How many billionaires you make?
Most of us have a sense of entitlement from the people we believe we have voted into office. This is as a result of following Attahiru Jega’s lead on elections and brazing the heat or rain to put our thumbs in places necessary to terminate some people’s tenancy from their temporary cozy offices. We hoped that saints would replace them and that all troubles associated with their tenure would go with them. It doesn’t happen and we shift blames between the past ruiners and their successors. If only we had been appointed, we would have been truly disappointed.
We hated military rule with the passion with which ancient Israelites loathed having an unseen God as their king. Those Israelis did something about it; they went to Prophet Samuel who had exclusive access to God’s actual address and demanded he abdicates for them to be governed by live kings, just like their neighbours. This must be the first case of the effects of peer pressure. God took the challenge stoically, exposing the seedy sides of earthly kings, but the Israelites pressed on until they got Saul. The story is better told in the Books of Kings and the accounts of Samuel.
In Naija, we didn’t let soldiers take us to Jerry Rawlings Square before we helped them return to their barracks. But soldiers are wise, they know that every good home has a back entry; so they have found their ways back into public office through the back door. Thus far, we have tasted two returnees at the national level, the notorious Wizard of Ota and now Sai Baba.
As a critic, the Wizard left no one in doubt as to his desire to seek public relevance. If he wasn’t writing his faction of history, he was challenging successors to make policies with human face and milk of human kindness. Talks like that sent him to prison from where he was rehabilitated back to power in 1999. That year, even Julius Berger engineers thought he would give them a run for their expertise in power engineering. But even as a failed student allowed to repeat his class (apologies to Mama Peace); he exposed the theory of the failure of the critic in government. The failure in governance was wily in biting every chunk of public pie.
Years ago, the Wizard confessed to single-handedly handpicking and crowning his successor. Such blatant acknowledgment of usurping the electoral mandate of over 30 million voters ought to count as mutiny, but in Naija, no one paid attention. Once his successor’s plans failed to work, he returned to wear his ragged toga of a critic. We did not understand until recently when we learnt that behind the rock, witches and wizards run the show. A country that heckled Chinedu Nebo for attributing the nation’s struggle against darkness to the unseen forces of witches, wizards and demons recently welcomed Reuben Apati’s occultist treatise on governance.
Anyone who has seen the colony of bats living large on Aso Rock premises would agree with Apati that a diabolic coven ruins the best intentions of those in the seat of power. How could anyone in their right senses approve more private universities for a nation that produces graduates with certificates unworthy of the ink on which their degrees are printed? I’ll answer my own question by saying that at the end of the day, a ruler is not judged by policies that boosts the economy or transforms the nation, they are judged by the answer to the simple question - how many billionaires you make?
President Jones, the only PhD holder without a known dissertation to have led the nation constantly talks about the number of universities he licensed. But he goes further than that; using foreign forum where such declarations make international headlines without contradictions, he now boasts that the duty of a president is to make millionaires. Anyone familiar with the EFCC files, would agree with him on that.
From the silence of irrelevance, the Wizard of Ota would not be outsmarted. Recently when he found himself in the same room with Africa’s richest woman, Folorunsho Alakija, he too declared that from his pre-Aso walls of Yola prisons, his prayer was to make 50 billionaires if he ever tasted power again - an average of one billionaire to 50 million paupers. His god of half measures granted half the score one of who, he swears is Alakija. For the later, contact with Jesus made her a billionaire. Poor Jesus, he trekked on earth, borrowed donkeys; had no money to host the last supper or buy himself a befitting resting place; suddenly those who read his story swear he is making them billionaires!
Who do we believe, the Wizard who holds a degree in Theology from an accredited night school or Alakija who lives the fame? Now Sai Barbarians are praying to be among the next level of billionaires. If they fail, nothing that Sai Baba achieved would erase the shame of being asked how many billionaires you make?