By Adeola Aderounmu.

 

It is becoming more obvious that the present illegal regime in Nigeria has nothing to offer the poor masses. That should not come as a surprise to anyone at all. Nigerians never voted for the man now parading the corridor of power aimlessly. When he is not parading himself in that fortress built with the blood and sweat of hardworking tax payers, he is on a flight to a secret place to rest or seeking some talismanic effects. This country don suffer..!

 

 

In this country, we will continue to speculate and anticipate. Yes o! when those who seized power using violent ballots and force have decided that secrecy and cultism is the way forward, then we have the right and freedom to use our imagination and cognitive powers. To quote an insider as your source will be tantamount to breaching security protocols and you may even be accused of sedition and then arrested on arrival. Many of us in this village square are definitely on our way to jail!

 

 

I appreciate Nigerian music a lot and Chinagoro (aka African China) has said it all in few phrases. Poor man wey steal maggi, them go show him face for crime fighter! Rich men (greedy politicians) wey steal money; we no dey see their face for crime fighters.

In Nigeria, you can go to jail for stealing a cube of maggi- a popular kitchen ingredient. That is if you are lucky that a policeman or an idle officer from the EFCC arrested you. If you are unlucky, the angry mob will dispense justice immediately-you are as good as dead. People will blame you if you go to jail or even if you die. Mumu, na maggi e steal sef…!

To avoid the short arm of the law in Nigeria, you gat to steal and steal BIG! You must be like Ibori or Obasanjo or Atiku or even Umoru himself to be above the law. You must steal a lot of money, in raw cash where possible. Load the monies (dollars, pounds, naira ati bee bee lo) inside your fridge, under your bed, inside suit case, inside brief case and inside your closet. Use any other technology available at your disposal to make sure that the money is not traceable to you. Use agents, offshore or recessive family members.

 

Start a business so that even if the money is traced to you, you can tell those fools at EFCC that it is money from your family business. You can even start an estate agency and tell them that you have sold one house and made profit and bought another one and then you now have an estate worth 20 billion dollars. Tell them and those internet junk journalists that you are an entrepreneur before you joined partisan politics. You must play politics like football; your aim is to always win. A draw must be your worst outcome.

 

Moving on-I have not written on the village square for a while now but I have continued to blog regularly. It’s more fun with the blog because you can describe some people as fools, idiots, thieves, looters, satanic, demonic, bad leaders and so on without anyone opposing your views or right to publish what you like! You can be hard on yourself as well and try to do things better. But someone will definitely not like your terms. Some people think it’s godly or angelic to steal, kill and make other people poor while you are merrying.

 

Blogging allows me to be who I am. I am not an apostle of perfection but I detest dishonesty and bad governance- the type that has continued to deprive more than 90m people of decent existence. The government of Nigeria has continued to maintain the ordinary citizens’ livelihood at the rat-race level predominated by competition for limited resources in a kill and go manner.

 

In no small measure, I practically hate all the hypocrites who parade government houses across Nigeria and I regret that I am still not able to do anything practical or physical to change the status quo. I regret that the trust and hope that we continue to build over the years have continued to crumble as well. In my mind, I have only families to return to, not country.

 

Farida and Nuhu do not make any difference in my perspectives of what crime fighting is all about. What I continue to visualize is a gang of thieves or looters changing the characteristics of the sheriff that they’ve appointed in their caucus meeting. Nigeria is not a normal country. The geographical area called Nigeria is managed by suspicious arrangements and oppression of common good. This is why there is still no real democracy in Nigeria.

 

Nuhu fought Obasanjo’s enemies with zeal whereas Obasanjo, his friends and families looted the treasury. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well. Was I the only one who learnt that in the moral instruction class in 1980? Half bread can only be better than none if the other half is saving another life.

 

You can’t fight financial corruption or embezzlement when the person initiating the fight against the corruption is corrupt. It is the same with other crimes. The situation is peculiar and made worse because the Nigerian Police is full of people of questionable characters (from the boss to the last man standing on the street) who extort money from the other people. A recent report shows that the Nigerian Police is the number one violator of human rights in Nigeria. The EFCC is part of the police and therefore remains incompetent to fight crime or corruption.

 

For example, the EFCC cannot investigate or prosecute Obasanjo, Babangida, Atiku and others. The EFCC is seriously programmed like an apoptotic cell. It has its limits and boundaries. This is why the EFCC is specialised in terrorising yahoo yahoo boys and fighting ringworm even though leprosy is deadlier. This is also the reason for the non-performance (apoptosis) of Farida when it comes to fighting the real war. Does anyone for instance expect her to investigate or prosecute the likes of Obasanjo or Babangida? No! That was not in the streotyping. If she dares, she will be sacked with immediate effect!

 

On a fair note, EFCC is not the problem with Nigeria. It is not even the police as a body. The problem is the system. It contains the wrong people (mostly rogues in plain term) in power. This is why they will instruct the police or SSS to arrest you at the airport and detain you in violation of your fundamental human rights! If they have their way, these rogues will kill you one time! The nest of killers (first used by Wole Soyinka) has always been a part of our existence but it materialises in different forms, shapes and sizes.

 

I have argued that being privileged or fortunate to escape poverty or penury in Nigeria has blinded many people to the real situations in Nigeria. A few flashes here and there have also been used to divert our attention from the real calamities: the prevalence of mass poverty in the population (which of course has been treated by several authors).

 

There are options for Nigeria and hopefully I will dwell on one or two of them in another article. We cannot continue like this. As an introduction into what I intend to discuss: there are options along the lines of changing the system totally or changing what the country is all about. The emphasis would be on the nature, composition and effects of a new system so that it becomes a complete deviation from that which sows hate, distrust and poverty. We may be deceiving ourselves especially with the emphasis on one nation. The time has come to look at the existence of this country more critically.

 

We cannot continue to ignore the options available to us. We must look at them and use our senses to come up with a viable road map that will serve the interest of everyone called a Nigerian. This country must stop serving the purpose of a few (who will charge the rest of us with sedition because the status quo was made for them and their likes).

 

The final irrevocable truth is if we don’t define how we want to live and what we want from living now (like some nations did in the last century), we cannot stop the future generation from doing that. One generation will break these curses and disappointments. It will happen!