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IMMEDIATELY after Nigeria gained independence from colonial Britain in 1960, it adopted what was known and called Fixed National Plans. So in 1962, even before it became a republic, the country started off with the 1962-1968 fixed national plan which laid emphasis on self-financing and the provision of infrastructure in all parts of the country.
The very first fixed national plan was interrupted by the outbreak in 1967 of the Biafra-Nigeria civil war. The country’s leaders returned to the process immediately after the war which culminated in the drawing up and implementation of the 1970 -1974 national plan. This national Plan marked the beginning of the uneven development and lopsided citing of projects of significant national value across the country.
Perhaps, expectedly, it was during the execution of the 1970 -1974 national plan that the defunct Eastern Region began to get the shortend of the stick, particularly, the core Igbo nation that was the fulcrum of that region. Igbophobia or the fear of the Igbo dominance of many sectors of the country – from the military to politics to governance to the public service to business, among others – had been an issue long before Nigeria’s independence in 1960.
So the declaration of the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967, in Ahiara, Mbaise in today’s Imo state, by Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, hitherto of the Nigerian Army [he was later to be known as the People’s General], was seen and treated as a capital sin for which generations of Ndigbo would continue to pay a huge and perpetual price. Emeka, as he was fondly called, was Igbo and the son of West Africa’s first billionaire, Sir Louis Phillip Odumegwu-Ojukwu. It was, therefore, no surprise that the implementation of the 1970 -1974 national plan took a different turn.
Crumbs of the development plan were sited and grudgingly implemented in the other parts of the defunct Eastern Region which had in January of 1970 been defeated in the civil war. The idea of developing the so-called minority nations surrounding the majority Igbo homeland was to rub in the defeat and to create fissue and enemity between the Igbo and their neighbours. It worked because the other components of the Eastern Region began to despise the Igbo and everything that the Igbo represented. However, a few of them stood with the Igbo.
It was also during the 1970 -1974 national plan that the central government embarked on the massive indigenization of transnational corporations in Nigeria. It was a calculated plan to scheme Ndigbo out of that potential source of wealth and corporate power. It was the period of the satanic policy of ‘gifting’ Igbo bank account holders 20 pounds sterling irrespective of the amount of money in their accounts before the onset of the war in 1967. The victors of the war – the Hausa, the Fulani and the Yoruba – shared the corporate loot among themselves. Of course, the major beneficiaries were the Yoruba. After the Igbo, Yoruba were a lot better placed than the Hausa and Fulani at that time in terms of sophistication, industry, exposure to Western education and experience with the national bureaucracy which were considered necessary to manage private body corporates.
That exercise really marked the beginning of the attainment of corporate positions and acquisition of corporate wealth without enterprise. As my Igbo people are wont to say ‘’ihe obula akotara n’akuku ite na-ala n’akuku onu’’. Easy comes, easy goes will be a very poor translation of that Igbo adage. But the translation would suffice. That saying has always been prescient and enduring no matter the situation and the circumstance. Expectedly, many of the ill-equipped beneficiaries ran many of the corporations aground. In less than one generation, almost all the corporartions that were indigenized and expropriated while the Igbo were officially held down by the winning factions of the Nigerian state had expatriates running them once again.
The tell-tale signs of the devastation of the Igbo nation by a combination of the ravages of the war and the deliberate neglect in spite of the post-war slogan of 3Rs [reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction] are still self-evident more than half a century since the shooting war ended. There are virtually no federal presence. The country’s gas infrastructure masterplan essentially excluded the Igbo in spite of the fact the largest deposit of natural gas in the country is in Imo state, the heart of Igbo land. The same applies to the national rail masterplan. It skirted around the South East geopolitical zone. Igbo youngsters routinely reject recruitment into the armed forces and sundry security agencies because of discrimination and career stagnation. In appointments into political offices, Ndigbo are dealt the bad hand.
The convention since the return to civil rule in 1999 is that the presidency will be rotated between the north and south of the country. But for about 27 years, the Igbo person had neither been president nor vice president. And the Igbo nation is supposed to be one of the major nations in Nigeria. Recently, and apparently in the name of establishing federal presence in the South East, the central government proposed the building of psychiatric hospitals and mental institutions in that part of the country. The hospitals might actually be beneficial given that the Igbo have been through torture for half a century.
The fear or hatred or both for Ndigbo is not abating more than 50 years since the end of the shooting war. If there’s any doubt just recall the bile that attended the 2023 presidential election simply because, Peter Obi, an Igbo, threw his hat into the ring. He was an adult. He was qualified. He is a Nigerian. Or was supposed to be one. In terms of democratic credentials, character, competence and temperament, many Nigerians considered him the most qualified. But he was harrassed and harangued. His supporters were intimidated, harassed, brutalised and bloodied in polling stations, especially in Lagos.
For many of Obi’s traducers, it was immaterial that the same zone was allowed to produce a vice president between 1979 and 1983. Indeed, it has been insinuated that the prospects of an Igbo man, then Vice President Alex Ekwueme, becoming the president in 1987 under the ruling National Party of Nigeria [NPN] prompted the military arm of the country’s ruling elite of the Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba extraction, to stage a coup to sack that government led by a Fulani school teacher, Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari. If there’s any need to demonstrate that the deepseated hatred of the Igbo is still pervasive, watch a recent viral video of an encounter between policemen at a checkpoint on a highway in the South West, and a road user. A ranking officer of the Nigerian Police Force told that returnee traveller [supposedly from the UK], that the only reason he would not deal with him ruthlessly and detain him was because he was not Igbo. He said in the video in which he was aware that he was being recorded that he would have dealt with that road user if his name had sounded even remotely Igbo. That incident was not an outlier. It was mainstream. It runs very deep from the presidency to the lowest rung of our society.
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Every corrupt and hate-filled society has a way of destroying itself. And that’s the case with Nigeria. Under this democratic dispensation, national budgets have not been worth the papers they have been written on since 1999. Padding of budgets have been rife. Their non-implementations have been commonplace. Looting by public servants and politicians of unexpended allocations to ministries, departments and agencies are yearly fares since the dispensation of President Olusegun Obasanjo [1999-2007]. However, under the presidency of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the problems with Nigeria’s national budgets have assumed troubling and monstrous dimensions.
At any given time a minimum of two national budgets are being implemented at the same time. Currently the 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets are supposedly being implemented simultaneously. But as it has emerged Nigerians are merely under the illusion that the three budgets were being implemented until a member of the national assembly said that the 2026 national budget signed into law by the president in April was not being implemented yet. And the country is in the second half of the 2026 fiscal year. Sad as it may be the simultaneous or lack of implementation of our national budgets is the least of this country’s problems. Apart from a non-existent presidential parastatal being allocated a hefty N1.3 billion in the 2026 budget, it has emerged that that budget is riddled with bizzare allocations by those in government from tha presidency to the national assembly.
It does not end there. One of the persons who allegedly inserted, if not smuggled, strange provisions into the current budget has been upfront and vocal in the media justifying his warehousing of about N800,000,000 in an unrelated agency for the upgrade of churches in parts of his constituency in Abia state. With his ‘’full chest’’, as we say here in reference to temerity and impunity, the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, berated Nigerians for saying that he inserted N1 billion into the budget for extra-constitutional ventures. He chided Nigerians for overstating the figure instead of reporting that only N780,000,000 was voted for equipping some churches and training youths in his Bende federal constituency.
It used to be that public servants feel contrition when they are caught with their hands in the cookies jar. Not any more. Now they challenge us to a combat as Benjamin Kalu appears to have done. But he is not alone. If he had any issue it was his public display of the typical and unhelpful Igbo bravado. After all the other persons who inserted more than N22 billion in the same budget to construct phantom traditional rulers’ palaces nationwide, and then renovate ghost palaces have not stepped forward to own their potential loot. The same for those who inserted billions more for solar lights in the desert and bridges without rivers. Like the allocations to churches and mosques totally about N8bn, the other billions of Naira smuggled into the 2026 national budget are poorly masked slush funds – to be stolen or to be illegally deployed for partisan political campaigns in 2027.
After all, a report about the governors of the ruling APC stacking a staggering N800 billion to prosecute the reelection campaign of their presidential candidate has been successfully hushed. At least for now. One report had it that the APC governors were instructed to be deducting a certain percentage from their respective federal financial allocations to build a war chest for 2027. Another report alleged that the sum came from a natural gas firm in which the government of the federation has substantial shares. Irrespective of where the money came from, the reality remains that it is the money of all Nigerians that has been purloined for private political purposes.
If national budgets are designed to be catalysts for development in a place such as Nigeria’s, then this country is doomed. To start with, the sum total of our national budgets in dollar terms is much smaller than the budgets of medium-size cities and counties elsewhere. Secondly, significant portions of the monies are misapplied or brazenly stolen by our rulers. Another tragedy is that these stolen sums are monies borrowed from domestic and international lenders at costs. For those who have the heart and who are interested in coming to grasp with the prospects of a bleak future for the country, they should religiously follow tracka.org/ng/documents. A caveat would be imperative because the picture it paints could be injurious to health.
Below is the summary of a sample of what passes as 2026 budget provisions that are expected to stimulate the human capital formation of our country and ignite its economic growth as captured by the budget tracker. ‘’N962.83 billion for SUVs [sport utility vehicles] and empowerment projects [which] exceeds the combined budget of seven key federal ministries in the 2026 budget’’. This non-governmental agency in addition uncovered ‘’troubling pattern of opaque spending’’ by the Tinubu regime. It identified provision for the acqusition of 39 SUVs for N15.13bn; 2,579 empowerment projects for N947.7bn for a total of N962.83bn. This figure trumps the combined N960.27bn allocated to seven key federal ministries.
A breakdown shows that the ministry of industry, trade & investment was allocated N156.8bn in the 2026 budget; housing, N145.3bn; women affairs, N169.39bn; justice, N150.7bn; livestock development, N177.6bn; aviation & aerospace development, N87.3bn; and petroleum resources, N73.1bn. For the empowerment projects of 2,579, only 70 have clearly identified implementation locations. The NGO then posed unavoidable questions which included how would Nigerians be able to track the progress of projects with no stated locations? How can oversight institutions verify implementation? How can taxpayers know who benefits from these allocations? To compound the opacity, the projects ‘’are spread across 184 implementing agencies, many of which have no statutory mandate to execute empowerment programmes’’.
Our national budgets have been troubled for several years, especially since 1999. But they have been bastardised in the regime of Tinubu. They have become wholesale swindle sheets. The president is contemptuous of Nigerians and he does not care about anybody except himself. He is taking this country to perdition. He should be stopped. That will be a patriotic duty.
