By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

                 25-10-2024.

A list of Nigeria’s 50 richest politicians was recently released with all but four of them (one of the four is now deceased) being either former governors, former Vice Presidents or former Presidents. The serving President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is also on the (top of the) list. The riches range from $80 million to $8 billion. All the amount translates to trillion of Naira (the Nigerian currency). I have my doubt about two people on the list, but notwithstanding, the money is still ‘MADE’ from the people’s commonwealth, or from the public coppers. That much, I have no doubt, whatsoever.

The recent revelation of the immediate past Vice President of Nigeria, Professor Osinbajo recently opened a can of worms about the corruption that has defined the conduct of most top government officials and leading politicians in the country since the commencement of the Fourth Republic. He spoke on the NTA where he claimed that:

“A few weeks to the 2015 elections, the sum of $219, million (equivalent to N105,000,000,00.) in cash, was taken out of the Nigerian treasury. For two weeks after that the Central Bank of Nigeria did not have cash dollars. Two weeks after that. Let us take $100 million of that, today that would be about N36, 000,000,000,00. (N36 billion).

“The trader money programme that we were doing where we were giving loans to 2 million petty traders was just N20 million. That is one withdrawal from the treasury of Nigeria. Another day N60 billion was withdrawn by three Nigerians who did what is called the strategic alliance contract. What was taken away was never returned and we are still pursuing them all over the place, all over the world, was almost $3 billion.

“How much is $3 billion? Our entire external reserves is $40 billion today. When we started it was $28 billion. If somebody makes away with &3 billion, how do you then not expect that people would not be poor, how do you then not to expect that we will not have enough to fund education, to fund infrastructure, to fund power? You know sometime I get so emotional about this issue of CORRUPTION. I am so irritated that the same individuals who robbed this nation can come back and tell us that ‘oh, we are the people who can fix it. I think we are dealing with an outrage”.

And a former Minister and former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (he was also overseeing Nigeria’s affairs in Dubai and Qatar), Alhaji Ibrahim Musa Kazaure, not only lamented, but admitted that had Nigeria been lucky in having the correct leadership, the country would have been developed by now. He proposed that all those found guilty of corruptly enriching themselves should be imprisoned, including himself, as being one of those who nearly killed the country because of corruption, especially at the onset of the current democratic dispensation. These revelations and confessions make the job of the President not enviable at all.

But the fire brigade approach adopted by the present administration to assist the poor to be able to feed not only fail to reach its intended target in most cases, but where it does, it is too little to go round to the needy.  Even if the amount of food items sent by the federal government to be sold at a subsidised rate reach them, many of the people do not have the purchasing power to afford them. Twenty some trucks of rice here, thirty trucks of oil there, and what have you, are not the answer to the nation wide hunger that has today become a common place in Nigeria, the solution is the return of some of the subsidies that were removed on the ill-intentioned advice of the World Bank.

And, unless the rumoured removal of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) is political, the current SGF’s alleged none performance is nothing but the case of ‘giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it’. Otherwise, Mr. President should have a good look at the whole country and the problem will stare back at him. The problem is the never-experienced-before poverty, lack, want, hunger and anger in Nigeria.

Since the whole lot is not the making of one single official, the President would have to do a lot of replacements in his administration, by removing many of his none performing aides, some of which, even his ‘daughter’, claimed were stumbling blocks in his administration’s sincere match to a better nation.

In any case, like the latest order by the President, that Ministers, Ministers of State and Heads of Federal Government Agencies should limit their official convoy to only three vehicles and four Policemen and one agent from the Department of State Service (DSS), a measure taken to ‘reduce cost of governance in the country’, the removal of the SGF, important as the office may be, is still a ‘fire brigade’ approach to solving the no-end-in-sight economic problem that is bedevilling the nation. 

The best and, for now, only way out of this monumental problem is the REVERSAL of some of the biting economic policies of the present administration, NOT the ‘religious’ adherence to the World Bank’s prescribed solution. Plus the DRASTIC reduction of the monthly take-home of every lawmaker, whether at the National Assembly ( NASS) or the State Houses of Assembly. Their salaries and allowances are just too outrageously humongous, in a country battling with the ordinary feeding of most of its citizens.

It does not take any specialisation to be a politician in Nigeria. It is a public engagement that fetches disproportionate amount of money in the country. And all it takes to ‘win’ an election is to know a big person in the society, whether they are in or outside the calling. Being a politician is not like being a medical doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect, or a quantity surveyor, or a  nurse, or any professional that requires specialisation. It is an all comers job, not any different from journalism. Everyone can become a politician or a journalist. The Social Media has made everyone one with a smartphone a ‘journalist’.

But the money that the politician gets officially in one year is enough to pay five university professors their lifetime salary, or ten lifetimes for the ‘ordinary’ journalist’. Another area which makes Mr. President’s job unenviable.

By the way, most part of northern Nigeria has been without electricity for the seven days running, and nobody can say with enough convinction that it is not a deliberate decision by the present administration to see it happen this way. To blame some unknown terrorists, like the ‘unknown’ gunmen that terrorise the south eastern part of the country with impunity, is BALDERDASH. The National Grid has collapsed four times within that period, and 11 times in 2024, affecting only the north, in the main.

The Northern Governors are advised to go and meet the President and complain about the matter, if they have not done so before. Let him ta concrete measure to rectify the problem and right the situation right away, if he is not supporting the secessionists agenda of severing the country into two: Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria. The Governors should not mince their words in telling Mr. President that ‘enough is enough’, unless they are content to go along with the situation, smug in the knowledge that the fuel to fire the huge generators at the various government houses would be found no matter the cost of the product.

An Igbo lady recently posed this germane question on the Social Media, asking for the whereabouts of the local so called human rights crusaders, noted for their virulent attacks on none Yoruba leadership of the country, under any pretext. They are however, nowhere to be found, or heard of, since it is now time of ‘EMELEKUN’. People like the so called atheist, Professor Wole Soyinka, the so called man of God, Pastor Tunde Bakare and the so called human rights Lawyer, Femi Falana, and other Yoruba ‘hypocrites’ like them.

They are silent because, no matter the faith of the person at the head of affairs in the country, his TRIBE (Yoruba) comes first and foremost, before the country and his religion, regardless of how low or deliberately low his performance in office may be, his sins are automatically forgiven. But God save the President if he does not belong to the ‘chosen’ tribe. As former Presidents Ebele Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, did not belong.

The tribalist ‘human rights’ crusaders can go to their preferred side and look for another handsomely paying pastime, since, as good errand boys, they have done their job of ensuring the split of Nigeria into two, with the ‘parasitic’ north going on its own way to fend for itself.

We still will not get tired of advising the very wealthy among the business community to redouble their daily FEEDING programme of the NEEDY, they are in fact, in the the overwhelming majority in the Nigeria.

May God give us the means to also be ‘our brother’s and sisters’s’ keeper all the time.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Katsina.