The anti-corruption protests last week were massive. No major city in the whole of Brazil was spared. The people trooped out and crippled the country. They demanded that you do something urgent and decisive about corruption.
Dear President Dilma Rousseff: Calvary greetings to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I trust that this letter will not ‘meet your absence’ when it gets to Brazil. I also trust that it will meet you in a good condition of health, if so doxology. I am writing to help you. I want to offer you some advice because I noticed that you have encountered some difficulty recently in presiding over the affairs of Brazil and you are handling issues very poorly ma. The Bible asks us to be our brother’s keeper. I have decided to extend that boy’s club Biblical injunction to a worthy sister like you.
Last Sunday, the people of Brazil finally decided that a people that does not kill corruption will be killed by corruption. They are angry that their country has acquired the reputation of being one of the most corrupt countries on the American continent. They are angry that all the institutions of state have been crippled by massive corruption. They are angry that national ethos and morals have gone to the dogs. They are angry that the state-owned Petrobras, which is the behemoth in charge of all things petrol in Brazil, has become a fetid oasis of corruption – an endless source of slush and sleazy funds for the political class. They are angry that billionaires and multibillionaires just emerge overnight in Brazil and nobody can explain the source of their wealth. Finally, they are frustrated by massive poverty in Brazil. And they rose up en masse against you, against your government, against the politicians.
The anti-corruption protests last week were massive. No major city in the whole of Brazil was spared. The people trooped out and crippled the country. They demanded that you do something urgent and decisive about corruption. Your approval rating crashed. You panicked and called an international press conference to announce massive new measures against corruption. Your speech was broadcast nationally in Brazil. You announced your decision to “fight impunity and corruption”. You announced so many measures that you will undertake immediately to fight corruption. I cannot repeat them all here but you said that measures will be taken to criminalize slush funds used to finance election campaigns and to seize the assets of people found guilty of corruption. You said that there will now be a requirement that government officials have no record of crimes. It was tough watching you because you were almost in tears, so pained were you by the fact that you have lost the confidence of the people of Brazil.
This is why I have decided to help you. I am moved to pity. Sister, you are going about this anti-corruption was the wrong way. Why am I qualified to help you? Let’s settle the little matter of my anti-corruption bona fides quickly. I am a Nigerian. That nationality rings a bell with you? That’s what I thought. You dare not claim not to know me. You must at least have received an email from me claiming that I am the secret black African son of Adolf Hitler to whom he willed his secret assets worth billions of dollars. As the German authorities are now closing in on my existence and secret assets, will you let me hide my billions in your bank account? Your cut will be 20%. It is possible that this email was sent to you by a Ghanaian, a Kenyan, a South African, a Ugandan, a Tanzanian, a Rwandan, an Italian, a Russian, a French, a German, an American or an English criminal. The moment they realized that Nigeria’s massive problems with corruption have turned her into an international reference for corruption, all the crooks in the world, especially African crooks, quickly started a crooks of the world, unite and call yourselves Nigerian!
The crooks of the world were able to do all these things in my name because I had massive corruption problems. In fact, I was surprised to hear that the people of Brazil were making all this noise about Petrobras because that state-owned oil company has disappeared ordinary $800 million in slush funds. The elder brother of Brazil’s Petrobras is Nigeria’s NNPC. If the folks at NNPC heard that Brazil was brought to her knees last week because Petrobras disappeared eight hundred million dollars, they’d laugh. At the height of our corruption problems in Nigeria, an NNPC official who disappeared less than a billion dollars could be sacked for low fund disappearance productivity. $800 million is what you budget for the lifestyle of Nigeria’s oil minister and President of OPEC who must maintain three luxury rental private jets and eat caviar in the royal suite of the Waldorf Astoria.
Then we moved massively and decisively against corruption in Nigeria. We fought corruption to a standstill and eradicated it completely. As of today, March 19, 2015, I am happy to report to you that Nigeria is 100% corruption-free. There is no more corruption in Nigeria. In other words, we’ve been there, done that in Nigeria and that is why I am in an auspicious position to help you out with your own anti-corruption struggle. I am well positioned to tell you that the measures you have announced are a step in the wrong direction. That is not how to fight corruption, President Yousseff. Here’s a rough guide to how we did in Nigeria.
Your admission of the enormity of the problem was your first fundamental error. You went on national television to admit to widespread corruption in Brazil. Anybody listening to you would think that the people of Brazil were right to have taken so massively to the streets. Next time, your first step is deny; your second step is deny; your third step is deny. Deny, deny, deny. You must deny the existence of the problem until you come to believe that it does not exist. You must use every opportunity to say that claims of corruption in Brazil are grossly exaggerated by your enemies. You must constantly say that anybody who mentions the word corruption in Brazil wants to bring down your government. Don’t you have opposition parties in Brazil? Blame them for recruiting and funding your enemies to claim that there is corruption in Brazil. Go on Christiane Amanpour once a mouth to denounce the international conspiracy to exaggerate the cases of corruption in Brazil.
And what sort of country are you running where people can just troop to the streets in all the major cities in protest against corruption? How did the people of Brazil acquire the level of civic sophistication to understand that it is their duty to protest against corruption and hold you to account? It means that your aides and officials are not doing their jobs for starters. If your aides were performing, the people of Brazil would be thriving in a national psychology which criminalizes such protests as unpatriotic. They’d be hailing you and all the officials of Petrobras to ride on! If the people are patriotic and happy and protest nothing, it means that there is no corruption.
You also say that laws would be enacted to seize the funds of all the emergency millionaires and billionaires who cannot account for their wealth. That is a mistake ma. If you begin to seize funds left, right and centre, that would amount to an admission of the fact that there is a problem of corruption in Brazil. That would contradict your message that corruption does not exist in Brazil or the little that exists is grossly exaggerated by unpatriotic citizens and enemies of your government. What you need to do is to create a culture of reward for corruption. You must move in the circles of all the corrupt people in Brazil. You must give them national awards and appoint them to positions of national responsibility. If anybody has been indicted or jailed for corruption in the past by an overzealous judge, you must abuse the instrument of presidential pardon and bring such a person close to your heart. In fact, the singular criterion for belonging to your inner circle of friends must be corruption or the perception of corruption. If people ask you why you consort with corrupt people, tell them you don’t give damn.
This brings me to your unfortunate decision to introduce a rule that those appointed to government offices will have no record of crime and corruption. This is illogical. If government officials have no record of crime and corruption, it means they are not familiar with crime and corruption. How are they supposed to fight what they do not know? Only seasoned thieves must be appointed to office. Once you adopt a habit of always denying whatever they do, there will be no problem.
There may be the occasional government official who is secretly working for the international community and the domestic enemies of your government. It is easy to tell such an official because he always has a holier than thou disposition. He will insist that there is corruption. He will even talk to the international media and roll out figures. Fire his ass! Do everything to discredit him. Get one of your aides to forge email exchanges between him and ISIS and accuse him of sponsoring terrorism. Luckily for you, there is no emirate system in Brazil and no benevolent spirits will crack his palm kernel and make him an Emir just before you are able to move against him and jail his ass.
Whenever you run a presidential campaign, there has to be a cocaine-addicted crackpot indicted for corruption and massive stealing somewhere in Brazil. Find him and make him the spokesperson of your campaign. The greatest asset of such a character is the fact that he has home advantage in the gutter. He will drag all your enemies to that place where he has home advantage and finish them off. With such a person fighting your public wars for you, the mere mention of corruption would become treason. Also, as President, it is your responsibility to teach your people lexis and semantics. It smirks of ignorance for a people to accuse Petrobras of corruption because of the disappearance of eight hundred million dollars. That is an ordinary case of stealing. To qualify as corruption, the figure must be at least one billion dollars.
If you deny corruption, intimidate and harass people for mentioning that word, reward the corrupt, consort with the corrupt, and give them juicy political appointments, corruption will disappear for what you cannot mention you cannot see. And what you cannot see does not exist. Remember this: nothing works like an army of diseducated and jobless youth recruited to make your case on social media. Hire millions of them. It will cost you less than 20 dollars a month to hire one because of poverty and under-education. Unleash them on Twitter and Facebook to drown out any talk of corruption in Brazil. Social media mob works and it comes very cheap since you get to manipulate such youth to work against their own interests. These are the robust steps we took to exterminate corruption in Nigeria.
Today, I am proud to announce to you that a presidential committee has been set up to liaise with publishers of dictionaries in use in Nigeria with a view to eliminating the word, corruption, from such dictionaries. We don’t want out citizens to be able to pick up a dictionary and look up corruption. It simply does not exist in Nigeria.
Go ahead and adopt these revolutionary measures Madam President.
You don’t have to worry about America’s reaction to such measures.
America will not know.
President Obama does not speak Portuguese.