The joke is told of three presidents who went for a meeting of heads of state in Geneva, Switzerland. At the end of the meeting, the three statesmen decided to return to their respective countries in the same plane. As they were about to take off, the pilot announced that each of them should watch out to know when the plane was in his country, so that he could alight.
The president of France was the first to get to his country. He knew because as he looked out of the window, he saw the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Versailles Palace, the fascinating lightings and other landmarks that stand Paris out as world’s most beautiful city. He shouted, “Drop me here! Drop me here! I’m in France! Pronto, the plane landed and the French president alighted.
As the journey continued, the president of America looked through the window and saw the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Hollywood Sign, the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks that set America apart as the world’s most developed nation, and he yelled, “This is America. Drop me here! Again, the plane descended, the American president alighted and went his way, leaving the Nigerian president behind.
The Nigerian president knew that unlike his counterparts in France and America, there were no landmarks of consequence through which he would know when the plane had reached his country’s airspace. As he continued to wonder what to do, it occurred to him that he was leading a country where there were more rogues than honest men. From the plane, he stretched out the hand on which he wore a gold wristwatch and told the pilot to fly at a lower altitude. He had barely done so for 30 minutes when someone snatched his wrist watch with the swiftness of the eagle. “Drop me! We are in Nigeria,”he shouted.
I wasted no time in dismissing the joke as impracticable, mischievous and patently unpatriotic the first time I heard it. But following recent developments, I have had cause to ponder over it and realised that impracticable and mischievous as it may sound, it no doubt underscores our penchant for stealing, particularly where public funds are involved. How else could one explain the daily emergence of various categories of thieves on the national scene in recent times? While we only had to contend with pickpockets, highway robbers and muffled cases of malfeasance in the past, the nation now groans under the weight of subsidy thieves, pension thieves, pipeline thieves and the latest in the range—bonus thieves.
Most at the receiving end are pensioners who had spent their useful years serving their fatherland, but now die on queues as they wait endlessly for pensions that never come. Almost on a daily basis, the news media are awash with stories of aged men and women who live purely on charity because the money set apart for their pension and gratuity in the nation’s budget ends up in the private pockets of government officials whose duty it is to disburse it. Thus, in a show of sheer madness, it is now a habit among pension officials to appropriate the sums to themselves in billions their children and children’s children cannot exhaust in their lifetime, even if all they do is spend money.
Under the nose of Dr. Sani Teidi Shuaibu as the Director of Pension Administration in the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, the sum of N4.56 billion meant for pensioners vanished into thin air. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) later declared in April last year that N1.5 billion of the sum had been traced into Shuaibu’s private account. This was after the commission had confiscated houses and filling stations whose value ran into billions of naira from the Kogi State-born civil servant. The list included a house at No 24, Ahmadu Musa Crescent, Jabi, Abuja; Brefina Hotel at Plot 1106 (Beside MTN) warehouse, adjacent to Vines Hotel, Durumi, Abuja; a house at No 1, Shuaibu Close, opposite Governor’s House, Idah, Kogi State; Riba-Ile Petroleum Ltd; an MRS filling station at Ajaka, Kogi State (registered as Riba-Ile Oil Ltd; another MRS filling station at Idah, registered as Hammo Oil, Nigeria; an NNPC mega station, Idah Junction, Ayingba, registered as Hammo Oil, Nig. Ltd; an MRS filling station at Ganaja, Lokoja, Kogi State, registered as A.Y Ted Oil Ltd; a mansion at Idah, opposite Federal Polytechnic; SunTrust Properties Company Ltd; a house at Plot B59, Dawaki Extension Layout, Bwari Area Council, Abuja; an estate of about 10 bungalows on Dantata Street, Nyanyan, FCT, Abuja.
Of course, many other suspected thieves have since been arrested, including John Yusuf, a former assistant director in the Police Pension Office whose case has generated protests from the Nigerian Bar Association, the Nigeria Labour Congress, opposition political parties and other civil society groups after the courts gave him a slap on the wrist, asking him to pay a fine of N750,000 for embezzling N23 billion police pension funds. There is also the current case of the runaway boss of the Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT) boss, Abdulrasheed Maina, who the Senate had asked to account for mismanaged pension funds amounting to about N469 billion
Last year, the entire landscape was shaken by revelations of trillions of naira paid out by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to various businessmen as subsidy for fuel they never imported into the country. No fewer than 25 chief executives of companies are currently facing prosecution over alleged theft of subsidy money. A fallout of the development was the sum of $620,000 Hon. Farouk Lawan, the chair of the House Ad-Hoc Committee on Fuel Subsidy Probe, allegedly demanded from the Chairman of Zenon Oil, Mr. Femi Otedola, with a promise to expunge the name of the latter’s company from the list of companies involved in the subsidy racket. Lawan has since been prosecuted by the Federal Government.
During the week, Nigerians woke up to the shocking news that the N1.3 billion bonus money approved by President Goodluck Jonathan for the Super Eagles campaign at the just-concluded African Cup of Nations was shared by top officials of the National Sports Commission and the sports committees of the two chambers of the National Assembly. The development, according to the National Pilot, was the key reason the Nigeria Football Federation had not been able to pay members of the Super Eagles the $30,000 promised each of them as bonus for winning the final match against the Stallions of Burkina Faso to win the Nations Cup trophy for the third time.
The foregoing are evidence of how desperately important it has become for the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan to step up the war against corruption before we wake up one morning and discover that the strong room of the Central Bank is missing. The laws against theft of public funds must be strengthened as well as the agencies responsible for fighting corruption in the land.
