Nigeria as a country blessed with abundant natural and human resources is ‘cursed’ with pretentious religious adherents and hypocrites that ‘worship’ worldly wealth than the Supreme Being they claim to worship. The country lacks sincere and honest leaders to pilot its affairs to lofty heights. Majority if not all of those in leadership positions are criminally minded supported and surrounded by a coterie of sycophants, pimps and fronts.
To drive home the point, it’s in our Nigeria of today serving civil servants supposedly on monthly salary and allowance, own mansions in choice cities including overseas and cruises in exotic limousines without fear of exposure of corruption despite the existence of anti-corruption agencies.
Just of recent, a serving civil servant with Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), birthed from a very wretched family that could not afford steady daily meals not to talk of other luxuries of life had the audacity to donate an SUV worth over N100million to a newly appointed traditional ruler in the state he claims in the North-east. The guy is said to be swimming in a fools’ paradise nursing 2027 gubernatorial ambition.
With such a suspicious, corrupt character that cannot defend his source of sudden wealth even under gunpoint, who are those fools he has assembled to trust the treasury of their state into his itchy fingers?
It’s therefore extremely hard, if not impossible to remain loyal and in love with a country that relegates its citizens to pauperization while confining the people to the breadlines. It’s hard to counsel patriotism to people birthed in squalor and trapped in shanties and hamlets, where dreams asphyxiate under the weight of despair.
Good luck persuading such people to embrace their marginalization while watching the criminally-minded ruling class and their appendages luxuriate in opulence and privileges of proximity to power and still claim to be God-fearing and adherents of religions.
Millions of disgruntled citizens find themselves pitted against a political class grossly insensitive to their plight. It hardly matters if a great number among them personify the same ills depicted by the ruling class and their errand boys in the other sectors of the economy they despise—-all that matters is their entitlements to grief and rage.
As President Tinubu is claimed to have embarked on a radical re-engineering of the economy and social institutions by those sycophants surrounding him, it becomes increasingly difficult to counsel patriotism or faith in his vision going by his past antecedents of deceit.
How can Tinubu preach patience and love for a country that has thus far reduced millions of citizens to more statistics of deprivation and insecurity under his watch? A country where N20.00 is more of value to a policeman at an illegal or legal roadblock than human life? A country where security agents protect and defend high profile crooks as more of criminally-minded than what they pretend to be? A country where corruption is a working tool in both public and private sectors?
To those targeted with the call by governments to be patient, the admonition “to be patient” resonates as a wicked joke meant to confine the people to perpetual poverty, penury and insecurity consciously. Patriotism, once a shared language of citizenship, has fractured into two vastly different dialects. One spoken by the privileged thieving few who navigate the corridors of power with ease, pride and pomposity, and another by the less privileged, the downtrodden pushed by bad governance to the receiving end to endure the daily indignities of poverty, idleness and insecurity.
Patriotism is indeed a hard call to those confined to the fringes of a society, where the thieving ruling class and their off-springs flaunt illicit wealth and privileges on social and traditional media for show-off to mock the cheated and the deprived.
It’s of no surprise that the deprived, feeling abandoned, would prefer to see Nigeria broken and burnt, than to continue watching it evolving into a paradise that excludes them.
To the latter, Tinubu’s gospel of Renewed Hope Agenda feels hallow when their daily reality is characterized by removal of fuel subsidy, soaring food prices and other basic necessities, insecurity, hardships and unabated corrupt practices that outstrips their means.
The government’s plea for continued patience and understanding usually falls on ears tuned to the dirge of unfulfilled promises. And yet, in the corridors of power, there is a dissonance, a belief that the suffering majority can be appeased with few bags of rice, maize, guinea corn and empty words while the thieving class continues to swim in opulence donating exotic cars to their children at weddings, birthdays or jetting out to Dubai or other choice locations for honeymoon and money laundering or, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for deceitful and egocentric religious tourism (Umrah).
How can that be? The person who cannot afford a meal today will never be consoled by tall illogical promises of a lavish feast tomorrow.
The perception that Nigeria is only for the elites—those with connections to cabals and powerful friends—has become entrenched.
This reminds me of the case of injustice against Dr Yusufu Maina Bukar of National Agency for Great Green Wall (NAGGW). This was a man who dedicated his life of service for the good of Nigeria and stamped his foot-prints on the sands of time globally respected and recognized in his area of specialization. He brought honor and respect to Nigeria as a technocrat and specialist in his field. He saved the ecosystem, degraded cases of erosion, deforestation and menace of flood across Nigeria as well as improved vegetation and living standard of various communities with basic necessities of life within NAGGW mandate in at least 11 states of the federation.
But for sentimental and other hidden agendas targeted at certain federal government chief executives, this Right Honorable and Humble Gentleman was unjustifiably removed with fiat from the office he had occupied for just two of his five-year mandate and hurriedly replaced with an already prepared favored Yoruba person.
Dr Bukar was not given any chance by government or the national assembly to defend his actions while in office and in a system we are expected to support to thrive?
So, when Tinubu’s apologists and hangers-on proclaim that he is doing so much that goes unappreciated, they must have forgotten that there are several victims of the administration’s injustice the likes of Dr Bukar, Sir Joseph Ari of the ITF who was also removed and replaced with a Yoruba and those majority at the receiving end bearing the brunt of economic hardships have no ears and patience for such a crafted excuse. They will not listen or subscribe to appeals for understanding and stoic acceptance of hardships while the thieving and favored ruling class enjoys obscene privileges and spoils from the commonwealth for contributing nothing to the good of Nigeria.
The untimely and haphazard removal of fuel subsidy was expected to stabilize the economy as claimed, to provide the funds needed to rebuild an inherited crumbling nation. Since the subsidy was lifted, the states have seen a significant increase in their monthly revenue from the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) so it was said.
In spite of the increase, in most states excluding the likes of Bauchi, Lagos, Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Plateau, Kebbi and Bayelsa, nothing has changed for the good of the people. The majority are left to wallow in abject poverty, starvation and insecurity.
For instance, with all honesty, people in Bauchi State are enjoying corresponding benefits courtesy of good governance that is ameliorating their pains through an effective policy implementation and blockage of sabotage and financial malfeasance.
In some states, governors have vehemently refused to pay steady monthly salaries, backlog of arrears and pensions to retirees. Where are the claimed new roads in some states, improved health facilities, schools that can lift a generation out of ignorance?
Unfortunately for those states, instead, the governors are busy diverting the increased monthly allocation to the purchase of mansions and castles abroad and secure their children’s future in foreign lands far from the misery they created and preside over.
The widening chasm between FAAC’s soaring allocations and the stagnation of development at the local government and state levels is a bitter pill to swallow. If the thieving ruling class persists down this path, the seeds of discontent they sow will eventually bear bitter fruit. If the masses resort to anarchy, there will be no country left for them and their children to loot and display with pride of pomposity.
While the ruling class has so much to answer for, the citizenry, most especially the more literate, enlightened and insightful among us, ought to display greater tact and concern to the rotting system.
Civil society activists, journalists, community and religious leaders, particularly we the journalists, must desist from laundering a decaying system that unconsciously incites the majority against its policies and inflames the polity with partisan views and fabrications to douse created tension.
We must understand that the dubious demagogues in power pulling their strings——those rogues on the corridor of power—-have second and third addresses abroad. If Nigeria is allowed to continue on the present path of decay and ineptitude, those criminally-minded will flee by any available means, leaving us to bear the brunt of the hardship they created. Remember the Gen. Muhammadu Buhari-led military coup of 1983 that truncated the Second Republic due to the sharp corrupt practices of those politicians in power? Umaru Dikko, then a powerful politician and minister for transport and other thieving rogues that pauperized Nigeria had to ran away to other lands for rescue? We are heading to episode two of same scenario.
Therefore, President Tinubu must have to take more proactive steps to engage with the downtrodden consciously pushed to unpleasant situations by his political associates in power, most especially his ministers and other appointees in political offices. He must counsel his political associates to make grand gestures of sacrifice in identifying with the people’s plight while enforcing accountability at all levels of governance as a measure towards good governance, or else, the end result may not be pleasant.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
