Of ossified brains and a jaundiced nation
Because the Payments Council are not just speaking off their heads, they have statistics to back up the change. Sweden and Norway are top on the list, but before you start saying it’s developed world blues, please be informed that our own South Africa is also on the list. It comes even before Australia. Now, […]
Because the Payments Council are not just speaking off their heads, they have statistics to back up the change. Sweden and Norway are top on the list, but before you start saying it’s developed world blues, please be informed that our own South Africa is also on the list. It comes even before Australia.
Now, this piece is not about 419, but it could just have been. Many have wittingly or unwittingly been fleeced by the antics of congroups who send scam mails announcing that our yahoo addresses are about to be closed because the information which we provided while opening them are like dud cheques. This is something different from the many scam mails which promise us mouth-watering deals – if we are careless enough to give our bank details. Others promise us billions in a lottery whose ticket we do not remember buying in the first place. This piece is about ossified brains and the challenges of modernity.
On the same day that I read the cheque story on the net, there was an item on a national radio to the effect that Rilwanu Lukman, Nigeria’s oil minister has started making another round of excuses to extend the over-stretched ban on gas flaring. Two days to the end of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Lukman blames lack of appropriate technology for what would eventually be Nigeria’s inability to enforce a law sanctioning oil companies not just for economic wastage but environmental degradation. Nigeria, which owns oil but does not extract it, is satisfied with being a mere commission agent on its own mineral resource. Lukman is flying an unpopular kite to excuse his complicity and those of his co-travellers ahead of the uproar that will greet non-compliance of the new deadline against gas flares. In other words, Lukman wants to be excused for failing his duty. It’s difficult to resist the urge to start calling him names because, in effect, he is the oldest man in the moribund Yar’adua cabinet.
But, give it to the old man from Zaria, over-used, yes, and perhaps irrelevant to the new mode of transacting the oil business except but regarded as a star in a country like which recycles dead woods even where there are firebrands. Rilwanu Lukman is not different from Adamu Aliero, much younger and coming from eight years of governorship experience but who is a total mess as a minister for a 21st Century federal capital. Much younger than his namesake and perhaps the youngest minister, Rilwanu Babalola, who cannot be trusted to deliver on a policy to deliver Nigeria out of darkness. Lukman’s thinking is not different from those of Mike Aondoakaa a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) whose thinking and approach to corruption issues is as absurd as justifying apartheid in the 21st century but who is a legal silk.
Rilwanu’s kite is not different from Sam Egwu, who, like Aliero chose to shamelessly engage in a naked dance at Hilton, celebrating a birthday and wedding anniversary while the federal universities he supervises were locked in strike. He too is a don on sabbatical. Egwu is not different from Chukwuma Soludo, who frittered away tax-payer’s money minting coins we never used and stood applauding while bank executives where stealing shareholder’s money blind. He is a candidate for governor of a state and happens also to be an academician.
These ones are no different from the two or so governors who flew to Saudi Arabia on taxpayer’s cash to solidarise with a President who refused to invest in health at home but has now ended up as a specimen for medical students in another man’s country. Nor are they all different from the President himself, who knew that he was medically unfit to stand the rigour of a political campaign but chose at the peril of his own health to turn the country into a sick joke with him as the chief clown health tourist. How can anything go straight when those selected to deliver the goods only make excuses? This is a clear case of a jaundiced nation being piloted by ossified brains, otherwise how can the world’s seventh supplier of crude witness long queues and artificial scarcity?