The Outrageous Reason for Dearth of Outrage in Nigeria

By

Chidera U. Nwogbo, PhD; JD

chideramichaels@gmail.com

 

     

The exasperating thing about the systemic rot in Nigeria is that at heart, almost every Nigerian is a potential looter of public treasury; they literally pray for a chance to get their hands on public funds. The practice is so embedded and imbibed that any officeholder, no matter how insignificant the office, regards himself as “blessed” with the opportunity to embezzle or to extract as much graft as possible from the public he is supposed to serve. The wimpy fuss over the $1.6m “spent” for two armored cars by Ms. Stella Oduah and her NCAA cohorts is one. The “inconclusive” Anambra State’s gubernatorial election is another. The kicker, it would seem, is the fake outrage of one side when the other side gets an upper hand in this their unending gamesmanship.

    

The sad thing though is that some serious minded individuals in the Diaspora really believe that the unthinkable has been perpetrated each time the public is treated to one of these ugly specters. But are these nice people still at the stage of not knowing that that’s what goes on all the time? Why do you think that some Nigerians kill and maim others to get into office, or to get appointed into one? If you are still thinking about it, think about this: Presidents Clinton and the two Bushes live in regular, non-descript houses that are not worth more than $.6m in America’s mindlessly inflated real estate market, while Babangida and Obasanjo live in magnificent hill-top mansions. The only people who are fabulously rich in Nigeria are politicians who have “served” or are “serving” in office, and those who are close to them. Why is there no outrage? Why are Nigerians not in the streets demanding a change? The sad reason for this dearth of outrage is that everyone is bidding his or her own time, waiting for his own turn to loot this bottomless treasury.     

    

A couple of years back, I was in Boston, Massachusetts on a visit, and my host took me along to a meeting of PDP Boston Branch. The membership of this PDP Chapter comprised of what I expected would be the composition of such a meeting in a city like Boston. The membership ran the gamut from the very well educated to the marginally educated, from the professionals who have made their marks in their chosen fields to the lowly clerks and security guards, from the high flying business executives to the cab drivers. But a common thread surprisingly ran through the demeanor and motives of all the members of this political party chapter in this far away Boston vis-à-vis Nigeria – they seemed to be competing for who would be the loudest megaphone for the “accomplishments” of their parent political party back home in Nigeria. At first I wondered if the meeting had always been that boisterous and ludicrous with it’s lavish of encomiums on a political party that had been in government for close to sixteen years and spent billions of dollars, with little to show for it. But on our way back to his house, my host informed me that there had been a representative from Aso Rock at the meeting. This representative, I was informed, had come with the news that a cabinet reshuffle was imminent in the presidency, and that the President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, had intimated to his close associates that he intended to name the next Finance Minister from amongst the Boston PDP Chapter members.

    

The spectacle I beheld that day would be akin to a park of starving dogs fighting for a lone milk-bone thrown into their midst. My shock was palpable given that my host, an accomplished attorney of note, a man whom I knew to be intelligent and very articulate, was among those competing to outdo each other for the benefit of the messenger from Aso Rock. I looked on in horror, my mouth agape, as my host shouted himself hoarse as he concocted tales after another of the Utopia that the PDP-ran government in Nigeria had brought upon the citizenry of Nigeria. I didn’t have to wonder why he had engaged in such absurdity after he told me the mission of the guy from Abuja. My friend wanted to be Nigeria’s next Finance Minister.

    

That evening, after dinner, my mind was still churning from the spectacle I beheld at the venue of the political party meeting. Up until attending that meeting, I never knew that my friend wanted to serve in government. Sure we discussed the situation in Nigeria all the time, but he hadn’t struck me as the type that would sacrifice his established law practice in lieu of service in government. So I asked him why he would want to give up his comfortable life for the unknown in Nigeria. For an answer, he acquired this far away look in his eyes and then informed me that he had dreamt of building an apartment complex of at least 60 units, and a couple of five-star hotels to boot, in cities in Southeast of Nigeria. At first, I didn’t see the connection between my question and his desire to build an apartment complex and two five-star hotels. Then it dawned on me that my friend’s plan was to embezzle money from the government if he was appointed into office in order to accomplish his real estate ambitions. Suffice it to say that he never got the chance to embezzle money from the government for the purpose of achieving his desire because he was never appointed to any position. As a matter of fact, nobody from the Boston Chapter of the PDP was appointed to anything as far as I know.

    

All these were brought back to me on the recent report that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) procured two BMW cars at the cost of $1.6m (N255m) for the Aviation Minister’s use. This would mean that each car was purchased at the cost of about $800,000.00. Give me a break! Even with the added cost of rendering the two vehicles bulletproof, their cost would still insult the intelligence of an imbecile. Having thought about it, I suppose that the money that would transform my friend into a real estate mogul would come from such purchases, had he been appointed a Finance Minister. But let’s face it; this kind of scarcely disguised robbery is not new to government appointees in Nigeria. Such tales are commonplace. I bet that nothing is going to become of this NCAA/Aviation Minister’s blatant heist of public fund. More people will go on stealing public funds in Nigeria while the masses that had nowhere to turn would turn on each other. Some members of the aggrieved masses would turn to armed robbery. Some would turn to kidnapping. Some of them would become assassinations for hire. And some others amongst them would turn to duping the gullible and hapless from both within and outside Nigeria. And the aim of these citizens-turned-criminals would be to measure up to these thieving office holders. The vicious cycle will continue, culminating in native-foreigners like me not moving back home or even visiting for fear of what may befall them.

    

But what is disturbing is that Nigerians who are educated in America, lives in America, and work within the law and orderliness of the American system could not wait to go back home to Nigeria – not to show examples of what products of a saner society they are – but to join the looting of their home country’s treasury; for their individual gain.

    

What has being upright or being of good behavior gotten us?” an architect of Nigerian extraction known to this writer and who had been awarded the building of noteworthy structures in a city in America’s eastern seaboard asked. “The last time I went home,” he said, “a couple of dumb-asses I used to know have erected tall buildings all over the places. During our secondary school days, these roughnecks were known for their brutishness, and I was known for being smart. I learned that one of them served as a local council chairman’s bodyguard, the other served as the same guy’s campaign manager. From there, they moved on to ‘more fertile grounds.’ Now they are both stinking rich. What has book-smartness and uprightness gotten me?

    

So it would seem that Nigerians both at home and in the Diaspora are of the same mind concerning the looting of Nigeria’s public treasury? Fine! But what about the minority of us who just want to live a quiet life devoid of molestation? What about those of us who would like to move back to Nigeria? These minority of individuals do not wish to go back to seek for appointments in government. They do not wish to go back to look for jobs of any kind. “Heck,” said another acquaintance of mine, “such undertaking would be akin to snatching food from a year old child on the ludicrous claim that one is hungrier than the child.” What this acquaintance meant to say was that there is no job to be had in Nigeria; that if there is a few to be found, such few should be left for those who live there.

    

The minority of Nigerians I speak of who want to move back home to Nigeria are going back to start businesses of their own. They want to start businesses that would provide jobs for the teaming jobless youths. But alas, they can’t go back home because they are afraid of being kidnapped for ransom, for being killed by stoned-to-eyeballs armed robbers, or for being killed by relatives who would not want to part with properties they had stolen from these returnees.

    

But not everyone who wants to head back home to Nigeria to start a business has a bulging bank account to build the popular six-apartment two-storey buildings. What the ones without fat bank accounts lack in the amount of money they have accumulated, some of them have abundance of in head knowledge required to start and run profitable business ventures. Take my neighbor (not really my neighbor; we live in the same neighborhood block but we call each other “neighbor”) for instance. He has worked in a cellphone-making company for seventeen years. The company trusts and holds him in such high esteem that when he told them that he was thinking of moving back to Nigeria, they floated ideas of either opening up a manufacturing branch in Nigeria for him to oversee or encouraged him to seek to set up a franchise with them if he didn’t like the first option. His would be the first franchise this cellphone-making company would grant if my neighbor decides to bite. The idea here is that if you don’t have loads of cash to build six-apartment two-storey buildings, and you have influence and knowledge, you can take foreign companies with you back to Nigeria.

    

This writer was part of a delegation of a group that calls itself “Professionals in the Diaspora for Progress in Nigeria” (PDP-N) that went to Abuja about three years ago to consult with the President. Our simple request was that Nigerians in the Diaspora need only a few things from the government in Nigeria in order to commence the repatriation of the amount of wealth and technology that would kick-start a belated industrial revolution in Nigeria. Maybe that was stretching it a little. Be that as it may, we told the President that we need good road and rail network systems in place, that we need a steady supply of power, and that we need a secure environment for business to thrive. We assured the President that the Diasporans needed nothing else. And that if he could fulfill his end of the bargain, that we would try our damnedest best to see that we pull enough Nigerians of means and foreign companies back to Nigeria, so that in about fifteen years, every Nigerian who wants to work will be gainfully employed.

    

What we hadn’t told the President (which was  implicit in everything we said), was that if he could get the hoodlums parading the corridors of power in Nigeria to hold their horses so long that he would provide Nigerians with these three essentials, that they could go back to looting the treasury any time they wanted. Look at it this way, with these three essentials in place, Nigerians would be busy singing the President’s praise to notice any more looting of the treasury.

    

During that trip, we intimated to the President what it looks like (as if he didn’t know that) from outside Nigeria looking in when ex-leaders of Nigeria who presided over the systematic looting of the country’s treasury, afterwards build magnificent mansions on hilltops, and these are in addition to billions of dollars in accounts all over the world, when their counterparts in Europe and America return to their towns and cities poorer than they were before they served as leaders in government. We reminded the President that we believed that the profligacy and “above the law” attitude of those who serve in government in Nigeria is responsible for the moral breakdown of the Nigerian society.

    

We also told him not to be lulled into false comfort because we believed that it was the memory of Nigeria’s fratricidal civil war that has most Nigerians cowed (they don’t want the return of that horrible time); this fear of another civil war, we told him, is being augmented by the avaricious hope of the average Nigerian that he may get his own chance to loot the treasury next. These twin facts, we told him, are keeping the streets from exploding.

    

This brings me to this question that even non-Nigerians had posed to me: what in the world are Nigerians (especially the ones living in Nigeria) waiting for before they take their country back? They think there will be a time when the looters will say they’ve had their fill of the oil money. Perhaps our brothers and sisters inside Nigeria think these looters will one day get religion and decide that they are sinning? Wasn’t it our own Wole Soyinka who said in his book, The Man Died: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” So is it really true that Nigeria is dead? If she is, do those inside Nigeria know this fact? Maybe not! The reason I think they may not know this fact is because I was in a meeting not long ago in which an elderly gentleman (a retired professor from one of Nigeria’s universities) who was on a visit from Nigeria spoke to this meeting. This elderly professor really believed that Nigeria is on her way back. “This man, Jonathan, is performing,” was this elderly gentleman’s constant refrain. He was not the only one that holds such view about Nigeria at the moment.

    

But what if the elderly professor is right? I hope that the President is “performing.” But who is going to tell his lieutenants, like Ms. Stella Oduah that the President is trying to perform? Who is going to tell the marauding armed robbers and the army of kidnappers who are well ensconced in their lucrative “enterprises” to give everyone a break? Who is going to tell those back home in Nigeria to lay off the properties of their kin in the Diaspora? Until every Nigerian, at home or abroad, decides that enough is enough, I predict that nothing will change. Sadly rather, I predict that things are going to get worse. May God help us all!