Guest Writer
–
| By Ebongabsi Ekpe-Juda |
THERE is no telling the fact that we are faced with a situation wherein over a million Nigerians have become so wretched in the mist abundant wealth of our country. The current war against corruption by Mr. President reminds me of three books I read as an undergraduate. Two of them were very popular titles in the seventies and early eighties. The third one was a subject book, only those who took the course had anything to do with it. Yet all three help to elucidate our current predicament as a nation. The books are: The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney. The one that was a subject book was the one on Social Change. We can add a few others that were equally popular and germane in understanding our current situation. These are For the Liberation of Nigeria by Yusufu Bala Usman; Intellectuals in Developing Societies by S. H. Alatas; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Frederick Engels; From Hand to Mouth, Marianne Herzog; The Social Construction of Reality , Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann; and John Kenneth Galbraith’s book, The Affluent Society. We can add to these the prison note of Wole Soyinka’s satirical book-The Man Died, and Patrick Wilmot’s title, In Search of Nationhood.
These books will give one a proper understanding of where we are in time. It will help the Bishop Kuka’s of this world to understand that in a war such as this, you do not dissipate energy wildly; otherwise you lose focus and in the end lose the war. It will help the critics of the effort at sanitizing the polity, understand that there is a starting bloc in any enterprise and it will unfortunately and undoubtedly but of necessity must begin with some people. More importantly, it’ll help us all understand the enormity of the task before PMB and then rally round to give him the needed support. And above all, it will help our understanding, so that even if he makes mistakes, that are indispensable in human endeavour, we know how to forgive him, provided those error(s) is/are not borne out of self conceited attempt at deception.
Another very important thing we need to understand is that in this kind of war, the enemies are very wealthy and therefore very powerful. They influence people easily with their stupendous, but ill-gotten wealth. They can buy over most of the media practitioners and use them to weaken the momentum of the war. Therefore, if we ever hope to bequeath unto the generation after us and those unborn a living organism called Nigeria, then we MUST rise up in unison to support this war. To the President, if you should attempt to stop this war, we the silent majority will become the vocal vanguard and will kill you. You were voted in because you promised to stop corruption in our country. We were praying for somebody like you and God in His infinite wisdom has brought you now. You could not have come at a better time than now. If you had come before now, you would have been a monumental failure; like what happen in your first attempt as a military man. God’s time is the best, and now is the auspicious time for you to execute the mandate God brought you into this world to fulfill. You have no choice but to fight this war to the logical end. Victory as they say is very certain.
Was it not in this country, that as undergraduates we ate a quarter chicken three times weekly, Sunday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s and a tin of milk also on those days? Did we not get supplies of toilet papers as you needed? Was it not in this country that our cloths were washed for us and we stayed in hostels with beds, mattresses and with potable water? So why are those things not going on today? The simple explanation is because of corruption. If we continue like this, what will become of this country in the next half a century? The only reason why we are where we are is because past governments not only failed to fight corruption, but encouraged it. The press in this country is culpable. At the first coming of Buhari, undoubtedly it was the press the shot him down. If the press had supported his War Against Indiscipline (WAI), we would not have degenerated to this level.
We need to understand that corruption is a very powerful hydra headed phenomenon, which will only take a determined person to crush. Ghana did it under Jerry Rawlings. It happened in Singapore, so it can happen here and must indeed happen here. No doubt corruption has been with us since the first republic, but it must not continue ad infinitum. Everything that has a beginning must of necessity also have an end. We will all agree that if Buhari had stayed a little longer at his first appearance, this is not where we would have been as a nation. We will also agree that if the likes of IBB and the Jonathans of this world had continued, we would have fizzled out as a people. It was in this country that Umaru Dikko said that Nigerians are not eating from dustbins. It was in this country that a minister told us that the pipelines are vandalized every week, so he spends twenty million US dollars every week to fix the pipelines, whereas they deliberately shot down the gas supplies to take out twenty million U.S. Dollar every week for a phantom repairs of the pipeline that never was vandalized in the first place. Ironically, since Buhari came on board, no pipeline has been vandalized and we are now generating over six thousand megawatts of electricity; which never happened before in the history of this country. This is a country where governors collect statutory allocation monthly and refuse to pay salaries of the civil servants but pay themselves, their wives who are not public officers and all their aides, nobody sees anything wrong with us. Recall that then Ngozi Iwella under Obasanjo, told us that soon as the federal allocation is shared, Naira takes a bashing, because governor buy up the foreign exchange!
This country generates so much from our natural endowment and a good chunk of it goes to individual pockets (remember that Jonathan admitted that four hundred million barrels of crude is stolen daily, and I remarked that such is not carried in jerry cans, that security agents cannot see. I concluded that the government was economical with the truth. That they know those who are taking our crude oil!), and we are told that we are broke, and the government cannot meet its financial obligations and had to borrow to pay salaries, yet receipts outside of oil were not reflected in our revenue earnings. This crime committed by the dominant elite, who have been over recycled and have become bereft of ideas or have been skewed into the mold of thinking corruptly. They have constituted an impediment to national development. They exert negative influence on the wheel of development by their kleptomaniac attitude. Imagine the effect of four hundred barrels of crude on our economy daily for God knows how long, and the short down of the economy on a spurious claim by the minister just to steal money. By his devilish action the banks were forced to close before time, other business were short-down on account of lack of power because of covert action of refusing to supply gas under the pretext of vandalization but just to make way for them to steal.
Corruption is everywhere however, according to Alatas, “Corruption of the political leadership and the bureaucracy in the developing societies has a more devastating effect on society than a similar phenomenon in the West, for the simple reason that a huge portion of the development capital in developing societies is channeled through this leadership and the bureaucracy”. Who can guesstimate the amount of money diverted into private pocket since the advent of the current civilian dispensation, from loans collected both locally and foreign? Yet we all will be required to make sacrifice to service those loans that have made some stupendously rich, while the nation gets poorer. If you add such money to it that stolen from the allocation from the federation account, alongside that stolen from the internally generated revenue and monies given by multilateral agencies which do not go government revenue, you can imagine what has happened to us. Children yet unborn will come to pay for loan they knew nothing about and which their parents never benefited from. I hope PMB will be kind enough to publish what he has discovered as stolen from our commonwealth by these thieving public enemy’s called government officials.
I have seen men who prior to their appointment into public office could hardly afford to eat decent meals, but soon move their children to school abroad while our teachers are not paid their stipends. This is reason the people want PMB to extend his probe beyond Jonathan’s administration because the fraud is monumental and has devastating effect on the country. The August 17th demonstration in support of the probe while condemning Bishop Kuka’s misguided utterance is just the beginning of such protest and agitation. To say the least the people are frustrated with the endless talk about war against corruption that has not been won and has neither progressed beyond lip service; yet before our very eyes we see the economy plundered and raped. We see people get appointment and next day become supper rich, their children living in such affluence that has no rational explanation and beats all logic. It is when they get such appointments that their children are married, in marriages that never last because of the cries of the poor and down trodden, whose commonwealth are used to fund such extravaganza. Any surprise that such marriages breakup soon afterwards? God still answers prayers.
There is the story in one state of a boy after being jobless for years roaming the street when the uncle became a governor and made him his personal assistance; celebrated his first thirty billion with chains of property in the state and Abuja towards the tail end of the uncles tenure. Yet in that state, primary school teachers and local government workers were being owed many months of unpaid salaries. These are funds that could have been channeled into development project. Yet we applaud them and bestow upon them chieftaincy titles.
Is anyone still in doubt why despite the huge revenue generated since the inception of this civil political dispensation, we have not been able to solve one problem out of the numerous problems besetting this country. Until Buhari came we never generated up to four thousand kilowatts of electricity. But ironically in just two months we are generating almost seven thousand kilowatt of electricity. What makes the difference? The answer is corruption. These are all the ramifications of underdevelopment and the exploitation of the imperialist system we operate. We never as a people hoisted on any government what they should do for us. But we give it to their wisdom, the merit of selecting from the array of innumerable problems which present themselves, whose solution is important to mankind. Yet none has been treated. Would it have been impossible for a government to say this is what I want to tackle and be known for that, and then tackles it head long. So if PMB has decided that he wants to kill corruption, has the Bishop without a wife, the right to insult our collective sensitivity, by advising the president to slow down or stop the war against corruption? Is he afraid that as the war goes on he will be implicated in the process?
Frantz Fanon said, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it”. In this generation, lead by PMB, we must cut off from the preceding generation, resist the erosion of our common values and patrimony by crockery of evil elite. We must help nurture the birth of a new nation championed by our own indefatigable PMB, by encouraging this fight to succeed and help to nurture the struggle, even if our blood relation is affected. If this fight fails then we are doomed to fail as a nation. A short while ago we were almost classified as a failed state, because of corruption energized by the lackluster attitude of our rulers then. Now we must rid ourselves and our polity of habits and dispositions capable of corrupting us and minimizing the actions of our fathers of nationalism or of feigning incomprehension when considering their silence in their grave and passivity now that we are in the thick of this fight.
Ebongabasi Ekpe-Juda is a Medical Sociologist, Security Consultant, a social commentator and the author of the books — The Bewitched Church; and — Issues in Security Awareness.
helpinghandsworldwide@yahoo.com
— Aug 31, 2015 @ 13:10 GMT
|
Tags:
