By Tony Marinho
COVID-19 records deaths approaching 1,100,000, infections 36,000,000 with 60,000 confirmed cases and 1,200 deaths in Nigeria.
Rank our leaders according to ‘Performance Vs. Funds’ as Federal Fiscal Allocation, LGA vote, Security Vote, IGR often Extortionist and extras like Paris Club Refunds and SUBEB counterpart funding. Mostly failures. To survive, Nigerian authorities must step up and execute a nation-saving restructuring to the constitution foisted on Nigeria in 1999 in which ‘we the people’ had no voting veto. Leadership must listen. The problems are glaring and human made. Parts of the country were carefully ‘advantaged’ in political and fiscal decisions including state creation giving political majority, lopsided and repeated LGA creation with massive increase in funding. These gave federal allocations from other states’ VAT etc. But the result of these ‘advantages’ was not used for educational, health, developmental, infrastructural advantage. So federal government lopsidedly poured more in and gave more administrative power posts. Result – little success. You cannot train citizens who-for whatever reason- reject training, but why not train people who-for whatever reason- are desperate to learn? The beneficiaries of ‘advantaged policies’ did nothing with 60-year financial and governance largess except to further empower and enrich sectional leaders. Not only that, ‘conservatism’ policies caused ‘arrested development’ nationwide. Of course, every governor and president except perhaps Peter Obi failed to deliver expectations for huge funds.
The president, ignoring complaints about marginalisation and ignoring equity and federalism insults Nigerians’ individual integrity and perpetuates the master-servant relationship. No southerner has left the south to undermine or murder farmers in the north.
Even under this ‘strict anticorruption regime’ how was Nigerian school children’s meagre /per capita food money stolen in billions? The thieves deserve a proverbial ‘millstone around their necks’ for harming a child. Nobody monitored, checked, raised alarm when one, ten, a hundred million, billion, 2 and 3 and 4 and N5billion entered accounts. Surely the bank’s CEO and Chief Accountant knew? Area bank managers must have welcomed the thieves. Nigeria should have outgrown or outsmarted the mega-thieves. Why this ‘continuous governance failure to nip corruption in the bud’? Why no alarm when N1m or 10million entered an account. This is a criminal mega-conspiratorial failure of supervision and monitoring requiring removal and prosecution of every government, institutional, bank and auditing financial official feeding from the money chain for ‘dereliction of financial supervisory duty’. The collaborating receiving banks should be fined, blacklisted, with licences withdrawn for ‘financial crimes against children of Nigeria @60’. Most politicians routinely are culpably guilty of crimes against the children of Nigeria!!!!
On politics, Nigeria must cut the number in and the cost of politics; cut by 75% the Salaries and Perks of NASS sapping Nigeria dry. Nigerian requires ‘One House, Part-time, Sitting Allowance’ politics with accommodation paid for by the home state. Politics must be a service, not a self-serving financial cancer pauperising Nigeria.
Mr. President, you chose ‘Togetherness’ as the 60th Anniversary slogan. Please get more of Nigeria’s ‘differing tribes and tongues’ people in your kitchen cabinet, customs, judiciary, the armed forces and NNPC. And please really federalise Nigeria. Nigeria deserves this birthday present.
Are you enthusiastic to be a Nigerian on Nigeria’s 60th Independence Anniversary eve? Do you hold up your identity, passport, as a stoic Nigerian ‘living in hope’? Our leaders rubbished us as disgraced ‘Generator Generation’ which cannot even refine its own oil. Why? Corruption, Incompetence, Negligence, Selfishness-CINS and political or ethnic indifference?
What achievements validate this 60th anniversary? Life, yes? It is murder, if stained wealth was acquired by cheating one ‘Fellow Nigerian’. Religion teaches not to curse. But who cursed them with greed above midwifing a geographical giant into a glorious Nigeria? Can they change? Restitution by Nigeria’s many political thieves would easily raise the $1-200b in foreign reserves required for Nigeria’s naira to bounce back.
Many today remember 1960. But successive leaders sold their inheritance for less than a mess of pottage, abandoning the ‘political burden of responsibility for ‘‘Fellow Nigerians’’’. We have had policies, politics, military, laws, decrees, lawlessness, peace, civil war, true federalism, a unitary governance and now we are gripped by the python of a feudal ‘pretence’ federalism favouring too few while other Nigerians are strangled by federal might with its ‘Knee On Our Necks’. Nigeria is at yet another crossroads. The haves have taken too much and done nothing good with it. We must share more and implement true federalism or remain a primitive undemocratic fractured society of master- servant or worse.
Ask your mirror person ‘What will I do to heal Nigeria in 2020-1?’
Surely Covid19 has taught wealthy Nigerians who treat Nigeria as one big extractive cash mining industry that their wealth can be temporary. Wisdom teaches corrupt Nigerians to return the billions needed to upgrade Nigeria to Series 2020.
Nigerians do not deserve to be hated! Make Nigeria a livable and lovably great again for ALL Nigerians!
Nigeria demands an apology for the naira decimation from $1=N0.75 to N465, in spite of trillions of dollars earned. This precipitated a poor nation with a tsunami of economic and political refugees and illegal migrants forced to be willing to risk dying to leave Nigeria? Who will revive a dying Nigeria @60? You? Perhaps he or she is reading this column. I hope so, for Nigeria’s unity/equity sake!
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