Can I have an ‘Amen’!

Within seven years, Turuku had morphed from a struggling general contractor who carried his office in his weather-beaten bag to a wealthy proprietor of several ventures valued at hundreds of millions of naira. His newfound wealth has enabled him purchase influence within and outside his political party and even though out of office now, he […]

Within seven years, Turuku had morphed from a struggling general contractor who carried his office in his weather-beaten bag to a wealthy proprietor of several ventures valued at hundreds of millions of naira. His newfound wealth has enabled him purchase influence within and outside his political party and even though out of office now, he is one of the must-see personalities if you are nursing any kind of political ambition.
By the way, Turuku was a celebrated dullard in his days at the local primary school. He earned the nickname, Turuku, on account of the perennial sore on his right ankle which made him tie a dirty gauze bandage to cover the site all the time. Nine chances to ten, he was likely to have ended up as a social miscreant; a future in higher education seemed not to be his ‘portion’. But he surprised everyone when he stowed away via a cargo ship and ended up somewhere in Europe. Many years later he returned home with dodgy certificates in business administration. He chose to be his own employer, perhaps because he knew that his qualifications could not withstand close scrutiny. Things were rough for many years until the return of democracy. The rest is history.
I can wager that there are equivalents of this type of character in every part of Nigeria. In this instance, every mother does have them!
The way governance is being bastardised as the shortest route to unearned wealth these days makes me feel that we owe the First Republic politicians an apology for being so harsh on them. If Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu were to be summoned from his grave to compare those he described as “ten percenters” in his 1966 coup speech with today’s one thousand percenters, he would probably swoon in disbelief at how any set of human beings could continue stealing public funds beyond what the next ten generations of their families would ever need.
We have been on a steady course of devaluation in virtually every area of life. Governors cut the image of Santa Claus handing out Christmas gifts when in actual fact it is our money they are deploying to entertain us (o fi owo Abu s’Abu l’alejo) as my Southwest brethren would say. You wonder if the chest-beating carpetbagger is spending his father’s money. No longer do our leaders bother to tell us where they are taking us. In the First Republic, every party’s programme was an open book; accountability was largely the mantra even though some fat camels still managed to pass through the eye of the needle.
If you want to try a mind-bending game, I challenge you to find out how much the original Ibadan-Ijebu-Ode highway was built; or the Enugu-Aba-Umuahia road; or the Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road. Compare that to the cost of a similar single lane road today. If the result does not frighten you, then I should be frightened of you. We hide under the fact that costs of goods and services have risen worldwide to perpetuate graft. One engineer who attended the last meeting of the society of engineers in Abuja a couple of weeks ago challenged me to compare the cost of building expressways in neighbouring countries with the same terrain, with the figures claimed to have been spent here. “How will the economy not be depressed when there is so much leakage?” he asked.
From local government through the state to the federal level, there is so much waste and so many square pegs in round holes in the name of politics that it is a miracle that we have managed to make any progress at all.
The aforementioned Turuku now rides his fleet of Rangers and Pajeros on the potholed roads he neglected throughout his tenure as local government chairman, just as General Obasanjo himself must ride through the deplorable Lagos-Ore road or the Agege-Otta road he refused to fix when he was the ultimate Babacrat of our recent Babacracy.
The most active industry today is 2015. Every politician worthy of his agbada has all his senses trained on the next elections. Because of the low quality of people in sensitive positions in several of the major parties, we have been constantly treated to a cocktail of insults and mud-splashing rather than enunciation of programmes and the mathematics of achieving stated goals. Some desperate politicians have even commenced sending out hate mails demonising people of other faiths.
The question to ask is this: If you are appealing to my religious sensibility in order to win my vote in a secular Nigeria, I know that you have nothing to offer. Tell me what you want to do with power. I have Christians, Muslims and adherents of African traditional religion in my family. I can’t be bothered by the colour of anyone’s religion. By thy acts I will know thee. MKO Abiola made many Christians admire Islam by force of example. He was one of the big donors in the building of St Dominic’s Catholic Church, Yaba, because he said, “they are my neighbours and we should love our neighbours as ourselves”.
We are not the only country on the surface of the earth with multiple religions. Let’s stop this dangerous religious campaign going on. Poverty has no tribe, no religion, no tribal marks, no particular language. Our politicians should tell us how they want to assist us to put bread on the table and make life generally more pleasant for our people. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, the only way God can appear to a hungry man is in the form of bread. Those seeking our votes should level up with the people: what have you done with the past mandate we gave you? Where do you want to take us next? How will you do it?
At every level, we must ask these same questions.
And when you are confronted by a demagogue who says his principal is the best thing to have happened to Nigeria since the invention of ice cream say a prayer for him: “May God treat you as your principal has treated his mandate”.
Can I have an ‘Amen’!