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A good N1.3 trillion was stolen by 32 entities comprising individuals and corporates from the Nigerian purse in barely four years, from 2011 to 2015. Ibrahim Magu, the Acting Chairman of the EFCC made this disclosure recently. He said the heist happened under the regime of President Goodluck Jonathan. Anybody who had followed the tenure of Magu would know this man talks before he thinks. But let’s just give him benefit of the doubt and assume that the figures were correct.
In June 2017, the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), Professor Itse Sagay, made a troubling disclosure: He said: “55 public officials and businessmen under the administrations of Olusegun Obasanjo, Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan stole over N1.35trillion.”
He noted that the figure of looted funds in the period under review was much higher when “fuel subsidy scam, billion arms purchase scam, hundreds of millions of dollars taken from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation by a former minister to bribe election officials in 2015, were taken into consideration.”
Now, if you piece these two disparate statements together, you know these men are lying and simply playing with figures. The mathematics and statistics of the figures do not rhyme. But that’s not my worry here.
My worry is that money has always been missing. And when we do not have enough to steal, we simply borrow to satiate our voluble appetite for the mundane. Just imagine this: In barely four years, the administration of Muhammadu Buhari has borrowed over N11 trillion, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO). And you ask: For what? This is aside the corruption festering in the Buhari government. It took the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and Chairman of the Board of NNPC, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, to blow the lid on a dubious $25 billion contractual agreement contrived on behalf of Nigeria between the Presidency and NNPC Group Managing Director. The details of this agreement were kept away from the Board of the NNPC to chagrin of the minister. Another surreal deal.
Since 1999, so much has been stolen from the national till. The story of grand theft is the same at state and local government level. This explains why some people would rather kill to join the public service via election or by appointment than engage in the drudgery called private sector. It was worse under the military but nobody dared look in the eyes of the armed platoon.
And you just wonder: where has all the stolen money gone? They have gone to subsidise our lifestyle. Since 1960, the nation has been puckered by the blight of corruption. Sometimes I get worried that some people were going to bring democracy to harm. They push Nigeria to the precipice. I’m worried by what brought us here. We are brought to this near-breaking point because of our strange lifestyle that promotes vanity over value. We borrow to finance our lavish lifestyle. Consistently, in our budgets, the recurrent expenditure has always outweighed capital expenditure. This means that our leisure is growing bigger than our productivity. When a nation borrows to finance its budget, it means the nation is consuming more than it is producing; it means that the hunter eats more than what he is able to kill.
This, to me, is the crux of the matter. We have for far too long sustained a bizarre life style. Collectively, our values are twisted, our mores are marinated in deceit and fatuous flamboyance. We live in a dream world where you can wake up a tout and the next moment you are the governor of a state. We live in a strange country where nobody aspires to be a teacher anymore; and where people silently regret going to the university to study medicine because their playmate who studied sociology in the same university, but got a job in the public service, has built mansions and hotels plus other investments with illicit wealth, while the doctor still lives in a rented apartment after many years of practice.
There is something wrong with a national lifestyle in which persons once convicted in foreign lands for drug and other criminal offences would return to Nigeria to be elected governors or appointed to other noble positions. There is something abhorrent in a lifestyle that promotes, rewards and eulogises corruption. Consider this: a political office holder is accused of corrupt enrichment. The man prior to his two or three years stint in public office was scrounging from friend to friend, but in three years, he has erected several mansions, bought estates in Dubai and in other exotic places but rather than investigate and if possible prosecute him, we garland him with national honours. Our lifestyle forbids us to build factories, invest in manufacturing or even enhance the quality of our education.
Over the years, we have subsidised a lifestyle that is at best wasteful. Let’s consider just a few. Only in Nigeria do we buy up full pages in newspapers to felicitate with persons marking their birthdays; to announce death and burial; to congratulate political appointees on their ‘well deserved appointments’. Where else in the third world would you see the type and number of expensive cars as we have on Nigerian roads? Every occasion is a feast.
I am yet to see a nation where the moment someone is appointed, selected or ‘elected’ into public office, all the advice he gets is not a call to serve his fatherland with all his might but a call to loot, to steal and to plunder. From his immediate family would come words like ‘this is our time to make it’; from his friends would come such words as ‘shine your eyes well, well, be smart’. That’s how we mount unnecessary pressure on an otherwise honest man. Before he ever gets his first emolument in his new office, we have organised a community reception for him and secretly passed the bill to him. Pronto, such a man begins to think ‘smart’. Being ‘smart’ in Nigeria is not doing your job well, it is being a good crook, the type that does dirty deals and never gets caught. This is a strange lifestyle.
We have not only made corruption our lifestyle, we subsidise it when we fail, as we always do, to punish the corrupt.
If we do not sanitise the oil and gas sector and rid it of corruption, if we do not punish those who took huge bank loans to import oil but end up importing nothing and only succeeded in ruining their creditor banks, then we have done nothing.
Nigeria will be a great nation if we all tone down our lifestyles. Every Nigerian is guilty of this: we live a delusionary lifestyle of flamboyance. The managing director of a Nigerian bank does not need a private jet, for what? Adherents of Reverend King, a condemned cleric awaiting execution by hanging took over 10 pages of advert to mark his birthday recently in a lavish laudation of vainglory.
If we don’t adjust our collective value system and bring it closer to the Asian values and work ethic, we’re going nowhere. Let’s change our lifestyle beginning with our leaders.
