Before eagerly supporting the suggestion that government sells off critical national assets have they sold off the many bullet proof cars they bought for selves, wives and kids?
The “last hope of the common man”
Has become the last bastion of the criminally rich
A terrible plague bestrides the land
Besieged by rapacious judges and venal lawyers
Behind the antiquated wig
And the slavish glove
The penguin gown and the obfuscating jargon
Is a rot and riot whose stench is choking the land.”
– Niyi Osundare in My Lord, where shall I keep your bribe?”
Wonders, they say, will never end. Nigerians woke up this past week to hear totally unserious APC governors attempt to re-write recent history. Having, again, run their respective states aground, owing a minimum of six to eight months in workers’ salaries, needing another bailout but knowing not how to present their begging bowls before the president a third time, they had, in spite of all we now know of the sleaze of the Jonathan years, and in a classical case of blaming the victim, claimed that the APC government of President Mohammadu Buhari should be held responsible for our current mega suffering as a people. Were they not so kind, they would have attributed the recession to his government, conveniently forgetting that a nation’s economy does not suddenly go kaput. The reason for this attempted obfuscation, and volte face, is so simple nobody would have believed that a body of governors would be as sissy as to ever suggest it. It is as simple as, having again come a cropper, and desirous of a fresh infusion of huge sums of money into their haemorrhaging states, they decided it is time to have a fall guy. Unfortunately, having not judiciously, or transparently, utilised the earlier bailout funds, they considered it smart to present the president to the agonising citizenry as the cause of their pains; that man, who wants to force his ascetism down the throat of ordinary Nigerians hoping that he would panic and be the one to offer them money on a platter. This thought process is so jejune it speaks directly to our manner of leadership recruitment in Nigeria.
What exactly do they take Nigerians for and when did they come to the realisation that they had been wrong all these days holding the profligate and thieving ancien regime responsible for Nigeria’s parlous economic condition? Do they believe, even for a moment, that they can successively erase from our memory what we now know of the depravity of that government? If they were serious, would they ever attempt to hold responsible for our suffering, a President Buhari who had spent what must have been agonising days in office trying to rein in profligacy in all its ramifications? Knowing what they claim to now know, have they stopped raking in the hundreds of billions they collectively take monthly as security vote even as Nigerians now suffer their worst ever insecurity in kidnapping and armed robbery which have spiked beyond control with some states daily experiencing these heinous, life threatening/taking incidents? Do they now feed from the salaries they draw from the common purse like ordinary Nigerians? Before eagerly supporting the suggestion that government sells off critical national assets have they sold off the many bullet proof cars they brought for selves, wives and kids? Have they told their senate counterparts to stop, forthwith, their N29 million monthly salary and the billions they make from oversight functions which they have converted to an avenue for illegal enrichment? And didn’t it occur to these latter day confessors that they were making nonsense of the government’s anti corruption war when they so cavalierly exculpated the completely ruinous Jonathan government? Or why would ex-President Jonathan not gloat in far away Oxford, making nonsense of the government’s attempt to bring looters to book?
In case they have forgotten, maybe we should jolt their memories and bring them back to reality.
In the 16 years of PDP’s stranglehold on the country, did it ever occur to the respective governments to diversify the economy and thereby stop the over reliance on a mono product, located in an area of the country where government has literally had to buy peace? Did those PDP governments sincerely believe that Nigeria should, forever, have to pay huge amounts of money, monthly, to elements who had maimed and killed in the past and could, as we have seen, easily revert back to those evil days of destroying the nation’s economic infrastructure? If the price of that commodity, oil, crashed from over 100 dollars per barrel to below 40, how was the Buhari government expected to make up for the shortfall in the short run given that there were no other sources of significant income to the nation’s coffers? One would have imagined that, in making their totally unreflecting statement, they would, at least, factor into their calculations the fact that a hugely expensive war is going on in the Northeastern corner of the country; a war whose expenses ballooned because of the theft and misapplication of the huge funds appropriated towards the war effort by the last administration.
But even these represent only the tip of the iceberg of the incriminating larceny of the Jonathan era and if APC governors have forgotten, we can help them by itemising a few. One of the earliest whistle blowers regarding the sleaze going on in that government was the then CBN governor who raised alarm over a missing 49 billion dollars oil money which he claimed was never paid into the federation account. President Jonathan’s response to that huge charge was that the United States of America would have known if that happened as if the U.S President was more relevant to our government financial situation than the sitting Central Bank governor. Of course, the same man would later inform his bemused countrymen that stealing is not corruption. The government would later commission a voodoo forensic auditing in which half the relevant books were not made available to the auditors. But long before then, thanks to the current senate President, Nigerians had become aware of the huge oil subsidy scam going on under the supervision of a former PDP chairman during whose time as chairman of the governing board of the relevant agency, the number of oil importers had more than quintupled. Nor did it surprise Nigerians when it emerged that sons of two former Chairmen of the lecherous party were among those who got paid billions in oil subsidy even where they did not bring a litre of petrol into the country. That scam claimed hundreds of billions of naira. So also was the pension scam which accounted for hundreds of billions with the hilarious aside that when the police authorities were claiming they could not find the suspect to arrest so he could honour a senate invitation, tens of their own men were giving him a 24-hour security cover and he was reported to have been present at the Abuja Airport, in a welcome party for the then president. But nothing would compare with the hordes of very important politicians of that era, as well as top military chiefs, that the EFCC have hauled, or is in the process of hauling before the courts for stealing amounts of money that must have now run into trillions. The names are today so common place that we do not need to repeat them.
It is amazing, therefore, that APC governors, well aware of these facts, and more, could still attempt to insult our intelligence by claiming that a government of just two years, is responsible for the consequences of 16 years of utter depravity. I am not, by any means, saying that the Buhari government could not have creatively remedied the situation because it could, way back two years ago, have started putting in place many of the things it started barely three months ago after the country effectively declared it was in recession. Given the abysmal nature of the economic circumstances he inherited, President Buhari should have treated the economy the same way he treated Boko Haram because in their respective spheres, the consequences of one was as deleterious to the country as the other as security is as key to the nation’s survival as the economy is. Therefore, whilst not totally exculpating the Buhari government from being partly responsible, it will be absolutely disingenuous, and unkind, to heap the entire responsibility for our current situation on the Buhari government of barely two years.
