BY KEN UGBECHIE

An international observer once described Nigeria’s 2023 general elections as a “crime scene.” That was 28 years after former US Secretary of State, retired Gen. Colin Powell, said corruption is in our character. A good seven years after former UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, described Nigeria as ‘fantastically corrupt’ in May, 2016; to which Muhammadu Buhari, then Nigeria President, nodded in the affirmative.

Powell had in his comments reported in the New Yorker magazine in September 1995 quipped that Nigerians “just tend not to be honest. Nigerians as a group, frankly, are marvellous scammers. I mean, it is in their national culture.”

While Powell may have been a bit much in his generalisation, he scored the bull’s eye in his choice of some words. ‘Marvellous scammers’ and ‘in their national culture,’ seem to sum up, most succinctly, the Nigeria corruption dilemma. But this should refer to a tiny crowd of the leadership elite who have continued to bleed the nation, causing colossal hemorrhage in the economy.

For his audacity to brand a whole nation as marvellous scammers, Powell was the subject of a deluge of rebuke from Nigeria’s military top brass who were in power and with power then as well as from some civil society and human rights advocates. It was one cause that both the military political elite and the civil society organisations found reasons to unite and upbraid the ‘enemy.’ Powell was that enemy.

By hindsight, Powell was right and deserves apology from those who attacked him at that time. When Powell tagged Nigeria ‘marvellous scammers’ he had no inkling of the coming volcanic eruption of corrupt practices. There is nothing to suggest that Powell, a Jamaican-American, is gifted with the power of clairvoyance. So, he did not foresee the impending chapters and seasons of corruption that the movie called Nigeria would serve the world. General Powell’s analysis of Nigeria’s graft bazaar was based largely on his perception of the military regimes of the past. Little did he know that democracy would mark a new epoch of corruption in the country. Democracy has deregulated corruption such that every season throws up its own scandal and scam.

Since 1999, and even beyond, every election has become a feast of heist. A horror movie. A festival of fraud. A crime scene, to borrow the phrase of the election observer. Democracy thrives on the strength of majority having their way while the minority are allowed only the luxury of their voice. But under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s democratic government, democracy moulted its skin. The might of the majority yielded to the cunning craftiness of the minority. Nigeria witnessed cases where Governors and principal members of State Assemblies were impeached by minority. It’s the type of arcane political  ‘miracle’ that only a marvellously corrupt political system can conjure. The horror that defined the 2023 general elections complete with voter suppression, intimidation and brazen falsification of results is still playing in the tribunals and Presidential Election Petition Court. The electoral umpire, INEC, is shamelessly flagellating in court behaving like a contestant in an election it’s the referee.

When the scam is not about election, it’s about petrol subsidy, a seemingly sophisticated but crude way of stealing public money. Petrol subsidy takes the trophy in the contest of organised crimes in Nigeria. From paper work in the office to the depots, subsidy has snowballed into a huge criminal enterprise only possible in a fantastically corrupt country.

Let’s connect the dots in the subsidy scarlet report. Between 2005 and 2006 under Obasanjo government, subsidy consumed N608 billion. From 2007 to 2009 under President Umaru Yar’Adua, it cost the nation N1.37 trillion. By the time Goodluck Jonathan chanced on the scene as President (2010 – 2015) it has grown teeth to crest N6.68 trillion. Then breezed in Buhari in 2015. Remember, it was the same Buhari that said ahead of the 2015 election that there was nothing like petrol subsidy. He swore that no petroleum economist would convince him of the existence of subsidy. Well, talk is cheap, they say. It gets even cheaper when the talk is a product of zero strategic thinking. In eight years of Buhari, subsidy cost literally grew wings and flew to as high as N7.95 trillion, an average of N1 trillion a year.

On the whole, Nigeria spent N16.6 trillion on petrol subsidy from 2005 to 2022. Don’t forget that this same Nigeria is a member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). No other OPEC member nation is as wayward as Nigeria in managing their crude resources. Nigeria, bar none, is the prodigal member of OPEC; a country that sells off her crude and imports refined products from the same crude at higher price. What a disingenuous economic principle.

But if you thought you’d seen the worst of a nation scamming herself with the subsidy boodle, wait until you are told how a certain Hadi Sirika, the minister of aviation under Buhari scammed a whole nation with an imperial masterstroke of primitive audacity.  On July 18, 2018, Sirika scammed his country offshore. He chose the most auspicious occasion, the Farnborough International Airshow in London, to display his mud-grained intelligence. He unveiled the logo of a supposed national carrier, Nigeria Air. It has since turned out a scam of the most bizarre order. He would follow it up by chattering an Ethiopian Airlines plane, temporarily coated with Nigeria Air logo and flown to Nigeria in what has now been exposed as a show of shame. The National Assembly has called Nigeria Air a scam. It remains so until proven otherwise. And you wonder, why is Sirika in a hurry to launch/unveil what has not even been given the operating license to fly. Why is he bent on using another country’s plane to launch a supposed Nigeria carrier at the twilight of his departure from office? Why the haste? What was he trying to justify? Money spent? How much has this fairy tale national carrier cost the nation? In 2018, when he allegedly paid $600,000 to a firm in Bahrain to design Nigeria Air logo, Sirika denied paying such humungous amount but as always failed to disclose what it cost the nation to engage a foreign company to design a logo that many Nigerian companies could have done even better.

The National Assembly, notorious for its own variant of scams and scandals, is calling the Sirika episodes a scam and an embarrassment. But it ends there, I wager. Probe Sirika from today till tomorrow, nothing will come out of the probe. It’s the way of a marvellously corrupt people. It’s the mores of a fantastically corrupt people; a nation which has corruption as part of their national culture. The Sirika series is just another episode in the nation’s long chapter of corruption. Nothing will come out of the so-called probe. Sirika should not even lose sleep. For a minister who worked for himself, his family and the nation under the Buhari government, a government with the dirtiest diary of greed and wanton corruption, Sirika should throw a party and fete his crowd of hailers and admirers. He even deserves a national honour.

First published in Sunday Sun