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Land Of Opportunity By Sonala Olumhense

Americans talk a lot about how their country is the land of opportunity.   It took me a while to understand what the problem is. What Americans need is a dictionary.  One of these days, when they open a reliable dictionary and they seek out ‘Land of Opportunity,’ they will find a full-colour map of Nigeria.  Africa’s most populous nation is the true Land of Opportunity. 

Americans talk a lot about how their country is the land of opportunity.   It took me a while to understand what the problem is. What Americans need is a dictionary.  One of these days, when they open a reliable dictionary and they seek out ‘Land of Opportunity,’ they will find a full-colour map of Nigeria.  Africa’s most populous nation is the true Land of Opportunity. 

A true Land of Opportunity has to be one in which you are served, not where you serve; where you take, not where you give; where you live, not where you help others live.  Consequently, in a true Land of Opportunity, both the land and its opportunities are yours.

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That is why, in Nigeria, you can kill, loot, rob, and you walk free. You can trade in weapons, light or heavy; or stand in front of the television camera and sell empty words. 

In Nigeria, the only killer, looter and robber who is ever questioned is the one who either insists on keeping all the proceeds to himself, or who is required for the occasional political sacrifice.  That is why nobody of any significance goes to jail and why crooks are celebrated in the press.  
If Americans are not persuaded, about these generalizations, let me provide some scenarios.  Suppose, an American was angry for some reason with the United States Attorney General.  The AG heads the Department of Justice just as Nigeria’s Attorney General runs the Ministry of Justice.  The American would find a lawyer and sue the AG.
In Nigeria, the angry man would simply walk into the home of the AG, open his front door, shoot him to shreds and then walk calmly to his car.  But were that to happen in the United States, they would hunt the angry man through show and fog and jungle, and through the night and the years into the next generation if necessary. 
But let us not talk about the dead.  In Nigeria, an AG can organize blackmail tours to coerce citizens—individual or corporate, domestic or international—into paying him hundreds of millions of dollars in bribe money.  He can use his office to set up a protection racket for powerful and wealthy criminals.  In the open, before his own government party, before the anti-corruption agencies and the mass media, he would enjoy gratification from every direction. 
Because ours is the true land of opportunity, he would not lose his job.  His boss would ignore every protest and every petition against the man.  In fact, the only scenario in which such an AG could lose his job is when there is a change of government and the new leader wants to exact some revenge because he feels he has been disrespected or unacknowledged by the Attorney General.  That is a true Land of Opportunity.

In Nigeria, the First Lady can run a parallel government in which she collects bribes and favours by the plane load.  She would coordinate and supervise an entire army of smugglers, money-launderers, blackmailers and errand boys whose business it is to ensure she receives maximum dollar-denominated bribes.  Naturally, neither her husband nor the glorified anti-corruption bodies would notice anything.  Even when she falls from power, power would not fall from her: nobody investigates or questions her.  That is what I call the Land of Opportunity.

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In Nigeria, the wife of a state governor can be arrested for money laundering.  In one case, such a woman was arrested twice in one month.  In the second arrest, she was trying to move the sum of $13.5 million dollars, but the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) stepped in, stopped her and took her to court. 

In the United States, such a lady would have had a long stint in a rough jail, and her husband’s political career would have been abbreviated.  In Nigeria, however, both of them were cheered on to higher office.  The cases were buried in an ethical landfill from which nothing and nobody ever comes back.  Today, powerful pastors are at hand to describe the couple as “God-sent.”  

Think about it: In the United States, all the people who were associated with Halliburton’s infamous bribing of Nigerian officials over the Liquefied National Gas project have paid huge fines and received jail terms.  In Nigeria, the government is determined not to prosecute such rich and important people.

Nigeria’s Big Men love Abuja, and have never hidden their desire to own all of it.  In a November 2003 report, the EFCC said it had uncovered a huge scam in which VIPs were illegally acquiring and developing plots of land in the city.  Through a corrupt FCDA official, the Governors, Senators, Ministers, and a former Senate President involved had recast the Abuja Master Plan in their own image. 

Also in 2003, when the police raided the Okija shrines in Anambra State, it was littered with such a multitude of decomposing bodies and human organs that the Anambra State Police Commissioner, Mr. Felix Ogbaudu, wept shamelessly at the scene.  The Police vowed to investigate the matter quickly and to prosecute the culprits.  Ten registers were seized from the Okija shrine priests, who were taken away to Abuja as part of the investigation.  The registers contained the names of their privileged patrons.  Only in a true land of opportunity can the Okija episode simply disappear into the mists of time. 

Last week, the Minister of Works announced that the construction of the Lagos-Benin Road will be completed by December.  Of course; every government says that.  Every government knows that Nigerians love to travel home at Christmas, and that the Lagos-Benin Road is always in the news.  In a related story in 2003,a state governor challenged the President to probe the Minister of Works regarding use of the funds meant for roads, as no evidence could be found that the N300 billion the President said had been budgeted for them in four years had actually been spent.  Then followed a huge uproar, in which the governor alleged receiving death threats, but it was all settled amicably within the PDP as a “family matter.”  The Lagos-Benin road is now one of the strongest metaphors of our national malaise, demonstrating how money can be voted for the same project in perpetual cycles without the project ever being undertaken or completed.  Only in Nigeria. 

Once upon a recent election, a glorified political thug in Ibadan took home ballot boxes ahead of the election.  The President, hearing of it, insisted that the man be left alone, as that was his character.  In the United States, if those words came out of Obama’s mouth, he would be impeached in a matter of days and hounded out of Washington DC. 

In Nigeria, in the year 2011, our rule-of-law government maintains a hit list of critics at border posts and airports.  The objective is to arrest these critics, who are usually outside the country, when they return to their fatherland.  This list is being maintained as a way of informing these critics that although their criticism may be fair under the law, the law is subordinate to the government of the day which can thrust you into a prison cell at will.

This is government at its most ridiculous: a day when it is the men of principle, the men who call on our country to aspire higher and achieve better that are listed for arrest, intimidation and possibly elimination.  

I write about the crooks who manipulate our country because it is the right thing to do.  I often hear the stupid retort that one should leave them alone, that what they may have done is in the past and that on balance they have done some “good” things.  My answer is that on the contrary, these people are a cancer.   Only a fool leaves alone the man who raped his mother.

Where we are coming from is that as citizens we have been forced to become investors in a political Ponzi-scheme where counterfeiting, trafficking and laundering are the swords of play.  It is not the land of opportunity; it is the era of the opportunists. 

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