Patience taxing our patience!
When I hear some Nigerians saying that Buhari should return them to the Jonathan era, I immediately remember the biblical story of the children of Israel insulting Moses when they experienced problems on their way to the Promised Land. They railed against Moses for liberating them from their enslavers. The story is told in Exodus […]
When I hear some Nigerians saying that Buhari should return them to the Jonathan era, I immediately remember the biblical story of the children of Israel insulting Moses when they experienced problems on their way to the Promised Land. They railed against Moses for liberating them from their enslavers.
The story is told in Exodus 16:2-3 – “The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The sons of Israel said to them, ‘Would that we had died by the LORD’S hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
May Nigeria never return to the Egypt of the immediate past administration when looting of the national treasury was honed to a fine art that defined every aspect of governance. If you pray that God should return you to those days of yore, let it be so for you and your household alone. I don’t want a return to kleptocracy. And in case you still don’t understand the issue, no one is saying all thieves in public office have been neutralised; but impunity is no longer fashionable.
From raw statistics, the past government earned above $100 per barrel of oil and steadily produced about 2.2 million barrels per day. Today, oil sells for about $46 per barrel, and militant activities have reduced production to 1.1 million bpd. Do the math: we are earning only about 25% of what we made under Jonathan. This is to state the facts as they are.
We have just survived an era when military commanders literally sat around a table and shared funds meant for arms purchase to fight insurgency.
Ethnic armies were allowed to fester to the extent of threatening the armed forces. National security was contracted out to individuals. Thieves and influence peddlers took charge of the destiny of the nation. And nothing typifies their brazenness as the past and present activities of Mrs Patience Faka Jonathan whose sole claim to fame is that she was wifed by the immediate past president.
Four companies and three individuals had been identified and charged for laundering funds for Mrs Jonathan into a domiciliary account to which she was the sole signatory. The representatives of the four companies quickly pleaded guilty to the charge, thereby avoiding jail and clearing the way for forfeiture of the funds. But Mrs Jonathan insists that it was all her “hard-earned” money and that she didn’t know the four persons who had pleaded guilty on behalf of the companies.
Thank Goodness for the introduction of the Banks Verification Number, BVN, by the federal government, Patience Jonathan might have continued to fool the system by operating many domiciliary accounts using fictitious names.
The only thing common to the accounts was that she was the sole signatory. She now claims that she actually requested that all the accounts at Skye Bank be opened in her name but that the bank opened it ‘wrongly’, using names different from hers. The four debit cards linked to the accounts also did not bear her name and the bank didn’t comply with her request to change the names.
But she has been operating all the accounts and indeed used those cards during her recent medical visit to Europe! Up till July 2016 when she was unmasked, she used the cards. So, who is Patience Jonathan fooling? This delusional woman has to be brought back to terra firma.
Nigerians are going through hards times. The current administration has cried itself hoarse trying to explain to Nigerians why things are the way they are. Nigerians don’t want stories. They want the government to do whatever it takes to get the country out of recession fast. In response last week, the government brought together economists and industry leaders to share ideas with the federal government on the way forward. I have no doubt that Nigerians are going to judge the Buhari administration based on how he navigates the country out of the waters of economic recession.
I don’t know if Mrs Jonathan was at home on the day God was distributing shame. Her incredibly jejune fibs about ownership of the $26 million beggars a child’s IQ. Now she has taken the EFCC & Skye Bank to court demanding an additional N200m as damages!
In today’s money, $26 million is N10,920,000,000 (almost N11 billion). Even with the Permanent Secretary gift she got from the Bayelsa State Government, what would her net worth have been if she had been earning a permanent secretary’s salary from birth? At 59, even if she had been earning N100 million per year since the day she was born, she still wouldn’t have earned the money. To earn the Naira equivalent of $26 million, she would need to have been working for 109 years at a salary of N100 million per annum without spending one kobo from her cumulative pay.
Corruption has become so endemic that the corrupt are beating their chests openly and daring society to rein them in. Patience Faka Jonathan even chastises EFCC for not bothering to interrogate her. And I say it’s about time EFCC knocked on her door, not just on account of this particular money laundering case but also on the many other shady deals that may be found as they comb the maze of local and international banking transactions for her fingerprints. This Patience has tasked our patience enough.
On plagiarism
I was one of those who made a meal of Melanie Trump’s plagiarism of Mrs.
Obama’s 2008 speech in the former’s attempt to humanise her ‘humanoid’ husband. I cannot excuse the speech writer who committed the same crime by dubbing President Obama’s sentences into President Buhari’s “Change begins with me” speech. I hope whoever was responsible for that gaffe has already been fired.