Borrowing In The People’s Name To Steal!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Those who run and ruin Nigeria read like rogue characters in a picaresque. Nigeria has turned out to be a sordid adventure and those who dominate our landscape are the picaros. Roguish, arrogant and bra­vura-like, our rulers prance about and do things that normal people will not do.

Yes, those who presently rule Nigeria are not normal. Their mental constitution is made of something in the realm of the abnormal. Daily, we are confronted with a multiplicity of inanities orchestrated by government officials who are never fazed by their acts of recklessness and perfidy. They have turned Nigeria into a nation of anything goes since infractions now happen without sanctions.

Kill, steal, maim, rape and indulge in any imagin­able or unimaginable crime, the Law will look the other way because those who rule us want it so. For that reason, things get worse by the day. The brazenness of many Nigerians result from the nation’s inability to serve justice as it should be served. Central to our national calamity is our woefully failed justice system. All that has gone wrong with our nation are the resultant effects of the inability of the justice system to rise above the miasma of corruption.

When the present regime took over in 2015, the nation was optimistic that change was here at last. That optimism was buoyed by the thought that corrupt elements would get their just desserts by way of legal prosecution with the judicia­ry doing what it should do to restore sani­ty to our beloved, but beleaguered nation.

Those who can recall will remember that the first three months of President Mu­hammadu Buhari’s regime were marked by some measure of deliberate order and apprehension in view of his earli­er reputation as a military dictator who jailed corrupt politicians for up to three hundred years! So, nobody wanted to be a scapegoat this time around. When Buhari was campaigning in 2014, he anchored his mission on the tripod of revamping the economy, fighting insecurity and eradi­cating corruption.

The latter was consid­ered Nigeria’s biggest problem because it not only ground the economy, it also gave fillip to insecurity and the conditions that birthed it. It was this stark reality that in­formed Professor Niyi Osundare’s admo­nition that if don’t kill corruption, it will kill Nigeria. That admonition became an instant hit as it resonated with everybody. Even the perpetrators of corruption who were senselessly belching from feeding fat on our heirloom heeded the warning.

Sadly, as Buhari was later to confess, old age and the dispensation of democra­cy do not augur well for the kind of things he, together with his tough deputy, Ma­jor Genreal Tunde Idiagbon, did in 1984. The Buhari of 2015 was a septuagenari­an and not the forty-two year-old of 1984, the Buhari of 2015 was functioning in a democratic order with checks and bal­ances which defanged him.

Gone was the Nigerian Security Organization (NSO), gone were the military tribunals, gone were the decrees, gone were the firing squads and in their places were rotund men and women in the temple of justice judisharing in the judiciary, legislooters who dominate the legislature and clum­sy executhieves in the executive arm of government. Besides the encumbrance of age and democratic norms, Buhari appears like a man without ideas about what to do with power. He wanted power, but he lacked ideals.

Yes, it has been said that the coup plotters of 1983 did what they did in Lagos and brought in Buhari to become head of state. It has also been said that his eventual emergence as pres­ident in 2015 was the work of people who drafted him into the race once more after three previous failures. In this, he was like Julius Caesar who demurred despite wanting power. Buhari is a bad student of history, politics and power. He badly lacks the ideals of a statesman and knows next to nothing about statecraft. It is not enough to claim to be Mr. Clean, while all around you is massive corruption that has brought the nation to her knees.

Buhari earned, what people now re­gard as undeserved, the epithet of an­ti-corruption crusader. Corruption is now more pervasive and walks on all fours under Buhari’s watch. The recent bor­rowing of eight hundred million dollars in the name of palliatives for the people in anticipation of petroleum subsidy re­moval in June is an instance of corrup­tion. What has become apparent is that Nigerian governments borrow to steal.

Such borrowings are usually anchored on one government project or the other, but the underlying cum ulterior motive is that such monies are meant for sharing among politicians. The money is shared even before it hits government coffers. What government is saying about this recent borrowing less than two months to its exit date is that it was meant to cushion the effect of petroleum subsidy removal on the people and they put the number of beneficiaries at fifty million in a nation where about one hundred and sixty million people are living in extreme poverty.

The Buhari regime is an irony of tragic proportions. Buhari was in the vanguard of the protest against petro­leum subsidy by the regime it succeed­ed. Yet, Buhari went on to implement the worst subsidy regime in Nigeria if not the entire world. And who doesn’t know that petroleum subsidy is the biggest corrup­tion facilitator in Nigeria.

The Buhari regime has gorged itself on our commonwealth and it must offer itself a humungous exit package. Its spin doctors must have smiled and conjectured that an eight hundred million dollars loan from the World Bank in the name of the poor will be a good exit loot and they got it. Again, this is happening because those who looted Nigeria between 1985 and 2015 are walking free and regrouping to cap­ture state power.

What has been consis­tent is that Nigeria has become a case study in state capture. Those who looted and ruined Nigeria in the past instead of serving interminable jail terms are the ones calling the shots all over Nigeria. So, massive corruption via looting becomes attractive as it is now the surest way of acquiring political power. And once po­litical power is attained, unimaginable immunity becomes your fortune. This is why the elite when partying over new loots will ululate “looting continua….Ni­geria is certain….no shaking”.

The Buhari government is leaving be­hind a heavy debt portfolio as our debt stands at an unprecedented 77 trillion nai­ra. Nigeria is broke and last December the World Bank said the country would be spending 123% of her revenue for debt servicing in the year 2023. Nigeria is bleeding because what constitute her debt were never used for development purposes, but were stolen.

Our leaders have long perfected the art of just bor­rowing to steal. They now borrow in the people’s name to steal. The eight hundred million dollars was taken from the World Bank because of the poor, but the rich and politically powerful will share it and only a few crumbs will reach the vulner­able.

It happened with the COVID-19 pal­liatives which governors, senators and their cronies stole while the people for whom they were meant suffered hunger pangs. It took the rage that attended the ENDSARS riots in October 2020 for the hidden palliatives to be discovered and the people that had become mobs took what rightly belonged to them.

Those who rule Nigeria have become numb due to satiation from feeding on the fat of our land. Thus they no longer feel, hear or even see. There is poverty in the land. Some call it extreme poverty. Others call it three-dimensional poverty. But there is acute poverty in the land. Those who can flee are fleeing.

Others are held down and are hungry, hopeless and dying. Hope has become a scarce item. Not many think about hope these days. Hope had tantalized us and evanesced. But Nigerians are strong and resilient. Nigerians will one day come together in one accord and dream of a new country. One day, hope shall be reborn. The signs are here, but not many can see or feel it. We shall someday reclaim our country. Then nobody will borrow in the people’s name to steal. It shall be well.

*Awhefeada, a professor of English, is a commentator on public issues