I AM ashamed to write this piece because I know many members of the National Assembly who have honour, who have a name to protect and have striven in public and private to protect that name. But the way material has been flowing from the Senate of the National Assembly in recent times, one wonders whether those who have a name can, without shame, confidently defend that name in public and escape being stoned. What the media has reported of the goings-on in the Senate had nothing to do with fiction writing. It has to do with what distinguished Senators of our Republic have been doing with money that ought to have been channeled to more productive use. And the centre of the current disclosures is Arthur Nzeribe who has a reputation for packaging disaster. He brought disaster to regimes, both abroad and at home. And he is the one man, more than any other single individual or group, who can destroy the smooth walk on the Democracy Highway. But he never could do any harm without willing agents of destabilization. With his recent outing, he seems to have secured such agents, and with them has sown thorns on our Democracy Highway. The truth is that we are all going to have our feet bruised by the thorns Nzeribe and his collaborators have dug into the middle of our highway.

Nzeribe came firing from the hip from where he had been holed up after he was expelled from the floor of the Senate because of allegations of fraud brought from inside the hat of the Senate President who himself had been under threat of Nzeribe’s impeachment moves. More than 80 distinguished Senators had, as it was claimed, signed up for Nzeribe to abort the plans to impeach President Obasanjo; but unknown to them, it was the same weapon that was supposed to be used to depose the Senate president so that Nzeribe would be Nigeria’s third most important person. The Senate president, however, moved faster, planting on Nzeribe charges of fraud and forgery that led to his purported removal of more than N20 million from the kitty of the Senate. When voting to send Nzeribe away was taken, there was not one of those more than 80 pro-Nzeribe Senators that raised a voice to save the maverick politician from Oguta.

But if Anyim Pius Anyim or any other distinguished member of the Senate of the National Assembly had thought that Nzeribe would be incapacitated through suspension from the house, they were wrong. He came smoking with earth-shaking revelations of what the upper House has been up to, and doing with slush money. The first shot was fired at the Senate president. He had improperly enriched himself to the tune of Nl 0 billion, Nzeribe cried in his petition to the Anti-Corruption Commission. The Senate president replied with a N1 billion libel suit. The dust had not settled before Nzeribe went to town again, this time against the Senate president, the deputy Senate president, and his colleagues in the Senate. He told a world press conference in Abuja that the Senate president took N60 million from him to crush the move to impeach President Obasanjo. He said deputy Senate president Ibrahim Mantu helped him to distribute N300 million to other Senators. Again this sum was disbursed to save the President from impeachment. Nzeribe described how the money was collected: "The Senators queued, signed and collected the N3 million bribe, but were not privy to the source of the money." Senator Jonathan Zwingina, chairman of the Senate Committee on Information, denied that what Nzeribe is saying had any iota of truth in it. Nzeribe, he says, is looking for people to sink with. Alhaji lbrahim Mantu seems embarrassed by his being linked with helping to distribute N300 million. But Nzeribe is not blinking. He did apologize to his colleagues in the Senate for putting them into the mess generated by the Senate president’s pre-emptive (or is it preventive) strike. He says he has more to say.

As far as I am concerned, Nzeribe has said enough for the law to take its course. Two things have been established. One is that Nzeribe gave out money which he himself described as a bribe. Another is that the money came from someone other than Nzeribe. It did not come from Senators, he says. If he was fighting to save the President, as he confessed by his anti-impeachment moves, then Nzeribe is saying loudly without mouthing it that the money came from quarters that have interest in the President not being impeached. I do not want to say that Nzeribe may well be telling the world that the Presidency funded his misadventure in the Senate of the National Assembly.

If no one else has committed an offence at this stage, Nzeribe has, by his confession in the material he sent out. I do not know if Nzeribe was bold enough to have sent copies of his petition to the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal. Before Nzeribe took office in 1999, he swore to abide by the Code of Conduct contained in the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. Part 1 of the Schedule shows clearly what a public officer should not do while in office. Part two of the Schedule provides for a Tribunal to try breaches of the code and punish offenders. The Schedule clearly expected the National Assembly to make laws for the operation of the Tribunal, but this was not done between 1979 and 1983 when the civilians were in power after we had opted for the presidential system. It was in 1989 that a decree was promulgated to provide for the establishment of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal to deal with complaints of corruption by public servants for the breaches of its provisions. Where a public officer accepts a breach of the Code, he will be taken to the Tribunal for trial. Nzeribe will, therefore, have no reason but to be tried for what he has accepted he had done. He bribed public officers and he is bound by the consequences of such an act. Aside from the fact that he will be punished for doing what he did, this punishment would not be a bar to any other criminal charges that due process would invoke against him. Those of his colleagues who took the money he offered would have to be tried by the Tribunal and if found guilty would stand condemned by the provisions of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act (Cap 56 of the 1990 Laws of the Federation). And what does the Act provide as punishment? Those found guilty will automatically lose their offices and forfeit what they received to the public purse. And they would he barred from public office for ten years.

So who loses office as a result of the confessions of Nzeribe? The first casualty is Nzeribe himself. He cannot go back to that House because he offered bribes to public officers. The second casualty is the Senate president and the deputy Senate president, if they are tried and found guilty by the Tribunal for receiving and disbursing N60 million and N300 million respectively. The other casualties in the Senate are those senators who queued and received the money from Nzeribe. There is yet another casualty. Who provided the money Nzeribe disbursed? All hands seem to be pointing to outside the Senate. I hope and pray that the fingers do not touch the Presidency on whose behalf Nzeribe seemed to be acting. The President, Vice President, all the ministers, the permanent secretaries and all civil servants, are by definition public officers and are bound by the provisions of the Act. If any of them is identified to be part of Nzeribe’s scheme to corrupt the Senate, then they will have to quit their offices and be barred from public office for ten years, aside of the fact that any of them can also be moved against by the provisions of the laws on corrupt practices. We are in a democracy, and this journey on the freedom highway is regulated by laws which know no friend or foe, but which must hit those who breach their provisions.

The Nzeribe case will show whether our laws are made for a few or for all of us. Time will tell.