It is painfully humiliating when flagrant budget padding and stealing not known as corruption were also displayed to the external world. When salary was not paid, one resorted to stealing to feed family. Hijacking money was not only in the Rio Olympics; our foreign embassies suffer the same indignities. Unpaid rents are forcing landlords to kick out foreign officers, our teachers and workers locally. This is how university students started going into nefarious activities. Who is next, our professors?
Most societies elect leaders to make policies and laws governing their countries. But African countries have lost control of their politicians. They are schemers whose only goal is to rob their communities blind. They may have been elected as Presidents, senators and representatives, what we have in place are people that created special niche for themselves to legally drain the treasury with outrageous salaries that are out of step with their fellow citizens and the world.
When it gets to the point when IBB, a former military President of Nigeria said what had been obvious to everyone: that politicians should have been made part time workers, our suspicion has been confirmed long ago. In disguise of discharging their responsibilities, they dole out and execute contracts to cronies. After all, their self-remuneration, there is hardly anything left for infrastructure or to develop the country. That is high way robbery not governance.
Any fund allocated for projects, people, pension, housing, schools and health are hijacked. Not even money kept in the Central Bank is secured. The President can order the Governor of Central Bank to deliver cash to any location specified in his order. What is surprising is how they get away with their jumbo salaries and allocating themselves contracts when common people are not paid salaries.
Our Olympics soccer players could not travel well in advance before the match and had to be bailed out by other sources. They were not sure the money given to them as a personal gift by a Japanese mogul would get to them when authorities want the money channeled through our officials. Somebody was already planning how to hijack their personal money. If anyone ever accused a Nigerian official of hijacking, diverting or stealing funds, they would rather sue you.
National players had complained that they had to pay to play in order to represent the country. Their salaries are usually withheld by some obsequious officials waiting to be bribed before they release some of the salaries, if any. Even coaches have to beg before their salaries, signed and sealed by agreement, are paid. They are yet to withhold salaries of foreign coaches.
The fact is if the first officer decided to be honest, you can still bet your last meal that the next officer will embezzle the fund. No matter how honest the first line officers are, down the line salary, pension, gratuities or anything in form of money and material properties will not get to the recipients it was meant for. This has become a national “privilege” to be the first on line hijacker-caretaker or better still, the next politician.
Nigerians are known among Africans for their bombastic arrogance and extravagant spending on dinners with expensive wines, jewelries mined in Africa but refined outside, on women, cars and houses that deserve the attention of the rich and famous. When we look at the sources of the money, reasonable persons must wonder if our humiliation is worth padding and stealing.
What type of people watch their own suffer, humiliated, starved, rut across the desert and sea just because they want to be the only rich persons among so many? Even capitalism used welfare as shock absorbers to prevent bloody revolution. But in countries without safety nets for the poor, desperate and educated class that have paid their dues are lacking basic source of sustenance. Oppressors of these people still do not face the anger of the masses.
Every once in a while we hear the sporadic shouts of oyeshi, barawo or ole. But do not last enough or sustained by the owners of the future. Those are the university students. They are the most passive in a generation since they can afford all the man-made material toys and gadgets. Without Uranium from Niger, Gold from Ghana, diamond from Sierra Leone, most of these gadgets cannot work. Whatever they paid us in raw material, they get back in 100 folds.
African countries cannot go on this way when the solution lies in our hands. We encourage and aggrandize these politicians to put us in perpetual poverty with no questions asked. Oppressors like children, do not spit out sugar in their mouths. They must be forced to vomit every penny they have accumulated and hijacked for the benefit of all.
Even slave traders had to weigh the cost of revolts in the high seas, at home and abroad to calculated the cost of doing dirty business. These politicians are worse than our chiefs that sold us to slave traders.
By turning them into part-time politicians, it will reduce the amount of legal stealing. But for other forms of bleeding the treasury, you may have to introduce Biblical “eye for an eye” and Sharia law for the rich since Sharia law only punish the poor. Yet people claim you cannot apply arcade laws into a modern society.
There would be no Sharia if it applied to the governors that introduced it. They will fight it tooth and nail with democracy, rule of law, innocent until proven guilty or overwhelm the court with multitude lawyers.