14 May 2009 |
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Musical Chairs of Nigeria’s Mafia I am a Nigerian and I find it humiliating to hear one of our leaders say he does not know what happened to $150m paid into his account by bribe givers. For goodness sake we are not talking We are subjected to this continual substitution of one set of thieves for another, at every change in Nigeria’s political leadership. Most people are familiar with the game of musical chairs played by people who dance round a limited number of chairs, hoping to find a vacant seat when the music stops. The only misnomer in the analogy is that rather than have seats taken away from the arena, in the case of Nigeria’s power game of musical chairs, more seats are being added. Members of these groups are usually from what, in other countries, would be regarded as respectable backgrounds. They are from families of monarchs and former leaders. By their privilege they attended some of the best educational and military institutions in the world that our money could buy. By the same privilege they rose to some of the highest positions in our society. In effect they have become the setters of national moral standards and, as would be expected with people like them at the helm, those standards have sunk to an abysmal low. Successively they have shown that they all have two things in common – their insatiable appetite for money and grand larceny. They also have sectional interests between the groups – competitive greed. The one thing it is obvious they do not have, either individually or collectively, is a good thought for Nigeria. These groups have been called several names but the most apt of these descriptions is mafia. The original Italian mafia is a secret society of criminals, highly organized, originating in Sicily. Whatever group is in power – Kaduna, Kano, Aso (Rock) and now, the Katsina mafiosi – these thieves have a way of gaining inroads and worm their way to the top and into the pocket of Nigeria’s treasury. All bribe givers and takers know there is nothing as a free lunch. The so-called Kaduna mafia that controlled Nigeria into our second attempt at democracy and a little beyond, had a sizeable number of these swindlers embedded within. They claim to be apostles of the late Sardauna but while the enduring and noble legacies of Sir Ahmadu Bello are all over the place, all they can show for their greed are unbelievably bulging bank accounts that are sometimes lost because the secrecy that surrounds the accounts only plays into the hands of their equally greedy bankers. While the late Sardauna is known not to own even one house in his name whilst controlling what amounts to the total budget of 20 states, all they can show within Nigeria for their kleptocracy are palatial mansions that I am sure will one day revert to the real owners (Nigerians) as hospitals, libraries and other communally beneficial projects. The main campus of Greenwich University in London today used to be a palace of one of the kings of England. Not too long ago it reverted to the real owners, the people of England, first as a maritime museum and naval establishment and later as university campus. Our greedy leaders should learn from history. That [Kaduna] mafia effectively terminated with Babangida when he re-educated the northern Nigeria leadership to the truism that real power in Nigeria flowed from the barrel of army guns and not from Emirs’ palaces. This was best demonstrated by his imposition of Sultan Dasuki on the Sokoto emirate. Some of the ‘richest’ people in Nigeria today are products of that period of licensed daylight mugging of the Nigerian state. Then we had the Kano mafia of the Abacha regime. Capitalising on the new power structures emanating from Babangida, the new dictator, Abacha, demoted Dasuki and imposed his own choice on the emirate. It seems that Abacha and his family had an onerous ambition to become the richest in the world, if stories of their money stash abroad are to be believed. I suspect these people do not even know the value of what they steal. They do not know the transformation it can make to Nigeria and Nigerians. Next came the Aso (Rock) mafia, a detribalised coterie of thieves that operated in Obasanjo’s time. The distinctive nature of Obasanjo’s Aso (Rock) mafia is that it had national character and every ethnic group that had a nominee with a filching tendency, shared of the loot. Yoruba, Ibo Ijaw, Fulani, Urhobo, name them, they were all there. We had hitherto penurious advisers becoming private jet and helicopter owners. Some known members of the group, until politics later did them part, were writing personal cheques in hundreds of millions of dollars, when you don’t see a factory to their name, or a productive company to their efforts. Why old men in their seventies (some say in their eighties) would want to corner a large share of Nigeria’s commerce, using Transcorp and the oil industry the fraudulent way they reportedly did, boggles the mind of any God-fearing person. The Katsina mafia that is yet to fully mature was inevitable. At the rate president Umaru Yar’Adua is going, Katsina state might soon run out of able-bodied indigenes to run the state, as all of them would have been employed at Aso Rock. Despite his inaugural speech to combat corruption, the best exponents of it are said to be regular faces in Aso Rock while the best exponent Nigeria has had yet, of the fight against corruption, Nuhu Ribadu, has been hounded out of the country. Nuhu, as far as I am concerned, is a hero of Nigeria and I do not care what anybody says. As in Obsanjo’s time, perhaps less obvious than Obasanjo’s time, the EFCC is still being used more as a political deterrent than a crime-fighting institution. Nuhu’s critics claim he was only going after thieves that were Obasanjo’s enemies. Now is their chance to go after crooks that are Obasanjo’s friends. In Nuhu’s time we saw real prosecutions, jail terms, refund of fraudulent gains and court fines. This current political window dressing of a fight against corruption only vindicates Nuhu and confirms his greatest offence was to step on certain big toes. Toes that are seemingly bigger than the collective good of Nigerians. Thanks to the international anti-money laundering laws it is no longer easy for anybody to abscond to London or to New York or to the Seychelles. Now their safest place is Nigeria where they can still bribe their way out of consequence. But for how long is Nigeria going to have to watch, in obvious despair, this alarming game of musical chairs?
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