My Eureka moment

Now, I know the holes into which our national wealth has been disappearing all these years. The Daily Trust of February 5 screamed at us in a front page banner headline: States budgeted N12 tr. for salaries in 4 years. I woke up.

It was my Eureka moment. I have always asked myself where the oil wealth was. I searched for it on our roads but given the terrible condition of federal and state roads throughout the country, I did not expect to find it there. I did not. I searched for it in power, as in electricity, but because my neighbours and I still use bush lamps, I knew it could not be there. It wasn’t. I searched for it in our primary, secondary and tertiary institutions, but I came away with the same result: nothing.

I should have known. Our university teachers were on strike for three months and called it off only on February 7. The egg heads too cannot understand why an oilrich nation that has fun in founding universities for politically correct reasons finds no shame in reducing them to centres of frustration, not of learning and research. I searched for it in our health system and my nose was assaulted by the putrid and suppurating sores where there should be healing. I knew it was not there.

For years, I wondered about what was happening to our national wealth. I tried to follow where the fingers were pointing in the annual budgets of federal and state governments. Those budgets usually tell us what the governments expect to earn in a given 12-month period and how they intend to spend it in the areas of social and economic development. Then I got lost. At the end of each budget season I see no evidence of the fulfilment of the promise to level the mountains or fill up the valleys. In simple mathematics, if the mountain is still standing and the valley offers you a menacing look, then a sensible conclusion would be that either the money was not earned or it was earned but not spent as promised.

Now there is a shaft of light in the dark dungeon of my confusion. The wealth of the nation keeps our civil and public servants in service. Just to underline the fine point here, their salaries and allowances come under what is called first line charge. This means that by the unalterable law of making our civil servants happy and ensuring that the engines of our civil services continue to hum in unproductivity, they must be paid before the governments could do anything else with money.

This throws up a new and inevitable problem. By the time the first line charges have been taken care of, the treasury begins to look empty. It can no longer stand on its own. When this happens, as it does every year, only fools would expect the budgeted new road to be built or the old road to be rehabilitated. This confronts the nation with no small dilemma. World history does not show any evidence of nations that leaped from being undeveloped or under-developed to developed by spending the bulk of its earning on salaries. But trust Nigeria to stand the theory of development on its head.

Still my confusion deepens. If the payment of salaries is a priority, how come more than half of the state governments are unable to meet this obligation? And this, despite the federal government’s intervention through bail out funds. Surely, the budgeted 12 trillion Naira in the last four years could not have disappeared into a hole? Abracadabra.

I confess that I have had some headache trying to picture how large the heap of N12 trillion must be were it deposited in my premises. I do not know what a trillion Naira looks like. I am at home with a thousand Naira and a million Naira. I have seen both at close quarters at one time or the other. But a trillion Naira? As frank Spencer would say, na. I see one trillion Naira written as the figure 1 with a good number of noughts stretching all the way to the door steps of the treasury looters.

How the times have changed. We used to worship the millionaires because they were a rarity here. Then in the unstoppable law of progress, the billionaires shoved the millionaires aside and reduced them to inconsequential men and women in the league of the wealthy. The billionaires’ club became the new exclusive club of the wealthy. Its members have such modern toys as private jets and fortified private mansions that Lawrence Aninih could have only envied from a safe distance.

Let me confess that I do not know what a billion Naira looks like either. But I have no doubt that it is much more than a million Naira. I often read the EFCC charges of alleged corruption against some of our former public officers. And if the commission is to be believed, each of them helped himself to our common wealth in billion Naira tranches. If you are not rich you always wonder what a man would do with a billion Naira in one life time. Greed defies logical explanations.

The billionaires have not yet been reduced to a junior league worthy of being ignored because the trillionaires are not yet here. They are on their way. I am sure that if you are reading this by the flickering lights of the evening, EFCC could be on the trail of a trillionaire executive-thief.

The Daily Trust issue under reference has made it easier for me to appreciate the quantum of Naira in the trillion bracket. According to the newspaper, N11.91 trillion would:

a) Complete the Lagos-Kano standard railway gauge line three times

b) Add 15,000 megawatts of electricity to the national grid

c) Build 72 roads equivalent to the Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road.

We are not invited to choose between having or not having civil and public servants on whom the nation now spends 80 per cent of its annual revenue. Choices such as this are impossible to make. If you have some Panadol close by let your mind roam over the possibility that the lumbering giant called Nigeria could have made a steady progress in its development if our governments were to spend less on their workers and more on capital projects. That is not an option because it would be politically incorrect to strive for development if the civil servants are not happy. Governments must always have the will to please the few but not the will to do the right thing to satisfy the many. We plod on.