By Olamilekan Andu
They are not your everyday people; they are not the hoi polio, the people you encounter in the dingiest of human habitations or those with the tightest means of livelihood.
Nigeria’s poorest are not among the scruffy fellows who run after vehicles at bus stops to help carry loads to the owners’ destinations. They are neither the tramps nor vagrants who often survive on the benevolence of fellow beings.
In Nigeria, most of the poorest live in highbrow estates where opulence, power and reverence hallmark their lifestyle. They enjoy almost everything money can buy and they revel in their high tastes that even the wealthy in advanced economies hesitate to touch.
Nigeria’s poorest hardly mingle with the masses as they live in perpetual dread of poverty among the downtrodden. They have erected a partition between themselves and the common folk. You find them in multi-millionaires’ or billionaires’ abodes. To them, it almost amounts to sacrilege to have interactions with the common people.
They are haughty, imperious, vainglorious and perfidious. You will always find them on the high horse.
Their dread of meagerness is tap-rooted. It is a nightmare for them to lose any of their prized possessions: paradisiacal homes with ambrosial settings, choice gourmet meals with classic wines or imported bottled water, trending dresses and latest shoes, a fleet of expensive cars parked on display for the struggling lot to envy and dream holidays in distant destinations.
The children of Nigeria’s poorest don’t attend public schools. That is a stain. They go to private schools where no student fails: money takes care of all their deficiencies, including academic underperformance. They groom their offspring to love life of ostentation and never mind those outside their circle.
Most of Nigeria’s poorest have something in common. They have either been in power for years or have been running the machinery of state for some decades. In their positions in political or civil service, they have become so grounded in the art of pilfering that it has become their second nature. The positions the masses thrust upon them have been the vehicles with which they convey the people’s commonwealth to their homes and personal reservoirs.
Characteristically, Nigeria’s poorest leave crumbs for the masses who pay multiple taxes from where the pilfering civil servants and perfidious political officials get their salaries.
The people’s expectations of judicious management of the resources put in the care of these public servants are dashed. Instead, the people are fed with promises, hopes and excuses for years on end. There is hardly any money left for infrastructure and other development programmes.
Roads collapse, hospitals lack efficient medical personnel and equipment, security personnel get poor package that discourages them from patriotic duties against criminals (many have become partners with criminals to make ends meet), a graduate teacher’s salary is an infinitesimal fraction of what a pedestrian lawmaker with a diploma or secondary school certificate takes home, because the nation’s poorest have to live big.
In a nutshell, the funds necessary for development have been misappropriated by Nigeria’s poorest in political arena and civil service circle.
You have probably been wondering why I refer to this class of people as the nation’s poorest.
It is obvious. If you strip them of all they have stolen from the public coffers and leave only what they legitimately earned, they will be poorer than the poorest of people I earlier enumerated.
Ironically, the poverty in Nigeria is the result of years of stealing among politicians and these civil servants. It is the reason the nation has been tottering and stumbling for over sixty years after Independence.
There has never been any difference between military brigands and civilian cavaliers in matters of national development. Almost all the office holders at all levels and agitators have focused mainly on sharing the commonwealth; any other names are mere semantics. Those who have been shouting replacements or change only want to lay their hands on the national cake and take their shares. It is just a case of the thieves outside envying those inside.
But we can change the narrative. Given our checkered history and based on the current precarious state of the nation, it has become necessary to rejig the system and give every Nigerian a sense of belonging. This is really urgent and compelling.
Unless our leaders still want to continue their deaf, dumb, blind and callous system of government, which has pushed the masses to the wall and is obviously ticking to explode into their faces, the time to change the system is now.
The first step is to overhaul it. Politics, in an underdeveloped country like Nigeria, should not be the biggest business, as it has always been here, especially currently. It is time to put all political office holders on the same salary structure, based on their qualifications, areas of specialisation and years of experience, with other civil servants.
It is satanic for an ordinary lawmaker to earn in one month what a civil servant would earn in twenty or more years. Those who invented such a system need psychiatric help, just like those who approved it. In England, as advanced as it is, there are professors who receive more than double the salary of the Prime Minister.
Our education system should be the driver of all areas of our national life, not politics. The sector should henceforth get the lion’s share of the national budget, at least in the next twenty years.
If public servants should earn the fattest salaries, they should come from our ivory towers and not from the corridors of power. Our constitution should be rewritten to give our intellectuals more space to lead a national rebirth from our institutions of learning and research centres, not from the floors of the National, Houses of Assembly or Government Houses.
How would a nation that wishes to make progress spend all its money on politicians? What values have politicians added to the nation’s life except underdevelopment, poverty, stagnation, pettiness, bickering and backwardness?
The best we have had from them are empty arrogance, mismanagement of resources, Stone Age laws that cede the people’s wealth into their private pockets in the name of severance package after about eight to sixteen years in public service, among other negatives.
It is time to make politics less attractive and education more alluring to our youths. Inordinate ambitions among the restless young population are more dangerous than any time bomb. Nothing propels our youths towards crimes than their peers who suddenly make it big in politics while they search for jobs that will never come as politicians have taken everything as salaries, benefits and stolen the rest.
Do we even realise that politics is the root of all the crimes in the land? Do we understand that it is because other persons outside politics want to feel good and important, like politicians, that they jettison moral, ethical and even religious conducts? How did false “men of God” become celebrities among hitherto upright Nigerians? Now, everybody wants to be a politician or have a worship centre where they will sell phony promises, hopes and miracles to the unwary masses.
How can a governor, for instance, who has stolen millions, or even billions, sign the death warrant of an armed robber who stole just a few thousands at gunpoint? Who is the worse criminal? Where is the governor’s conscience?
Imagine a “man of God” praying to the jobless: “God will give you that dream job that will pay you millions.” And the ignoramus would shout a deafening “amen”. Really? Such prayers have been said for many years; yet, over fifty million Nigerians, mostly youths, are jobless. These are human beings who must eat at least twice daily, wear clothes and take care of other needs.
As politicians promise what they will not give, the “men of God” also promise what they cannot deliver. Both smile to the bank and live like tin gods at the expense of the hapless masses who continue to shed weight and live on the false hope that “tomorrow go better”.
But that tomorrow of the masses’ dream of having a great nation can be realised. A new nation where the children of all categories of citizens will be educated in the same classrooms and earn equal wages is possible. If stealing among politicians and other segments of Nigerians gets severe punishment, there will be enough for free education, free medical care, rural development, research funding and sundry matters for accelerated national development.
Of all Nigeria’s leaders, it appears history is giving President Muhammadu Buhari the chance to give Nigerians a new lease of life. He may be surrounded by politicians who want to continue amassing personal wealth without leaving anything for honest, hardworking Nigerians, but history is giving him a chapter to write his name in gold.
Most of the lawmakers we have currently – not all – will vehemently oppose him in yielding to the agitations of the masses, the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg. But with the youths on his side, a new Nigeria will soon be midwifed where sincere professionals, and not dishonest politicians, will take our nation to greater heights. He only needs to win the youths to his side. He will surely find them as dependable allies.
The moment beckons when honesty will prevail over deceits; hard work will be rewarded and indolence will be dumped into the dustbin of our history. Those who stole the commonwealth from the masses will have no hiding place as they will be called to account in the emerging nation. There will be no more career politicians.
Accountability will become a national ethos. Every kobo the masses have earned shall be spent on projects that will be beneficial to everybody and not to a small gang of politicians and thieving civil servants who have donated their conscience to the devil.
A more respected Nigeria for those at home and in the Diaspora is what we should bequeath to our children. It is up to President Buhari to set the ball rolling. It is not about tribe, religion or area of the country where somebody comes from. It is about a true federation where everyone is welcome and satisfied to reside in peace.
Our energetic youths, home and abroad, especially, as well as other Nigerians of different age categories are waiting for the day they will be proud to carry our flag with a high sense of pride, patriotism and dignity anywhere in the world.
They are waiting for the day they will stand shoulder to shoulder with other nationals and walk tall among the comity of nations that Nigeria is their fatherland.
It is time to do away with politics of mass poverty in the midst of huge natural endowments. There is enough to go round if politicians without conscience stop stealing or are made to pay dearly for acts of malfeasance. What we all need to realise our ideal nation is action, not mere platitudes. With the current leadership and a resilient youthful population, let the rework for Africa’s greatest nation and the pride of the Black race begin.
God bless Nigeria.
- Olalekan Andu, whose piece first appeared on his Facebook Timeline lives in Lagos.