It’s Like We Had a Fraud Promo
Ihave not ceased wondering how Nigeria has managed to remain a diplomatic going concern. Everything needed to ruin and imperil the country has taken place. From the stretch of bad governance, through poor leadership, down to the all-wrecking malaise called corruption, Nigeria has had more than a fair share of these vices to cause it to go under. I do not know of any nation, not even Hungary that can survive the degree of mindless pillaging the Nigerian treasury has suffered, and perhaps continue to suffer.
Almost everyday, we are assailed with tons of recovered loot from those who held offices yesterday. It is as if Nigeria once ran a fraud promo. And all the participating contestants struggled to win the premium prize.
And you wonder what kind of system we run. What kind of system makes it that easy for rogues in government to cart away our commonwealth unchecked and undetected? Haba!
Already, many of the accused persons, from whom huge sums have been recovered, still have the effrontery to go to court to challenge one thing or the other in the name of exercise of fundamental human rights. Arrant nonsense! What right does a treasury looter have?
With a fraction of what they looted, they hire the best of lawyers who sure know how to throw spanner into the wheels of the prosecution in such a way that the prosecution takes almost forever, while they gallivant round town in the allure of their lucre.
Pray, where are/were the internal and external auditors when the nation was being robbed blind by these persons?
It is either the auditors are collaborators in the raid of the nation’s treasury or they do not know their work. Either way, they deserve to be put in the dock and dumped.
We do not all need to be economists to know that the signs and symptoms of the present economic recession have been activated long before now. How can a country be this robbed and raped and not go into a coma? Nigeria is a living paradox. We wallow in the poverty of our wealth and in the wealth of our poverty.
Nothing else but bad leadership and sickening corruption explains why we are as we are: abjectly poor. For a country to be this blessed and endowed, yet this depraved and degenerate, bespeaks of something fundamentally wrong with our collective gene. That is why I am convinced that the crave for restructuring of the polity will not necessarily end our woes as a people. Will restructuring of the polity, for instance, mean that all the wizardry in corruption will cease? No, I dare say!
In other words, corruption and unbridled roguery, and not an unrestructured polity is our greatest threat to growth and develop- ment. The terribly depraved persons in high places will be restructured into somewhere, where they will continue their nefarious acts.
I have always advocated a crusade for moral re-armament. I admit that I do not know, in finite details, how it will work, but I know that there is something verily wrong with our attitude to life and living. And unless we change our attitude radically for the better, Nigeria will continue to be tethered to the poles of penury and stagnation.
What kind of restructuring, for instance, will make all the Andrew Yakubus (former GMD of NNPC) of this world not to mass up and store away in fireproof cabinets, the sum of $9,772,800 (Nine Million, Seven Hundred and Seven Two Thousand, Eight Hundred United States Dollars) and another sum of £74,000 (Seventy Four Thousand Pound Sterling) cash, in a facility belonging to him in downtown slums of Sabon Tasha area of Kaduna? This is a man in his 60’s. What does he need that staggering sum for? This is a man who has more than the basic necessities of life, given the privileges attached to his former office. What does he need that sum for? Indeed, it is because he does not need it that is why it is hidden away in a bunker, while the nation groans. He practically ran a mono-transactional cottage bank.
But Yakubu claims it is a gift from an unnamed friend. Gift my foot! Even if it is, he must have compromised his office most dearly to land such a humongous and embarrassing gift. And that same Yakubu, has shamelessly gone to court to challenge the forfeiture order granted by the court.
Few days after the recovery of the Yakubu cash, another huge sum of $37.5 million was recovered from a house (in Banana Island, Lagos) belonging to the former Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Diezani Allison Madueke.
This is apart from the several other sums that have been recovered from her since she left office in 2015. She has indeed been in the mire of several fraudulent controversies whilst she battled her cancer affliction in the UK. She recently spoke, admitting that she may have made mistakes, like all human, while in office, but denied being a thief. That declaration was however closely followed by the discovery of the $37.5 million in her Lagos mansion on February 10, this year, whereas she has been in London for nearly two years. Another stashed away fund!
There is no gainsaying that the NNPC has been over-milked by those minding it over the years. And that is why it has failed to replenish the nation.
The NNPC is the equivalent of Brazil’s Petrobras. Both oil corporations have essentially the same history and functions, but parallel result. While both corporations handle about the same volume of oil production (2.3 mbpd), the income they rake into their various countries are very different.
As at three years ago, Petrobras had nearly 81,000 staffers. But Nigeria’s NNPC is yet struggling with about 5,000… all because the NNPC is not growing, unlike Petrobras with ever expanding subsidiaries.
In Norway, the country is busy saving up all her earnings from oil. But in Nigeria we are not only hugely indebted to other nations and global financial institutions, we are unable to justifiably manage even the funds we borrow. Something is wrong with us!
But our NNPC is wracked down by corruption. Every and anybody appointed into the NNPC as anything believes he/she is been given a ticket to automatic wealth. That is why the corporation has produced wealthy crooks rather than a wealthy nation.
When the then governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and now emir of Kano, HRM Sanusi 11, raised the alarm that some $20 billion was not remitted by the NNPC into the federation account, he was harangued and sacked. Today, we are gradually seeing where those monies went.