Hunt down all the witches!

Anyway, in those five years tens of thousands of Nigerians have been hauled before the courts by the police and by other citizens. Thousands of them were imprisoned for offences ranging from stealing a goat to uprooting a yam tuber to taking a client’s money to do a menial job for him but “converting the […]

Anyway, in those five years tens of thousands of Nigerians have been hauled before the courts by the police and by other citizens. Thousands of them were imprisoned for offences ranging from stealing a goat to uprooting a yam tuber to taking a client’s money to do a menial job for him but “converting the money to your personal use,” as the police delicately like to put it. Despite all those arrests, prosecutions and mass convictions we did not hear any shouts of witch hunt. Until we came to the men who were alleged to have pocketed, not goats or yam tubers, but whole shiploads of grain, whole housing estates and convoys of bullion vans full of cash.
As soon as anyone of them is grabbed, his cronies rush to the press and take to the airwaves to allege “witch hunt!”  Some even demonstrate in the streets and in court premises saying their masters are being witch hunted for reasons ranging from 2011 to 2019. You know what? We should intensify witch hunting in Nigeria! We should make the hunting of witches a major national preoccupation at par with to hunting down Boko Haram. I say so because there are too many witches in Nigeria. They are flying all over the place on broomsticks, ravaging the scene like so many locust swarms and picking every bit of the public treasury like so many Amazonian piranhas.
Witches have ravaged Nigeria. They are eating us alive. I say go after them all, bring down their broomsticks and hunt them down. Yes, we should be a nation of witch hunters, of the witches that ravaged our public treasury.
Madam Ngozi, stick to one story
How many versions of a tall tale does our former Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Madam Ngozi want to tell about what happened to the once brimming Excess Crude Account alias Rainy Day Assembly? What is not in dispute is that the account once held up to $20 billion. By the time Madam left the scene, the account was down to about $2 billion even though most of the money’s owners, i.e. the state and local governments, have no idea why or when it was drawn down.
Now we are hearing one story after another. It is true of course that the state governors played a big role in drawing it down. Instead of waiting for a rainy day to draw from the account, they haggled with the former president to draw from it on very sunny days when oil was selling well above $100 a barrel. Now the cold winter is here and the rat has not saved anything.
Trouble is, the governors themselves have forgotten when last they drew from the account. Madam Ngozi at first said no money was withdrawn from the account without approval, that is, of the National Economic Council which is dominated by the governors. When the latter kicked at the suggestion and instituted a four-member panel to audit the account, she changed her story and said there was approval to withdraw the money alright. Only that it was given not by NEC but by former president Goodluck Jonathan.
Madam, you knew that the money belonged to all tiers of government but you dipped into it at the say-so of only one party. You are very angry when Governor Adams Oshiomhole said your testimony will be thrown out of court on account of contradictions. It is worse than that. A judge would have hauled you in by now for perjury.