By EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO
Last Christmas period most of us staying
in the urban areas such as Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, River state and
foreign territories did make the annual ritual of mass return to the
South Eastern region of Nigeria to spend time with loved ones and also
attend to the multidimensional development -focused village meetings
convoked by the elders-in-council.
As far as I am concern, I make it a
religious, cultural and traditional obligation to always travel to
Arondizuogu in Imo State to touch base with my people and join other
progressive-minded citizens to brainstorm on how to move our home town
forward from the perpetual poverty infested terrain dominated by
absolute lack of social infrastructure to a twenty first century human
habitation.
After embarking on this yearly
pilgrimage to Arondizuogu for over twenty years, I have come to accept
the fact that unless the entire suffering populace in Nigeria team up to
say no to the evil status quo of gross underdevelopment and monumental
heist of the nation’s commonwealth by the few elite that are less than a
percentage, then we will continue to dwell in poverty, mass
unemployment, unprecedented corruption and what corruption breeds such
as terrorism, political instability and violence/insecurity.
You may wonder why yours faithfully have
drawn this conclusion but please take a little time and reflect on what
steps you think people who are perpetually at the receiving end of the
vicious circle of criminal neglect by the political elite can take to
better their situation and free themselves from the terrorism of
corruption and large scale embezzlement of public fund.
Over the years we have carefully
followed developments regarding the nationally shared allocations that
go to the different federating units but often the rural dwellers who
are basically peasant farmers are neglected to a point that basic social
amenities such as rural roads, electricity power, good and workable
health care infrastructure and even markets whereby they can display and
sale their farm produce are not available.
Because of this poor state of
infrastructure, the rural farmers are left at the mercy of middle men
who buy off these produce from the farms at give away prices thereby
perpetuating the poverty circle in which these farmers are trapped.
Again, the rural poor have no access to medicare and the high cost of
transportation and health care services in nearby urban cities are way
too out of the reach of these rural poor thereby subjecting them to the
dehumanization and increasingly diminished dignity as human beings even
as most of them die before any help reach them.
Like most people who took time to travel
to their village homes for the 2012 Christmas season, I witnessed first
hand, the stark reality of majority of my rural people living in
squalor and I also witnessed the absence of any kind of local or state
government presence just as the local bridges constructed by the people
through communal contributions are almost collapsing for lack of
maintenance.
Therefore, a rational reflection of the
situation of massive poverty under which most Nigerians live even with
the statistical evidence that Nigeria is resource rich, will only take
the thinker to one logical conclusion-corruption is same as terrorism.
Transparency International best defined corruption as the abuse of
entrusted power for private gains. Terrorism is generally seen as the
use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
Wikipedia the online encyclopedia stated that terrorism has been
practiced by a broad array of political organizations including the
ruling political elite to further their political objectives.
Away from semantics, we must realise
that it is because of large scale theft of public fund by the political
elite and their collaborators in the top hierarchy of civil and public
service in Nigeria over the past several decades which intensified since
1999 that poverty and lack of development have become the cancerous
afflictions that have led to the untimely demise of scores of citizens.
It is because of corruption by the
ruling elite that security infrastructures have collapsed making it
inevitable that armed non-state actors have being terrorizing the civil
populace without the properly and constitutionally constituted armed
forces and security agents effectively rising to the occasion to defeat
the unprecedented insecurity all across Nigeria.
Corruption and the diversion of public
fund by the elite is responsible for the institutional rot in the
Nigeria police Force which has changed this otherwise strategic public
institution to the shameful position as one of the most indisciplined,
and most professionally incompetent policing institution in the world.
It is because of corruption and economic
crime perpetrated by the public office holders and hierarchies of key
institutions that made foreign security experts to dismiss the Nigeria
Armed Forces as institutions whereby the members are poorly trained,
poorly equipped and grossly indisciplined.
On Monday 5th November 2012, The
Guardian of United Kingdom published a story titled; “Nigerian army’s
Mali Mission stalls amid doubt it can fight.”
The doubts on the fighting capacity of
the Nigerian army emerged amid the effort by the Economic community of
West African States (ECOWAS) to deploy military operatives from member
nations to confront the fighters of the Angor Dine, the largest of the
Islamist groups that at that time controlled northern Mali.
These doubts compelled the leadership of
the sub-regional body to appeal to France to rout these terrorists that
held sway in most parts of Northern Mali making use of the firepower in
their arsenal.
The Guardian of United Kingdom had
reported about the Nigerian army thus; “The shocking state of the
Nigerian army has delayed plans for a military intervention in Mali,
amid reports that it lacks the capability to fight on the frontline”.
According to the report which was
viciously rebuked by the Nigeria’s military authority, The Guardian of
United Kingdom also found out that operatives of the Nigeria army are
bereft of training and are deficient in the modern fighting weapons.
“The Nigerian Forces lack training and
kit, so they simply don’t have the capacity to carry out even basic
military maneuvers. They have poor discipline and support. They are more
likely to play a behind-the-scenes roles in logistics and providing
security”, The Guardian of UK reported quoting competent sources.
Now the question to be asked from the
above is what has happened with the huge budgetary releases to the
Nigerian defence sector since 1999 that democracy returned? Why have the
Nigerian Custom Service, the Nigerian Immigration and the armed forces
unable to stop the incursions of armed bandits from the neighboring
countries to launch vicious terrorism attacks in parts of the north of
Nigeria?
Corruption and outright theft of these huge public fund meant for the defence sector since 1999 is responsible if you ask me.
The British Prime Minister Mr. David
Cameron only recently at the World Economic Summit in Davos,
Switzerland, lambasted the government of Nigeria for not accounting for
the over $100 Billion USD that Nigeria generated from export of crude
oil in only 2012.
About the same time, Nigeria’s former
education minister and immediate past vice President of the World Bank
Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili accused the late Yar’adua and the current Jonathan
federal administration of misappropriation of over $64 Billion USD that
the President Obasanjo administration handed over on May 2007.
Prime Minister David Cameron had told
the World thus; “A few years back a transparency initiative exposed a
huge hole in Nigeria’s finances, an eight hundred million dollar
discrepancy between what companies were paying and what government was
receiving for oil-a massive, massive gap. The discovery of this is
leading to new regulation of Nigeria’s oil sector so the richness of the
earth can actually help to enrich the people of that country.”
The British Prime Minister then made a
revelation of monumental proportion regarding how only in one year
Nigeria made over one hundred billion United States dollars from export
of crude oil but the gap between the tiny rich elite of less than a
percentage and the poor majority has widened dangerously.
David Cameron said: “last year (2012)
Nigeria oil exports were worth almost a hundred billion dollars. That is
more than the total net aid to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. So put
simply: unleashing the natural resources in these countries dwarfs
anything aid can achieve, and transparency is absolutely critical to
that end….”
Speaking of transparency, the revenue
generated by the Nigerian government is not transparently accounted for
thereby foisting widespread poverty and insecurity on Nigerians and
Nigeria.
The latest independent Nigeria
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) audit report of
oil and gas sector for 2009 to 2011 shows that the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in one instance among many others, received
$4.84 billion from the Nigerian liquefied National Gas (NLNG) on behalf
of the Nigerian government, which was yet to be remitted into the
CBN/NNPC JP Margan account or the Federation Account by the NNPC.
This same NNPC has reportedly approached
foreign creditors to borrow $1.5 billion loan because it is reportedly
broke. What a cesspool of corruption!
The report which was published by NEITI
on February 1st 2013 showed that in whole, the total financial flow to
the federation account from the oil and gas sector from 2009 to 2001 was
$143.5 trillion.
The breakdown shows the amount is up
from proceeds from the sales of equity crude, royalties and signatures
bonus, concession rentals, gas flaring penalties, petroleum profit tax
and companies income tax.
Now, where are the above monumental resources and why is there so much poverty, unemployment and insecurity in the land?
The answer is corruption and impunity by
the elite that have continuously terrorized the citizenry to a point
that poverty has now dehumanize a majority of the citizenry.
Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili who was two times
minister under President Obasanjo typically supported my affirmation
that corruption is the same thing as terrorism when she reeled out the
statistics to show that the population of the poor has grown in leaps
and bounds even when the nation has received generous foreign
exchange/revenue from crude oil exports which are however stolen by the
elite.
According to Mrs. Oby Nigeria is a
paradox of the kind of wealth that breads penury because the trend of
Nigeria’s population in poverty since 1980 to 2010 suggests that the
more we earned from oil, the larger the population of the poor citizens.
It appears that Nigeria is not only resource cursed but also cursed by
the terrorism band of political elite who are holding all of us as
hostages.
But some critics have however fired back
at Mrs. Ezekwesili questioning her moral high ground to accuse other
governments of corruption when in actual fact the government of Obasanjo
in which she served, actually elevated corruption to the highest level.
This day Newspaper of December 19th 2006
published a story of the presentation by then Vice President Mr. Atiku
Abubakar who accused his boss President Obasanjo of misappropriation of
N10 billion belonging to the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) to
bribe members of the National Assembly to change the constitutional two
terms limit to enable him allegedly pursue a third term.
The then Vice President had made this weighty allegations under oath while testifying before the Nigerian Senate.
Now if these humongous amount can be
callously diverted by the political elite how else do we expect that the
poverty and insecurity that besiege a majority of Nigerians and are
terrorizing our lives will just go away just like that without
Nigerians waging a collective fight against the terrorism of official
corruption?
Our situation in Nigeria was captured by three erudite scholars in their book “The criminalization of the state in Africa.”
The trio-Jean-Francois Bayart; Stephen
Ellis; and Beatrice Hibou had in that book aforementioned argued lucidly
that the growth of fraud and smuggling are interwoven with politics.
The book examines the plundering of
natural resources, the privatization of state institutions, the
development of an economy of plunder and the growth of private armies.
The book suggests that the State itself is becoming a vehicle for
organized criminal activity.
The authors emphatically propose
criteria for what they call gauging the criminalization of African
states and indeed moved on to the realm of pragmatism by presenting what
is regarded as a novel prognosis: they successfully distinguished
between the corruption of previous decades and what they now prefer to
identify as the criminalization of some African states now taking place.
The authors rightly argued that major political office holders in Africa are now able to connect with global criminal networks.
Tell me if this corruption going on in
Nigeria which is economy of plunder by the political elite is not
terrorism what is it then?
For them the term economy of plunder
refers to the acquisition by representative of public authority of
economic resources for private purposes. For me this is the highest
manifestation of terrorism on official scale.
Source:
http://www.nationalaccordnewspaper.com/index.php/opinion/viewpoint/519-corruption-as-terrorism
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