By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

The topic of discussion today is self explanatory from the heading above. With a lot of feeling, I condemn the BLIND craze among the denizens of our dear country, Nigeria to accumulate more and more money than even their great children can be able to spend. The craze is ABSOLUTELY crazy, one must say.

This is happening in a country that a world survey by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) some years ago has shown to be the ‘most religious’ world wide. It is happening in a nation that is said to have more Muslim Koranic reciters than any other country in the world, including Indonesia, which is ranked as number one with a Muslim population of 241 million to Nigeria’s 95 million.

The fierce craze appears to be like a competition, among those in the position to ‘make’ money, so as to out accumulate one another, not for any society-edifying reason, but for the sake of vanity, in most cases.

Some have planes, houses in choice addresses in many parts of the world, many ‘flashy’ vehicles, designer clothes and other items and, for the promiscuous men, beautiful women, and for the promiscuous women, handsome men, accompanying them wherever they go.

Such people are not limited to a particular calling. They could be found in many fields, including religion, the business, the oil bunkering, the civil service and those with no known assignment other than being on the corridors of power, especially at the federal level, and politics at the villa and the various government houses. There is also the membership of the National Assembly (NASS) and the get-rich-quick syndrome, better known on these shores as advance-fee fraud or 419.

There are the clerics from the two leading religions of Islam and Christianity, who, apart from accumulating more money than they can use, also go for vanity accoutrement of life such as sartorial elegance with designer clothing and other paraphernalia of fashion.

There are the business people whose business it is to make more money more than the competition. But the true business people make money only to reinvest it in their and or other businesses so as to make yet more money for further investment. And so continues the circle, which makes them to become stupendously rich in money and wealthy in possession.

There are the biggest of the ‘free loaders’ who steal the crude oil belonging to the Federal Government of Nigeria. They are in two broad categories: The small local oil thieves and the big oil thieves, who work alone or in connivance with foreigners. The stolen Nigerian crude oil is sold either in the high sees or at the international black market of crude oil in (oil) tankers.

It is alleged that in a good year they can make the sales of up to one billion dollars. Collectively, the local were said to be richer than the federal government, and capable of ruthlessly ‘removing’ anybody from office if he tries to stop them from going on with their unpatriotic activities.

The political appointees, the members of the NASS, those on the corridors of power and the civil servants ‘make’ huge amounts of money in the course of their various activities. The amount may accumulate range from millions to billions of dollars, since service in Nigeria is about self, in most cases, not about the nation.

Then there are advance-fee fraud experts, who are referred to as 419ers in Nigeria. They are called so because their crime breaches Section 419 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended. These people, staying in their living or hotel rooms with their laptops, live the high life on the sweat of their victims. 

The person who is believed to have blazed the trails for them is Emanuel Nwude Odinigwe, who is a former director at the Union Bank of Nigeria. He was also known as the Owella of Obanaja. In 1990, he sold a nonexistent airport to a Brazilian bank for 242 million dollars, a development that led to the collapse of the bank. He is currently serving a twenty five- year prison term in Lagos.

There is also the notorious Hushpuppi, alias Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, who lived the high life in Dubai, United Arab Emirates before he was arrested for 419 and taken to the US where he was sentenced to 11 years in prison and sent to the Federal Correctional Institute (FCI) in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

There are also many more advance- fee fraudsters and want-bees all over the country who want to become rich quickly and with ease, without working for the money. This explains the almost daily arrest of ritualists or, in most cases, the gruesome discovery of their activities.

Not least of course, are the bandits and their dastardly activities, which almost always, involve the killing and or abduction or both of innocent people, some of them little children, by the bandits. They release the abducted only after the payment of some amount of money always running into millions. Their ill activities are mostly concentrated in the north western and north eastern parts of the country.

Accumulation or not, one thing is a certainty. This is the truth that the dead do not go to the hereafter with anything but the shroud they are taken to the grave with, in the case of Muslims, and the one casket and the dress that is worn around the dead, no matter how expensive they may be, by the non Muslims. Nobody goes to the afterlife with a kobo of whatever amount of money they might have accumulated when they were alive.

Therefore, the earlier we come to terms with this reality the better for all of us and the nation, instead of taking from the commonwealth from left, right and centre, only to leave everything for others to miss use as they so wish.

Malam Malumfashi  was  former editor at Daily trust newspapers and people daily  newspapers,  he was a Director General, media and publicity to  former Katsina state Governor,  RT Aminu Bello Masari wrote  for  Katsina. Times Newspapers.