I am asking you to believe, not just in my ability to bring change in Washington....I am asking you to believe in your ability. - Barack ObamaWhat is going on in Nigeria today is akin to a situation where 100,000 hijackers take control of a plane carrying 140 million passengers. Reasonable people will admit that the passengers should not have a hard time displacing the hijackers. Counting from independence, the people who have brought Nigeria to its knees are less than 100,000. Yet they have been able to hold the other 140 million people hostage.
What is going on in Nigeria today is akin to a situation where 100,000 hijackers take control of a plane carrying 140 million passengers. Reasonable people will admit that the passengers should not have a hard time displacing the hijackers. Counting from independence, the people who have brought Nigeria to its knees are less than 100,000. Yet they have been able to hold the other 140 million people hostage.
Nigerians must not only believe in their ability to change their country as a group, they must also believe in the critical importance of their individual ability to change the course of Nigeria’s history. Nigerians cannot celebrate the emergence of Barack Obama without remembering the sacrifices made by those who came before him. Preparing Nigerians for those who will come after this generation is the task confronting this generation.
After 17 months in the presidency, Nigerians now know that President Yar’ Adua’s idea of rule of law is that the former presidents, governors, ministers and other top level government officials who have financially raped the country are either never arrested or when arrested, are charged to court within 48 hours in air-conditioned luxury cars. At the same time, he sees no conflict with the rule of law when an Internet reporter spends almost two weeks in jail without ever being charged with any known offence for daring to challenge the Emperor of Aso Rock and the corrupt, rotten and dilapidating empire that he presides over.
After 48 years of statehood during which this potentially great country has crawled or even slept while countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia made tremendous economic advances, one would expect any responsible government to engage in a sprint to catch up with those countries that have left us behind. Nigerians now know that it takes the president about five months to announce a cabinet re-shuffle. Time will tell how long it will actually take him to find new ministers who are crooked enough to understand that in present day Nigeria, you get appointed not to do the job. Those who actually do or try to do their jobs get fired or demoted in rank. Political apologists have told us that the president is taking things slowly so as to avoid making mistakes. The problem is that, in his confusion, this president gave himself a 200% pay raise without understanding his job requirements and he had no qualms about that.
Nigerians now know that Yar Adua cannot change anything in that country for good. The same people who led Nigeria into the current abyss are the ones he has recycled into ministers, advisers and lawmakers. The same people who ruined Nigeria before (apologies to Fela) are now the people posing as saviors. Nigerians have received enough insult and should not tolerate any more.
Nigerians now know that this president is not prepared to arrest and try those who have looted the country’s resources because he is one of them. Remember his net worth jumped from N66 million in 1999 to N900 million in 2007. If he got this rich through investments, even the legendary investor Warren Buffet will look at such feat with envy. Nigerians will expect him to do the same with the economy. The President does not have the political foresight to understand that the money needed to provide electricity to Nigerians and lay the foundation for an industrial take off is less than what has been stolen by those friends of his who hang out with him in Aso Rock.
We now know that the president does not have the ability to understand that while those around him may tell him how great he is as a leader, the best he can ever achieve if he continues on this treacherous road is mediocrity and ignominy and this is a fact. His regime and its 7 point agenda to no where will be reduced to a footnote when the history of Nigeria’s emancipation is written. Let him ask Obasanjo who was led to believe, courtesy Frank Nweke, that he was the father of modern day Nigeria. Now he knows better that he is not even the father of modern day Abeokuta.
There are millions of reasons why Nigerians should not hope for a kobo of good leadership from Yar Adua. As I have said before, PDP has all the characteristics of a criminal organization. Where it not a political party, there would be no difference between it and the notorious Mafia. Everything it does as a party or government is in furtherance of its criminal goal of enriching the pockets of its members. Its pragmatic raison de entre is the looting of Nigeria’s resources and that is what makes it a criminal organization. Nothing good will come out of a government in which Ibori controls the strings of power, Saraki picks the EFCC chairwoman, and Aminu who has been implicated in the Siemens scandal continues to head a senate committee. Trust me, do not waste your time expecting anything good from this government. The politicians are only there to fill their pockets and it is the moral responsibility of Nigerians to stop them.
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How can Nigerians stop these marauding and shameless lootocrats you may ask. Before addressing this concern, I would like to point out my observation that despite being a country of eminently intelligent people, Nigerians have bought into this idea that the country can never change. This claim which is being bandied around by those who are benefiting from the corrupt system is factually deficient. It is lacking of any empirical foundation. What Nigerians are tolerating is a situation where those who have stolen their resources are now trying to steal or control their minds by making them believe they have been condemned to misery, darkness, insecurity, bad roads and leadership by morons. Martin Luther King once said that you will have to bend your back for another person to ride it. Nobody can ride your back if you decide to stand up straight.
These lootocrats, who give no damn about God while pillaging the people’s entitlement, want Nigerians to be patient and pray. They never fail to remind anyone who cares to listen that they were put in office by God but they cannot explain why God would resort to election rigging if ever the Supreme Being wanted to get involved in elections. Neither are they able to tell Nigerians the portions of the Bible and Koran that encourages its followers to loot public funds and in return give alms to the poor. Nigerians have been bamboozled into believing that their situation is the creation of God or God’s punishment for past sins. Nothing can be further from the truth. Before our very own eyes, we are seeing a practical demonstration of why Karl Marx called religion the opium of the masses. Christians and Muslims and followers of other religions must wake up from their slumber, rise up and practice the dictates of their religion. They must challenge evil as dictated by their religious beliefs. The Bible implores Christians to resist evil and shy away from the company of evil doers.
The power and ability to change Nigeria is in the hands of Nigerians and I am not a dreamer, although no one has ever been jailed for dreaming. Just imagine a situation where Nigerians decide that enough is enough and serve notice on this illegal regime that at a set date, not too far in the future, Nigerian workers, students, traders and other citizens will shut down the country by staying at home. They will not go on the streets to avoid the brutalities of the Nigerian state. I will bet my life that this caricature structure that we call a government will not survive 30 days of such a stay home protest. What is the big deal if the workers are not paid for one month? Afterall, they have gone months before without getting paid. Confronted with a situation like this, the Nigerian government will collapse. How will it survive without petrol, banking services to facilitate bribery, police officers, air traffic controllers and power supply for propaganda through NTA?
Confronted with the situation described above, a president that needed five months to reshuffle a cabinet will quit office because there will be nothing he can do. These politicians who will want you to believe they are superstars, maybe gangsters, have no stomach for a fight. They will be the first to cross the borders and take the next available flight to Europe and North America to enjoy the coziness of the mansions they purchased with the peoples blood. Remember the story of the bomb explosions at Ikeja Cantonment and the governor who took Okada to Cotonou, fearing a military coup? The story illustrates the cowardice of those lording it over an otherwise proud and brilliant group of people.
The charlatans around Aso Rock are worse than Judas; they will betray the president, and deservedly so, even before the cock crows. The president will be left stranded in Aso Rock until he sees the light and resigns. He will be stranded because if he decides to bomb all Nigerians out of their houses, the Nigerian Air Force has no functional aircrafts for the job nor would they find aviation fuel. He will be stranded because there will be nobody on the streets for the Police to brutalize. He will be stranded because there will be no NTA to sing his praises as it often does when the country is actually in flames.
Notwithstanding the attraction and practicality of the above scenario, considerable ground work needs to be done by Nigerians outside the country. They must take the lead in bringing about this reality. They must set the stage for what could become an epic struggle for the soul of Nigeria. They must take the lead because they can prepare the ground for the scenario described above by enlightening the people inside the country through peaceful demonstrations in Europe and North America. They can organize massive demonstrations targeting Nigerian embassies and high commissions, branches of Nigerian banks in New York and London (we regret there are none in Canada) for their role in helping politicians launder billions of stolen money.
In this era of global financial meltdown and bank failures, all that is needed to get the customers of these banks to withdraw their money, go elsewhere, and shut down these money laundering operations called banks is letting them know that their bank is involved in money laundering and therefore risking regulatory sanctions and possible collapse. UBA has already paid millions to the United States government for similar reasons and unfortunately, shareholders have not been bold enough to sue UBA in the United States. Picketing these banks will force their international lending partners to withdraw or limit their credit facilities. It will not be long before they banks close down and return home defeated.
In a place like London-England for example, mansions purchased with stolen money dot the landscape and saharareporters.com has done a wonderful job of letting us know where some of these assets are located. The politicians come to town almost every weekend riding in their big cars and hosting million dollar parties. Unfortunately, many Nigerians, the very victims of the politicians’ greed fall over one another fighting to be invited to these shameful displays of unmitigated greed and emptiness. Why are Nigerians in England not picketing these parties? Why are they not carrying placards in front of these mansions and letting the neighbors know that they have a thief in their midst?
As practitioners of the technique described above, members of our group have achieved success with it. Through picketing, we have been able to stop the ambassador from attending some functions in Toronto and wasting the country’s money through dubious allowances and accommodation fees. Recently, a state governor was de-invited from the list of people to be honored by an organization in Canada because our group made it clear that we will picket the show. By stopping this state governor’s proposed jamboree we estimate that we have saved the people of the state enough money for 50 boreholes, assuming a cost of N200,000.00 per borehole. We arrived at this calculation by estimating that the governor would have shown up in town with at least 10 people flying first class at a cost of $5,000.00 per ticket, add lodging, allowances and the services of call girls or prostitutes then you have a bill of $100,000.00 Please do not ask me why they are honoring this governor whose only achievement is the looting of state resources.
Better still, why have Nigerians in England not instituted lawsuits to recover the houses belonging to the politicians, sell them and keep the proceeds in a bank until there is the opportunity to return the money to a responsible government? For the doubting Thomases, see the case of Zambia v. Chiluba:
In the above case, a British court ordered former president Chiluba and his fellow conspirators to return over $45 million dollars to the people of Zambia. The court derived its jurisdiction from the fact that the stolen money went into the British banking system. I am not an expert in this area but do have considerable training, knowledge and experience in the area of asset recovery and banking litigation. Anyone interested in this type of litigation or any other matter relating to efforts to change Nigeria can contact our group at [email protected] The time has come to put the toes of these politicians to the fire. For those of us in Canada, our promise is that if we find one of these houses, our group will go to court to recover it and we invite anyone with knowledge to try our resolve with proper information. I cannot imagine one of these politicians taking the witness stand and being cross-examined on the relationship between his/her tax return, accumulation of funds in their bank accounts and the saving of the money used in buying these houses. The banks that granted the mortgages, if any, should be added to the litigation in order to gain access to documents from the transaction in its possession.
Hope is an essential ingredient of human life but like everything else, hope in the face of a factually hopeless situation is akin to myopia. Tragically and for too long, Nigerians have hoped and come to believe that if they struggle long enough and kiss enough back sides, they will finally get their opportunity to partake in the national hobby of treasury looting. How wrong they have been. From a mathematical point of view, does not Nigeria have enough money to make every Nigerian a millionaire, the resounding answer is no. For this group of Nigerians, they may actually be “waiting for their turn to die”
According to Martin Luther King, the triumph of good over evil can only come through constant struggle and it will take the commitment of a few dedicated citizens to change the country. One thing that would surprise those of you who may be interested in this kind of struggle is the resistance to change within the Nigerian community in Diaspora. Virulent opposition should be expected. Despite the Saturday evening sport of politician bashing that takes place over bottles of beer in any setting where Nigerians are gathered, you will be surprised at the creative arguments some Nigerians will come up with to explain why a particular politician is not part of the problem and why demonstrations should only take place in certain places. They say the ambassador is not part of the problem, a man who has was a senator in the second republic and has remained a politician ever since. He has been a witness to Nigeria’s decline, although he is not alone. If the ambassador is not part of the problem then my late father must be part of the problem. Underlying these arguments of exclusion and or exemption lie the existing or desired relationship that these Nigerians would like to have with the corrupt politicians.
I sympathize with the group I just described above because they have failed to recognize the teachings of history. The teaching represented by Martin Luther King’s words that “oppressors never give up power voluntarily, the oppressed must demand it” The few dedicated ones must go on and at the point of inevitability, those sitting on the fence will be welcomed back home where they belonged in the first place. Some of them are behaving like seasoned gamblers by hedging their bets by supporting both sides, watching to see if we will fail and this is the reason why we must not fail.
We have studied different models of popular change and concluded that the Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi models are not suitable for Nigeria. These individuals succeeded because they were allowed to demonstrate internally. We also do not think the instantaneous popular uprisings that occurred in Ukraine, Georgia and Romania will work for the same reasons.
We believe that the South African model of pilling economic and political pressure on the government from outside is best suited for Nigeria, an environment that is hostile to civil demonstrations. The catalyst for change in South Africa came partly from those demonstrations in London, Rome, Amsterdam, New York and other places. Others came from the strangulating economic conditions. The government capitulated in the face of economic ruin. This is what Nigerians have to do. The pressure must be built from outside before finally going for the juggernaut with an internal sit at home protest. With respect to Nigerians feeling the brunt of economic hardship, please tell me about the time in history when the common Nigerian has not borne the brunt of economic hardship. Moreover, the oppressors in South Africa made this same dubious argument.
Ibori’s wife is expected in a London court on November 13 and 14. On that same day, we intend to demonstrate in front of some Nigerian banks in London, England.
There is no better time to highlight the shameful roles played by these banks in assisting Ibori to loot the people’s resources. Chief among these culprits is Cecilia Ibru of Oceanic Bank. Since the EFCC has “lost” its files, we are going to help them recover the money. We are inviting all well meaning Nigerians to show up for this demonstration. Those who are interested can contact us at [email protected] for further information on strategies and location.
I want to end here by challenging every Nigerian out there to examine what they are living for and what they would like to leave behind for the next generation. Most things are transient and one of the few enduring legacies is the work we do for the betterment of humanity.
Majekodunmi Adega - [email protected]
Toronto, Canada
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