Month: September 2011

Nigeria at 51, It’s Not Working..!

/ Adeola / 1 Comment

Adeola Aderounmu

This is probably the first time in 5 years that I am not writing a serious article concerning Nigeria’s Independence anniversary.

The reasons are obvious.

For several years I’d known that the problem with Nigeria is not whether we write or say things- the problems have always been that we keep doing the wrong things.

If you tell typical Nigerians how you wished that everyone is honest and that no one is stealing or looting, they just hissed at you. They’ll tell you to keep dreaming. When they are departing they’ll tell you not to be a fool, that you should be sure to loot or steal if you find yourself in government. They emphasized it deeply that when it is “their turn” they will eat and Nigeria will still have loads of money left.

I wrote about Nigeria being almost a fool at 49. A year after that I was seriously angry when prodigal Jonathan wasted over N20b to celebrate 50 years of madness and failure. Only in Nigeria do failures deserve such a wasteful celebration. It was double tragedy. You failed (still failing) then you wasted billons to mark the stupidity.

Even as failure was celebrated, the governors, legislator, commissioners, ministers and all sorts of government officials continued to steal, loot and merry in vain. When everybody steals then it is impossible to stop the process.
Nigeria is worth crying for. She is doomed. The general acceptance that someone can rule Nigeria because he or she is less corrupt than another person says it all.

If we follow the law of Idiagbon 99.9% of those in government today in Nigeria would be condemned to death at the firing squad starting from the presidency to the last department in the local government areas.

Unfortunately we don’t have an Idiagbon law. So evil can flourish. Nigeria is ruled by evil doers and extremely corrupt people who have become dominant as far as public service is concerned. They are few but persistent and dominant.

In all vices that can affect countries or nations, Nigeria is ranked at the top of the ladder of evil.
When corruption is mentioned, we are there at the top. Diseases, we are always on the rise. Poor countries are doing away with diseased including malaria. Nigeria has probably the highest rate of malaria death and maternal mortality in the world.

Electricity supply in Nigeria is negligible. It is almost non-existent. The recent increase in MW is not worth mentioning. It is a disgrace to human intelligence to even announce that type of rubbish and nonsense.
School, Water, Roads and other basic things of life-51 years after independence-have been taken away from the ordinary people.

Nigeria is for the highest bidder and they are in control until the next sets of winners take over. The losers are over 70% of Nigerians living desperately on less than 2 dollars a day and having no sustainable source of income-yet preferring to remain resilient and prayerful rather than becoming resistant and taking their destinies into their hands through the biggest massive revolution ever seen on earth.

A fool at 51 is probably a fool forever. Nigeria will probably never make it as a country. 51 years is an age that is too late for reforms or new education. Instead New nations with great potentials should emerge from Nigeria and the earlier this is done peacefully the better for all and sundry.

In a previous post I have dismissed the fear of allowing nations to emerge from Nigeria. The other options including the rise of BOKO HARAM and terrorism are far worse than allowing the different nations to go their ways.

At 51 Billions of Naira will be wasted in Nigeria to celebrate again. But the people are suffering and employment rate is extremely high despite the purported growth rate. The politicians will celebrate and they will award contracts for the parties which are more avenues to steal.

Seriously several Nigerian politicians are mad and need psychological evaluations. We will never understand why their works remain undone for 51 years while they steal, loot and make merry on common wealth. We also have no explanation for why good people become thieves inside government.

I started this essay by wondering on why we must all be thieves when we are inside the government. I think it will be hard for people to steal in Oduduwa Republic because they will swear by Sango at their inaugurations and Sango will strike them to death when they steal or loot. How about that?

Related articles By Adeola Aderounmu:

https://aderinola.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/nigeria-at-50-two-wasted-generations/

http://www.theafricareport.com/typerighter/index.php?post/2010/09/29/Nigeria-at-50%3A-what-is-there-to-celebrate

Nigerians and their foolish rulers

/ Adeola / 2 Comments

By Adeola Aderounmu

On May 22 2007 I wrote a famous article titled Nigerian leaders are fools. It made headlines and appeared on a BBC review.

The title of that article should have been Nigerian rulers are fools. We have shortage of leaders and the country is in a big mess.

Nigerians are living in denial because they carry false hopes.

I continue to have arguments with a few groups of people who think that my views are extreme and think that we should be optimistic about a better tomorrow. These people and I near our graves and we have not known what it means to live under normal circumstances in Nigeria.

Millions of Nigerians have lived and died without knowing the true meaning of life. They were denied the essence of it by thieves and looters who have occupied the Nigerian political scene in uniform and agbada. Those unfortunate Nigerians had no access to the basic things of life and simple infrastructure like constant electricity was never a part of their short miserable lives.

Yet millions of Nigerians living nurse (false) hopes and aspirations under a system that calls for nothing other than a bloody revolution.

It doesn’t matter now into how many pieces Nigeria should be divided. It doesn’t make sense to worry about the outcome when the alternative that I’d known for over 3 decades is not different from living in the biblical hell.

What should make sense is how to stop the stupidity and senselessness of both politicians and military rulers in mufti.

Politics is Nigeria is an insult to the intelligence of man. It questions the superiority of man over lower beings.

No Nigerian government has made the total elimination of corruption an open and targeted agenda. This is because all the people in government are corrupt. All these people include past and present rulers of Nigeria, and in various capacities. Almost invariably they are all birds of the same feather.

It doesn’t matter how lazy or hardworking Nigerian politicians and public servants are: they are all thieves and looters to varying degrees. Even Lagos that we thought was a pace setter has been opened up a nest of foolish looters.

I have argued all these years that N1 stolen from public funds or N1 taken without accountability has a snowball effect. It adds to the poverty and impoverishment in the land. In Nigeria funds are looted in billions of dollars and the looters walk free. Ask Mrs. Waziri the figure head at EFCC. Even ask Ribadu the talkative before her. It’s all mess.

Nigeria is one of the most blessed countries in the world but it is home to some of the world’s poorest people who ironically live in the Niger Delta Oil Region. Northern Nigeria has one of the highest illiteracy levels and their women can hardly write their names. Some can’t!

Nigeria has been run like a gangster business. At the federal and state, at the local and municipality levels, it’s all the same. The country has been on a free-fall since 1960. How the country remains one is an aberration.

There is no other country on any planet where people have looted and stolen so much that there has not been a revolution or a war or series of it. Nigerians are living in captivity. It’s a sad situation. Yet they are not fighting on a scale that will topple the system of things.

Boko Haram and the Niger Delta militants are chasing selfish interests. In a way they should actually be allowed to carve their own niches away from Nigeria. Who says they must be within Nigeria?

There is a big difference between terrorism and a revolution anyway.

MASSOB wanted BIAFRA. Why not now? Why the silence? Why the timidity?

The Oduduwa Group is emerging stronger. It was about time.

It doesn’t matter how many groups or nations emerge from Nigeria. What will be relevant is that people should belong to a nation where their rights are respected and where they have absolute freedom to pursue happiness, peace of mind and unlimited or limited resources to achieve their life goals.

These are not going to be the end in themselves because the stupid people who have ruined Nigeria are from all the possible regions you can imagine.

But when we have gone our different ways, I am sure there will be greater control within the regions to check the sort of absurdity now being perpetrated by the aimless Jonathan dynasty.

The president of Nigeria and several of his Ministers should actually be cooling off in a forgotten prison by now. They have all stolen! They are still stealing!

We didn’t need the revelations from the wikileak cables. It helps though. We already know that these things exist.
The crimes that Nigerians have continued to commit against themselves include doing nothing about all these nonsense. Their decision to tolerate and live with these aberrations negates the essence of life. It deters the pursuance of happiness and it deprives one of the fulfilled life.

Every year funds are looted as infrastructure are neglected. Roads, schools, hospitals and other basic things like electricity and water have been sent to the archive as far as common people are concern.

There is no one checking the system.

Several Nigerian journalists are interested in government jobs. Good people are rare in Nigeria. The men and women with the pens know it is their own way to the treasury. Many Nigerian journalists are crooks and serving a corrupt government makes them accomplices in this great crime against humanity.

When journalists have become beggars in the presence of the politicians, then information reaching the people will continue to be that of fake hope in a hopeless country.

In other professions people are interested in short cut to wealth and fraud is prevalent. What is more definite in expressing a banana republic or jungle existence?

The problems in Nigeria have reached a scale such that there is no going back. As far or as long as Nigeria exist as one country poverty will remain above 70% and unemployment among youths may exceed 50% in the nearest future.
No one man sitting in Abuja and overseeing corruption daily can tackle the national problems facing over 140m people.

The system is so bad now that it is a permanently hopeless situation.

When you have a country where corruption is legalized and madness is allowed in public offices, where then are you heading?

In Nigeria all the corrupt rulers and murderers are living as free men. It is pure insanity when the laws of the land are inadequate. It is more than insanity when the judges up to the Supreme Court accept millions of dollars in bribes to give false verdicts.

In that sense Nigeria is not a country. It is an aggregation of confused people enslaved by the junta and tropical gangsters.

That order designed by the colonialists and mastered by the tropical gangsters posing as rulers must be dismantled in order to set people free in their various regions.

It is from that point that groups and tribes can start to figure their ways forward. No one should care how long it will take to find the way forward. It may take 100 years but not starting at all is the greater evil fostered by fear.

No one should even care how things will work out or not.

The present order of things in Nigeria cannot continue. It is just not thinkable to imagine that Nigerians now more than 140m people have been zombied for the past 50 years by a clique that has managed to self-perpetuate itself in several forms and under several disguise.

From the bottom of my heart, I believe no more in one Nigeria and I refuse to accept the oneness of it. I believe that my roots lie in the Oduduwa Kingdom or Empire.

It is time for change. No matter how long we delay, it is inevitable and it is our key to freedom.