By
Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
“What luck for rulers that men do not think.” ― Adolf Hitler
Many Nigerians are stuck with zero experience of what it means
to live in a decently run society. Laden with a long history of mostly inept,
insensitive and less-than patriotic leaders, it seems abnormal to expect any
bit of improvement in their daily existence from any government. Massive
infrastructural decay due to criminal neglect and regular reports
of primitive accumulations of illicit wealth by wayward and light-fingered
public officers have since lost their capacities to shock Nigerian masses.
*Buhari and Tinubu
In fact, most people have since adjusted their lives to
perennially absorb the vicious impacts of these debilitating vices. They only
extract some bit of cold comfort from continually reassuring themselves that
they are in such a hopeless and helpless situation where these excruciating
fallouts of leadership failure will remain the resilient, inseparable
companions they are condemned to perpetually coexist with – which will always
be there to severely hurt their country and diminish their joy, peace and fulfillment.
Those who lack personal resources to obtain some form of
alleviation for themselves and their families resign themselves to fate hoping
that they would be able to sustain the capacity to continue enduring these
searing rewards of successive rudderless leaderships – which will remain their
perpetual sources of torments.
Even the Nigerians who reside in well-ordered societies, where
leaders are accountable and basic amenities are meticulously provided and
maintained, once they touch down on Nigerian soil automatically adjust their
minds to endure the excruciating realities of life in Nigeria. They only derive
some consolation from the fact that they would soon jet out again to where
sanity and orderly existence are taken for granted.
And so, when it is election season and this set of disenchanted
and disoriented Nigerians are ready to vote, they do not even bother to
interrogate the character, antecedents, hollow promises and other antics of the
candidates having concluded that they are all the same – members of the same
cult of corruption and ineptitude; rather they would seek to extract some
ephemeral emotional satiation from lending their support to a candidate
who shares the same ethnic or religious identity with them. At least, they can
always derive some comfort (or even animation) from the fact that their
“brother” or “sister” had also joined the rampaging band of locusts, and that
their votes had helped to achieve that “feat” for their own people!
Some others will eagerly accept contaminated crumbs from the
tables of these same callous, thieving politicians who have cruelly
impoverished them and mortgaged the future of their children and go all out to
promote and mobilize voters and even fight for them to ensure they capture
elective offices to continue their boundless looting of the public
treasury.
Unfortunately, in Nigeria of today, the bad, shattering news is
that there is hardly any green vegetation left anywhere again for the locusts
to swoop on and devour! What we have all over the place are long stretches of
excruciating aridity which only rewards with poverty and hardship all that are
unlucky to have Nigeria as their home at this time, except the treasury looters
and their accomplices.
A few months before the expiration of the Muhammadu Buhari
regime, the London-based Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and
analysis division of the Economist Group, told the world what most people
already knew, namely, that Nigeria’s “debt service payments in the first four
months of 2022 totalled N1.9trn, which was greater than its total revenue of
N1.6trn, according to the 2023‑2025 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework and
Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP) draft presented by the Finance, Budget and
National Planning Minister, Zainab Ahmed, on July 21st.”
In plain language, what we were told was that the amount being
spent to service the huge debts accumulated by the Buhari regime, as a result
of reckless borrowings, including the USD1.96 billion foreign loan for the
construction of an undesirable rail line from Nigeria to Niger Republic, had
far exceeded our country’s income, forcing Nigeria into the perilous state of
compounding its debt burden by borrowing more money to service debts!
Also, the Excess Crude Account (ECA), Nigeria’s savings for the
rainy day, which stood at $2.1 billion when Buhari became president, instead of
increasing, had by June 2022 been brutally reduced to $35.7 million. By July of
the same year, it plunged further down to $376,655. It would be a huge surprise
to hear that as much as one cent remained by the time the Buhari regime exited
power on May 29, 2023.
And so clearly at sea as to how to get Nigeria out of the sticky
pit it was willfully dragged into on his watch, Buhari sought to derive
revolting animation from playing the profligate big brother out there, dolling
out USD$1 million to Afghanistan and approving N1.14 billion for the purchase
of posh SUVs for Niger Republic to “strengthen their security operations” while
the country he pretended to be ruling was scarily submerged in worsening
insecurity. No wonder he threatened the other day to escape to Niger Republic
if anyone disturbed him in his palatial country home in Daura, Katsina State.
For about eight months last year, the Academic Staff Union
of Universities (ASUU) was on strike due to very poor working conditions, and
hapless parents were forced to watch the unsightly and devastating spectacle of
their children’s future being toyed with by insensitive politicians whose own
children were mostly studying in quality schools and colleges in better managed
countries of the world.
When will Nigerians realize that each time they are deluded by
politicians into allowing primordial sentiments to dictate their
choices during elections, that they are only empowering their sworn enemies to
continue their perpetual impoverishment and continuous devaluation of their
lives and those of even their unborn offspring? Shortly after the
elections, the politicians they had naively adopted as their “native idols”
will hurriedly converge with their “bitter opponents” of a few days ago to plan
how to share the nation’s resources, thumbing their delicate noses at their
so-called supporters who had foolishly cultivated lasting enmities with neighbours
and friends with whom they had enjoyed many years of cordial, beneficial
relationships while campaigning and even fighting to rig in their “brother” or
“sister” whom they have never met and might never meet?
Until Nigerians decide that only competent and patriotic
managers should be allowed to take over the leadership of Nigeria at the
national, state and council levels and steer the country away from its
determined path of disaster, Nigeria, already miserably broke and prostrate,
will fail beyond what anyone had thought was possible in a country ruled by
human beings.
By the way, how do candidates even emerge in Nigeria? Are they
chosen on merit? Does anyone among their party delegates bother about their
capacity and character? At the national conventions of the two faces Nigeria’s
terminal affliction, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP), the delegates that voted to choose their presidential candidates
for the 2023 elections were reportedly bought soul and body with crispy wads of
US dollars – an unwholesome indulgence that unleashed further hurt on the
economy. This was apart from the hundreds of millions of naira earlier
squandered to purchase nomination forms and sort out other logistics.
Now, after investing all these millions of dollars and billions
of naira to secure their parties’ tickets alone and then more billions to
prosecute the campaigns and buy votes from willfully impoverished Nigerians who
are ready and eager to sell their future to assuage their hunger, what would be
the first mission of such candidates once any of them captures power? But will
Nigerians learn anything from this gloomy reality and apply themselves to
wisdom in future elections for their own good?
If Nigerians continue to allow themselves to be deluded every
now and again by ethically bankrupt politicians to discard character and
competence and vote on the basis of ethnicity or religion or both, they will
all be here to continue suffering the consequences of their tragic decisions.
A new government is in town now and the cost of living has gone
to the skies as poor Nigerians are asked to make sacrifices while those in
power swim in obscene opulence. Since many adult Nigerians were born, every new
government has asked them to tighten their belts in order to enjoy a rosy
tomorrow; but can anyone point to at least one single benefit that such
punitive measures inflicted on the hapless people ever brought?
What we usually
see is that after sometime, things would get worse and more sacrifices would be
demanded. This will continue until the particular regime quits power and the
new one will come in with a reworded version of the same deceptive language: suffer today and enjoy tomorrow! A pie
in the sky meant to tantalize and delude the unwary and tragically naïve people
who have stubbornly refused to learn from their past mistakes!
Each time Nigerians go to the polls with the wrong reasons
and vote or rig in mostly corrupt and incompetent candidates, all they have
done is to help the perpetuation of the unimaginable suffering they are currently
writhing under. Yet, despite this self-hurting preference, many of them still
wallow in the grand illusion that a patriotic and competent administration will
emerge to lighten their burdens and mitigate their sufferings. But is it not
foolish to continue to plant mango trees every season and expect them to
produce apples? How can a people persist in the fatal indulgence of
stubbornly eating and drinking poison and yet expecting to live and
flourish?
Indeed, the excruciating pains of corruption and incompetence in
leaders at all levels have no tribal marks. They do not unleash their torments
with any discrimination. They viciously attack everyone irrespective of his or
her place of origin, voting preference or even the tribal marks of the new
misruler they have helped to enthrone.
Nigerians from Katsina, Buhari’s home state, or even the entire
North that persistently gave him the loudly trumpeted twelve-million votes, can
attest to this. Their region received the lion share of the boundless
insecurity and excruciating poverty that distinguished Buhari’s eight-year nightmare.
*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye, a journalist and writer, is the author of the
book, “Nigeria: Why Looting May Not Stop” (scruples2006@yahoo.com; twitter:@ugowrite)
