Every once in a while, misguided leaders and their cronies try to justify their deliberate indifference and complacency towards gullible supporters or the naive Africans. Simply put, they justify and cover up their kleptomaniac tendencies by claiming the population of Nigeria is so overwhelming, even if you divide all the incomes coming in, Nigerians are still poorer than other African countries. So, stealing is not corruption and should be differentiated!
Jonathan was proud of the fact that he created more millionaires than previous Administrations. Their way of creating wealth is for a few privileged politicians, senior civil servants and their relatives to spend ostentatiously around the world. It is their way of attracting investments from foreign countries, they claim. Regardless of the percentage paid to lawyers and financial experts to launder money abroad. Who is fooling whom?
General Abacha who commanded the Treasure as his personal vault, had helpers within and abroad. Chief Antony Ani, a reputable Partner at Peat Marwick was Abacha Finance Minister from 1994 to 1998 claiming major reform while opening the Central Bank foreign currencies at Abacha’s pleasure. There was a selfish interest of course, because he got some of the loot into his own private pocket as most financiers at home and abroad.
The Asian countries that were starving in the 60s and 70s, struggling to kickstart their economy invaded Nigeria in order to send money back to relatives at home. Many were railway workers, teachers in high schools and universities. Africans that qualified in foreign countries could not wait to return home and countries like Nigeria actually sent recruitment teams abroad to bring back educated Nigerians in particular and Diaspora Africans in general.
While countries like China implemented drastic action to limit their population and stipulated a deterrence for embezzlement or any kind of corruption in order to build their economic base and improve the Gross Domestic Products; Nigeria GDP was higher then! It is the same GDP that our politicians are using to justify poverty in Africa today. China and India with higher populations were able to reduce the number of poor while Nigeria became the Poverty Capital of the world!
All the Asian countries that came to Nigeria in order to send money home to feed their families are now major economic powers like China or India. As they send their students abroad to study, universities and technical schools were established locally that can compete with any Western university. Compared to Nigeria, the privileged class impoverished the educational system at every level while funding universities overseas for their children as status symbols.
The military that took over had ridiculed “book soldiers” within them. Those without the training, skill or education to manage even a community, dominated leadership. Just as other countries were being shaped and built by well-informed folks in their respective fields. Overwhelmed with oil income during the Arab Oil Embargo of the early seventies, Nigerian military leaders were boosting that money was not their problem but how to spend it.
Spent, they did like drunken sailors. Instead of investing in manufacturing, building and fabrication of goods and materials; we were buying ready-made goods and services all over the world. Killed local industries and entrepreneur spirits. Apart from toothpicks and pencils usually cited as examples of outrageous spending, Nigerians preferred used car parts, clothes shoes discarded abroad. It got to a point as Nigerians were importing garbage from the high Seas.
Nigeria has been building bridges with foreign experts for ages, yet none of our universities, technical or trade schools have been able to produce world renown engineers capable of building bridges locally, not to mention overseas. We killed our textile industries when it became a status symbol to import cotton and lace materials. A few that were made in Nigeria had to be taken across the border and imported back home in order to be marketable!
Political rivalry between these regular officers as Yakubu Gowon v. “book soldiers” Emeka Ojukwu. Olufemi Olutoye (Cambridge University) Ojukwu (Oxford University), Victor Banjo (Mechanical Engineer), and a few had university degrees. Victor Banjo and Emeka Ojukwu ended up on opposite sides of a tragic execution. Ironically, their political thinking and sharp intelligence eventually led them to command large armies against one other during the War.
These new generations of leaders still rest on the laurels of their fathers’ accomplishments boasting and spending hard earned income from mineral resources and slave labor without thinking about how to leverage or invest the enormous wealth after the political Independence of the sixties. Most of the African new generation leaders were actually consuming the seeds that should have been invested to grow into fruits and future returns.
If you are not well informed, you might accept recent statistics after poor Asian countries overtook Nigeria by prudent management. Since Independence Activists ruled with the African basic tenet that it takes a village to raise a child; when our wealth was judiciously managed, with better policies and dedication in the sixties after Independence. Hoping Nigeria would become a Regional Power today, even predicted outside Africa.
However, the children of the Freedom fighters and some senile leaders controlled by younger cronies became looters raised Nepo-Children that never overgrew their feeding bottle. While their fathers and mothers had to go to school and work to send themselves to school in foreign countries, some even sending money home for their poor parents and siblings; these new leaders implemented the policy to drain the Central Bank for foreign school fees as a right.
Dr. Harold Shodipo and Fela Anikulapo Kuti, among others were jailed for exceeding the One hundred pounds foreign currencies allowed. Nigeria went from there to liberal foreign exchange market no country in the world allowed. Here we are today wrestling to keep up with foreign currencies we have absolutely no control over; either to print or dictate terms of trade. Yet, miseducated Africans at Oxford and Harvard keep preaching the benefits of liberal market.
