Nigerians should pray and hope that 2017 would see those who divided our common patrimony among themselves have their time in the gulag. In fact, a special place should be prepared, in our prisons, for those who embezzled funds meant for pensioners, building hospitals, buying arms and ammunitions to fight insurgency, strengthening our education, constructing roads, providing electricity and just about everything that have impoverished Nigerians and made them destitute in their country.
Can we really sit back to quantify the collateral damage pensioners suffer after spending their entire productive age to serve this country only to have their entitlements embezzled by a band of heartless fellows who happened to administer those funds, at their retirement? Imagine soldiers and other paramilitary men, of whatever rank, who risked their lives in defence of the country, and on retirement, are made to queue for months to collect their entitlements.
Cases of most of them who slumped and died while struggling to ‘file’ their papers are legion. The truth of the matter is that those ‘fillings’ were just euphemism for funds, which had already been embezzled by a gang of very insensitive, rapacious maniacs who shared the money among themselves.
Those patriots, for the greed of a few, were left to die regrettable deaths as a result of hunger, treatable diseases and frustration for serving their fatherland. Or, can anyone ever imagine that a commander would send his troop to the battlefront to face an enemy with sophisticated arms, after he had embezzled the monies meant to provide arms for his soldiers or take care of the welfare of the troop.
The hypothetical shepherd here abandoned his flock to wild animals. Equally, look at the damage to our education, health, road repairs, electricity and other social infrastructure and you would begin to understand the damage to our collective psyche.
Today, after spending billions of dollars to fix electricity in our country, we are still in darkness and those who stole the money are prancing about with latest SUVs, palatial mansions, banks vaults around the world, brimming with illegally acquired money that would keep several of their generations in perpetual luxury.
Sometimes, these heartless fellows also get caught in their game. I know a former Chief of Army staff whose palatial home somewhere in the Eastern part of Nigeria is stock in location with no motorable road! And he had to power his generators 24 hours because of poor public power supply.
These are just few cases in which the national sleaze has happened under our helpless watch. Over the years, we have had governments who only paid lip service to the issue of corruption, for the fact that they were complicit.
You can’t be serious with fighting corruption when you are neck deep in it or you allow your proxies to turn national till into private vaults. You just can’t arrest corruption when you don’t see it as stealing or you bribe the national assembly members to extend your tenure. Corruption cannot be fought when you, as head, made it a national policy to openly bribe your vocal citizens by dispensing patronage, to give you breather to continually change your handover date.
The antics of corrupt people in Nigeria, psychologists will tell you, have a regular pattern. With a large war chest, they exploit options to scuttle investigations by bribing investigators; thwart judiciary processes by exploiting loopholes in the constitution and other technicalities; and water down public opprobrium by engaging dubious public affairs analysts, columnists and commentators to wash them with sweet smelling roses.
You get to hear or read about ‘due process,’ ‘rule of law’ and such other jargons, all in an attempt to either delay the course of justice, whittle down the momentum or the bid for time hoping that the administration will run out of steam. But, my confidence continues to grow because so far, it doesn’t appear as if the Buhari’s administration is about to succumb to this grand blackmail.
So far, Femi Fani-Kayode’s resort to playing the ethnic card is not flying. He has cunningly left the issue of sharing in the bounteous arms scam booty, and he is now the number one fan of the Biafran republic.
He has suddenly remembered the Hausa/Fulani Oligarchy are on the prowl. Before he partook in sharing oil money, I watched him on television pilloring ex President Goodluck Jonathan, calling him clueless and such other ignominious characterisations.
At this juncture, the only advice I can give to President Buhari is that he should not waiver in the face of the antics of corrupt Nigerians and their cohorts. For those who want to thwart the effort of curbing corruption by opting to stop the urgent need for a special court to try corruption cases, should bother to read the road to the British Common Law and the subsequent establishment of an ordered society in, not only Britain but most of Europe.
Again, there is the belief by corrupt elements to think that, by blackmailing the President and the government, they can walk away with their loot. It will not be that easy. In the Communist Manifesto authored by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, published in 1848, they had warned the oppressed, ‘you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chain’.
The import of this is that, those who have appropriated your resources might think they have conquered and appropriated your resources but you can get them back through collective movement. And, what is the movement? Keying into reporting corruption to the authority as advertised by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, so that Nigerians can be part of the fight against this monster.
For those who think ill of Buhari’s fight, too bad. But, when you look around and see the debilitating effect of corruption, you will realise that we must collectively prepare a place in the prisons for these heartless people, including James Ibori whose cohorts have started and shamelessly jubilating over the release of the exconvict.
So, Nigerians must be prepared to help President Buhari’s bury this scourge or get buried by it. The shenanigans of the corrupt should be known by all now and, like the routing of Boko Haram in Sambisa forest, corruption must be nailed and buried for us to have a sane society
