There is a cancer eating through the national fabric of Nigeria, and it is not the Biafran agitators. Anybody with a single brain cell in his head knows that the Biafran State will be realized within the next 20 years! We do not need to write an essay to spell this out; all one needs to do is take a close look at present day Nigeria and the fraudulent dullards running it!
In what will go down in history as one of the greatest depictions of Western interference in African politics, a former military dictator was dressed up in civilian garb, and presented to the Nigerian people as a bonafide candidate for its general election in 2015 by a trio of Mr. David Axelrod, who was paid millions of dollars by corrupt Nigerian politicians, who then proceeded to provide the dictator unfettered access to President Barack Obama, and Mr. David Cameron, former British Prime Minister who gave this dictator the platform to address the world at the Chatham House in Britain in the run-up to Nigeria’s presidential election in 2015.
Before I wade into an economic experiment of nature taking place in Nigeria today, let me state that I have just returned from a trip to Nigeria and conditions are worse than they were when I visited last year, and subsequently wrote an essay which exposed the Western contrivances that put a barely literate, forged-certificate peddling, former military dictator into the office of the Presidency of Nigeria.
To state that Nigerians are suffering is to do a disservice to the word ‘suffering.' Nigerians are on their last legs. People are committing suicide in remote towns and villages out of hopelessness, children are being pulled from schools by parents who cannot afford tuition, college students are starving in schools, workers are limping to and from work, airlines are shutting down, and banks are gasping for air! But the so-called president of Nigeria, Mallam Buhari is sitting pretty in the presidential mansion in Abuja, surrounded by corrupt acolytes, and planning endless, wasteful, and unproductive foreign trips, while paying no attention whatsoever to the endless travails of Nigerians. His stark insensitivity was on public display when on hearing that the Nigerian economy had slid into recession, trotted out his Finance Minister, Ms. Kemi Adeosun, to inform devastated Nigerians that recession was just a word and that they should hold their peace.
The Nigerian economy is in the pits because Mr. Buhari, a former military dictator, is running an ethnic and religious government staffed by more than 70% of appointees from his region of the country, which happens to be the most educationally backward in Nigeria. Read it here: http://dailypost.ng/2016/08/01/sectionalism-unprecedented-nepotism-also-corruption-punch-tells-buhari/; and here: http://punchng.com/nepotism-buharis-govt-worst-nigerias-history-junaid-mohammed/. A recent report in one of the nation’s newspapers quoted the Minister of Education Malam Adamu Adamu as complaining that most directors of ministries and parastatal in Buhari’s government cannot write a simple memo! Read it here: https://www.nigerianbulletin.com/threads/most-directors-in-civil-service-cannot-write-education-minister-adamu.226101/. This is the first time in Nigerian history that a critical mass of fraudulent dullards has taken over the machinery of government and are bent on running it aground! Mr. Buhari’s practice of nepotism has infested the Nigeria economy with an army of mega-parasites who are actively drawing huge salaries and benefits from the Nigeria coffers, but spend their days in office chattering, sharpening pencils, sleeping, drooling, and doodling on their desks while the economy spirals into oblivion.
Buhari’s apologists are quick to blame Nigeria’s current economic meltdown on the drop in oil prices, but this is where the experiment of nature comes into play. If the drop-in-oil-prices hypothesis were true, then a majority of oil-producing nations in the world would be in similar economic straits as Nigeria. But this is not true. Therefore, what is the primary difference between Mr. Buhari’s directionless government and those of other oil-producing nations that are not in an economic meltdown as Nigeria?
The history of Nigeria provides a clue to the answer.
There is a certitude that has remained inviolable since Nigeria’s independence in 1960: as long as the price of a barrel of crude oil is above $70, even a tadpole can rule Nigeria! This concept has given rise to the band of born-to-rule class: a group of barely literate Nigerians, mostly from the Hausa-Fulani tribe who, despite their hatred for Western education, stubbornly insist on seizing the wheels of government at the highest level from their more lettered countrymen and women. Now, as long as the price of crude oil stays above $70 per barrel these boorish born-to-rulers can crash the vehicle of state repeatedly with impunity and the system will absorb these relentless shocks and continue to hobble on its course. We saw an example in a former dictator of Nigeria, Mr. Ibrahim Babangida, who once wondered aloud that he could not understand why he was unable to sink the Nigerian economy despite his repeated attempts to empty the treasury! But that was during the Gulf Oil Windfall of the 1990s when the price of a barrel of oil was above $100! It is this culture of poor leadership, extravagance, and lack of diversification of economy by past and present Nigerian leaders that makes the country vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of oil.
Thus, the inevitable experiment of nature takes a bizarre turn when the price of crude oil drops to less than $70 per barrel! Suddenly, the system fails to absorb the shock stemming from the born-to-rulers’ medieval economic policies, the abject lack of vision, rampant corruption, and their incompetence to compete with other nations that are led by highly-educated leaders with clear economic policies that are fine-tuned to modern global trends.
Mr. Buhari has now broken a world record for being the first ruler to take the largest economy on any continent from the first position to the dust in less than one year! Western media houses and the Obama Administration are wringing their fingers and wondering how they got it so wrong when people like this writer were warning the world that this unlettered dictator would plunge Nigeria into an abyss because all the warning signs were there!
The worst thing that can befall any nation is for its boorish class to seize the machinery of government! All civilized, progression nations in the world insist and demand to be led by a person of high intellect who has his or her finger on the pulse and strategic direction of the world.
It will take Nigeria more than 20 years to recover from the Buhari menace, and by then the nation of Biafra would have been actualized. No amount of operation python dance, marginalization, and massacres in the former Biafran territories will prevent this reality, because, in due time, a confluence of internal and external forces will force the breakup of Nigeria into at least four nations, of which, Biafra will be one.
-Benjamin U. Nwosu.
