By Mideno Bayagbon
(mideno@thenewsguru.ng)
Truth be told, the average Nigerian is as guilty, if not more guilty than the thieving politicians, we are all fond of vilifying. Every Nigerian you meet is finger-pointing at some politician, at some corrupt policeman and other, who they believe, is the problem with Nigeria. But in their day-to-day lived reality, corruption in all its goriness is celebrated privately and hypocritically condemned publicly. For most, it is corruption and condemnable, when it is others who are thriving in it and we are the victims. We mount pious pulpits, flood the social media and discussion forums to vehemently condemn it; unless, of course, we or our relatives are the beneficiaries. In that case, with stony hearts, we invent excuses, resort to ethnic and religious sentiments, fan the embers of our fault lines and wear shining bright white robes over our soiled and darkened souls.
From Buhari’s “top to bottom” despoliation of the country, more and more Nigerians are being recruited daily into the cesspit of corner cutting, corruption and all the perfidy that currently define us. Yes, it predates the Buhari misgovernment. But it is no longer a secret that even our teenagers have joined the mad rush to be rich, by all means; any means even if it means sacrificing mother, father or some random girl for money rituals. Probity, equity, integrity, hard work, fairness and piety are dead. In our own small way, most Nigerians are now economic, political, social and religious Boko Haram, and terrorists.
Yet we are, outwardly, such a religious people. Almost an equal number of Nigerians identify as either Christians or Moslems. We wear our religion as a badge, a chameleonic cloak of acceptance; but ultimately, deceit. We block roads, look for every conceivable spot and mosques on Fridays; we jampack churches on Sundays; but work in Satan’s vineyard all week. The most religious country in the world has become the most corrupt, the most unliveable, the headquarters of Satan, the Devil.
While the media focuses on the unbearable security situation in the country, while it has become our past time to lambast the government in power and heap all our woes on them, as we ordinarily should, we turn a blind eye to our children, our brothers, our sisters, and our parents committing even worse havoc on their fellow citizens and indeed the nation. We celebrate and encourage ill-gotten wealth, no matter how gory the path has been. Almost every Nigerian would do the unthinkable to their neighbour if that would spiral their economy into some sort of temporary wealth. So we turn a blind eye to our children being engaged in economic sabotage through what is now glorified as Yahoo Yahoo. Or the most repugnant, Yahoo-Plus, which involves the killing and harvesting of human parts for money rituals. We turn a blind eye to our brothers and sisters who are politicians and are milking the country dry for their personal estates. We gladly accept pittance from them while hailing them as messiahs.
Some poor parents, can today, be heard proudly informing that their children are “learning Yahoo-Yahoo.” They beg, borrow or steal to send their children to Ghana or some other places in Nigeria to become apprentice Yahoo-Yahoo entrepreneurs. Our conscience, morality, ethics; our humanity is dead on the altar of trying to survive the harsh economic woes. We prey on each other. But we posture otherwise. Listening to the average Nigerian lament the woes of the Buhari government, you would think you just visited a heavenly ordained saint.
A few shocking stories I heard recently have further ingrained in my mind the feeling that Nigerians are truly not ready to get the country back from the brink. We are not ready to set it on the path of social, political and economically acceptable development. We are not ready to replace the dubious fast lane with integrity and hard work. We are not ready to shun evil of unearned wealth; curtail the excesses of our politicians. We attempt to mask our greed and lack of morals on the “situation of things in Nigeria”. With a mouth full of excuses, top of which is the bad governance the corruptly inept government of President Muhammadu Buhari has foisted on the economy, and indeed on all spheres of national life, we make lame excuses why making it by all means is the order of the day for Bola, Emeka, or Jubril. We blame the politicians but forget our role in electing them because of N1000 – N10,000 bribe we took.
A friend’s wife had gone shopping recently and her bill came to a tidy N50,000 for the few items she picked. She had expected to pay either through the POS or transfer into the company’s account. She didn’t have that kind of cash on her. To her surprise, she was told the POS was not functional; neither is the official bank account of the supermarket. She was offered a ready but crooked solution. She was asked to make the transfer into the personal account of one of the staff. She resisted and asked for the manager who was nowhere to be seen for over 15 minutes that she insisted on speaking to some authority figure to confirm the authenticity of the request to make the transfer into the staff personal account. With no manager in sight, she reluctantly made the transfer. But she was still uncomfortable with the whole business.
As God would have it, as she was about driving off, she saw a friend who is an acquittance of the owner of the business and told her what had just transpired. Shocked, the friend called the owner of the Supermarket who confirmed that there was nothing wrong with either the bank account or the POS. Long story short, the Police were invited. The four staff on duty, including the security man who was supposed to check receipts against the goods purchased, but who conveniently waved the customer through without any check, were picked up. On intensive interrogation, it was discovered that that week alone, the band of boys, all under 23years, have siphoned over N2 million into their private bank account from the sales.
The masterminds, two UNILAG students, home because of the ASUU strike, who were temporarily employed, through pleas of their parents, one of whom is a Professor and the other a cleric, confessed to have used their IT hacking skills to compromise the account of the owner and were easily diverting monies from sales into their private accounts.
A second story involved a former top banker who used his retirement entitlements to go into distributorship of drinks with one of the nation’s notable breweries. He was a sub-distributor to a major distributor. Daily the company driver and a young employee were sent to go and distribute drinks to customers in the company’s van. This they do dutifully but with an evil motive behind their zeal. The money they collect as payment, they pocket. And to cover their nefarious track, they would head straight to warehouse of the major distributor and restock the quantity of drinks sold to customers whose payment they have pocketed. They then return the new stock to the warehouse of their employer claiming they didn’t make any sales. That way they ingeniously pocket the sales profit and leave their employer high and dry. Yet at the end of the month, they collect their salaries. And soon enough, the company was wrecked and the retired banker is left with a huge mountain of debts. Of course these stories are just a tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has bothered to set up a company in Nigeria, in recent times, has his/her own tale of woes in the hands of Nigerian workers.
The rot has become systemic and endemic. Parents, unfortunately have a mountain of guilt on their conscience. Our children study us and study their environment. The internet of things has not helped either. They grow up seeing a society that glorifies unearned wealth. They see government officials aggrandize public funds with impunity and they are hailed by the society, by those who should have risen up to oppose them. They grow up seeing people with no visible means of livelihood driving the best of cars, living in the most alluring of houses and having policemen and soldiers as their security details. They grow up seeing so called Men of God living Pop star lifestyles, fleecing their poor congregants while living the heavenly life here on earth but persuading their members to be heaven focused.
A society that welcomes and tolerates wealth by whatever means will definitely be in death throes as Nigeria currently is. Yet it will get worse. With Nigeria earning less than it needs to even service her debts, the future looks like a project patterned after the Hobbesian state. With over 70 percent of our graduates jobless; with “handwork” conveniently shunned, dogs are set to eat dogs. The more the pity for the politicians who are angling for positions in the coming dispensation. Soon they will become public enemies number one. The current situation in most of the North of Nigeria, and to some degree in the South, where politicians can no longer go home to their states, will be child’s play. The current sense of entitlement and impunity that reign all over the nation will bear implosive conflagrations. Nigeria of tomorrow, except God intervenes, is loaded. I do not envy whoever emerges President and Governors and Senators, etc next year. Tough years ahead await unveiling.
