The sounds of cacophonous ignorance send ravenous chills down the spine of bewildered onlookers. It is the rented representatives of the oppressed celebrating the oppression of their oppressors. The incipient, muffled, stealthy and squeaky groans of the oppressed barely sips through the sealed cocoons of their oppressors. The oppressors converged in their airtight, temperature-controlled palatial mansions (courtesy of borrowed public funds) to plot their next bloodsucking strategy.
The oppressed, severely weakened by prolonged psychological agony gasps for the oxygen that is freedom. It is too noisy inside those mansions. The yahoo boys of yesterday are holding a passing out parade as yahoo men with their bellies bulging out of seams. Their new kingdom is their belly. They speak human. But their clothes hide the fur of devilish animals. Their shoes conceal the hoofs of vicious half-beings. Animals of the grasslands of the Nigerian Reserves hold higher levels of ethics than these. They are indeed the Animals of the Belly Kingdom of Nigeria.
Nigeria, where most Yahoo boys having escaped the snares of the rule of law graduated to emasculate all apparatus of power. They set up institutions of failure. Instruments that advance their power base in lieu of institutions that promote communal welfare. A nation raped by grossly incompetent cabal. You are rewarded with a ticket by a governor in lieu of what you did for him personally or what he expects you to do for him in future. Not because your people want you to serve. Those who fail governorship or senatorial elections are transferred to the National ministerial settlement scheme. Hence the wasteful bulge of ministerial appointments since 1999.
Privatization of state assets and petroleum subsidy were used to transfer communal wealth to rent seeking political billionaires. Furthermore, the remainder of public funds are transmitted to their colleagues occupying various forests under the pretext of “non-Kinetic” negotiations with kidnappers. They in turn collectively deploy these resources in state capture.
A foundation of shifty mud projected to carry a multi-storey edifice, the Nigerian Federation. A structure of broomsticks setup to support a doomed edifice. Yet we expect a sustainable future. A future built on the most visible index of state failure – the seasonal sharing of rice by agents of a captured state. Lest we forget, in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, with little money in the system, families were able to feed and afford quality public education for themselves. Thus, palliatives metamorphosed into conduits of corruption which impoverished those dependent on it. Conduits that had never produced results for 40 years but churned out rent seeking billionaires as well as the poverty capital of the world. The biggest conduit being the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC); hence politicians of other regions fight to attach their own conduits to the national cake by creating multiple regional commissions.
Their hypothesis is to create wealth by renting out our natural resources to foreigners, and sharing the rental income as communal wealth. In contrast, 60 years ago, Nigerians created wealth by engineering communal productivity. However, without intellectual readiness of the indigenous populations and good governance; there is no amount of wealth below our grounds that will uplift the livelihood of the population.
Lest we forget, the DRC, Venezuela and Nigeria have the greatest amount of mineral resources, matched with the highest per capita poverty on earth. Today, in all these countries, the people have lost their freedoms. Of all human cataclysms, none is more destructive than a heightened state of ignorance combined with deliberately impoverished minds. Abundance of natural resources merged with ignorance to create an absolute state of poverty. These Pharaohs of the Belly Kingdom, created the largest pool of poverty per capita in the world by selling 8 years of the previous failure to the public using the combination of emotion of tribe and party loyalty. Thereafter they chose to look the other way while the heart was ripped off institutions of democracy. Hence, we achieved insecurity and poverty levels worse than Afghanistan and Somalia.
A ruling class in competition with incompetence. A generation steeped in economic suicide. They set up their cash cow (the NNPCL) to fail. Lined up incompetent hands to run it down. Hence while PetroBrass declared billions of dollars in profit; ours, mortgaged our future oil production for consumptive loans. For years, they borrowed money to vandalize the Nigerian environment, leaving over 100,000 projects uncomplicated, abandoned or substandard. Still they always end up poorer than when they started. The worst being their poverty of mind. They accumulate primitive wealth by any means possible to buy up the conscience of their followers ever ready to argue there is no longer a distinction between good and evil.
When you have stolen more than enough in Nigeria, you will find enough people to pay and they will choose to sell their surname. They sing cacophonous praises of ignorance. There is no shame marketing a previous failure and thereafter the present catastrophe. Truth had left this nation. God appears to have departed from it. The devil is here to reap its havoc. Hence the hunger, poverty and degradation of society.
By allowing such half beings to focus our minds on tribe each time, we give the Pharaohs of the Belly Kingdom an opt out route to accountability. Our reward must not be measured by tribal or party affiliated appointees, whereas the issues are performance based. The Key Performance Index (KPI) that will make Nigeria functional again: Better to appoint 80% of the ministers from “the moon” to achieve even 80% of the quality of: 1) the education we had in the 70s & 80s; 2) the level of security we had in the 70s; and 3) the level of power availability of the 80s. In other words, our KPI is a wish to regress only by 45 years.
“The danger between two mutually unintelligible cultures is more imminent than science fiction”, and that is the bane of our permanent underdevelopment. Unable to collectively define what progress looks like for ourselves; the Pharaohs engineer all the subcultures in Nigeria to run around in circles chasing each other’s tail. But will freedom ever reign again? Yes, we are assured by history. Darkness thrives only in the absence of light. Light must expose the satanic motives of this Belly Kingdom. Ultimately, history assures us; we the people will be free.
Chidi Okemadu M.Sc. (Arch); M.Sc. (Mangt. & Fin.); M.A. (Ed) CeFA, MCIM, MCIOB
