With their names on overflowing bank accounts While they famish like ownerless dogs

Shall I haul it all to your village In the valley behind seven mountains

Where potholes swallow up the hugest jeep And Penury leaves a scar on every house

My Lord It will take the fastest machine

Many, many days to count this booty; and lucky bank bosses May help themselves to a fraction of the loot

My Lord Tell me where to keep your bribe?

My Lord Tell me where to keep your bribe?

The “last hope of the common man” Has become the last bastion of the criminally rich

A terrible plague bestrides the land Besieged by rapacious judges and venal lawyers

Behind the antiquated wig And the slavish glove

The penguin gown and the obfuscating jargon Is a rot and riot whose stench is choking the land

Behind the rituals and roted rigmaroles Old antics connive with new tricks

Behind the prim-and-proper costumes of masquerades Corruption stands, naked, in its insolent impunity

For sale to the highest bidderInterlocutory and perpetual injunctions

Opulent criminals shop for pliant judges Protect the criminal, enshrine the crime

And Election Petition Tribunals Ah, bless those goldmines and bottomless booties!

Scoundrel vote-riggers romp to electoral victory All hail our buyable Bench and conniving Bar

A million dollars in Their Lordship’s bedroom A million euros in the parlor closet

Countless naira beneath the kitchen sink Our courts are fast running out of Ghana-must-go’s*

The “Temple of Justice” Is broken in every brick

The roof is roundly perforated By termites of graft

My Lord Tell me where to keep your bribe?

Judges doze in the courtroom Having spent all night, counting money and various “gifts”

And the Chief Justice looks on with tired eyes As Corruption usurps his gavel.

Crime pays in this country Corruption has its handsome rewards

Just one judgement sold to the richest bidder Will catapult Judge & Lawyer to the Billionaires’ Club

The Law, they say, is an ass Sometimes fast, sometimes slow

But the Law in Nigeria is a vulture Fat on the cash-and-carry carrion of murdered Conscience

Won gb’ebi f’alare Won gb’are f’elebi**

They kill our trust in the common good These Monsters of Mammon in their garish gowns

Unhappy the land Where jobbers are judges

Where Impunity walks the streets Like a large, invincible Demon

Come Sunday, they troop to the church Friday, they mouth their mantra in pious mosques

But they pervert Justice all week long

And dig us deeper into the hellish hole

Nigeria is a huge corpse With milling maggots on its wretched hulk

They prey every day, they prey every night For the endless decomposition of our common soul

My Most Honourable Lord Just tell me where to keep your bribe.

Large, extremely tough bags used for carrying heavy cash in Nigeria

They declare the innocent guilty

They pronounce the guilty innocent.”