You would begin to understand the scope of the problem in this country when you remember that two Nigerian leaders on whose watch the nation's universities turned a cesspool now boast of full-fledged, world standard universities of their own! Ask IBB, OBJ et. al... Oh, the latter even had a deputy who owns one of the best university campuses on the continent! History will judge these men for deliberately undermining our future while all the while building a future of opulence for their own.
One would wonder, where was OBJ's ingenuity with agriculture during his two terms in government from 1999 to 2007? Instead of that 'talent' translating into a home-grown solution to the food question in the country, we instead developed a craving for imported food. And yes, OBJ himself prospered tremendously within said period. For a farmstead that started in Ota, Ogun State in 1979, the retired general now controls an impressive swathe of arable land across the country's six geo-political zones in a fully mechanized operation that spans everything from palm oil to poultry.
Question is, how much of these ideas could he have made available to the Nigerian economy as a deliberate policy of government with the vast economic implications that agriculture holds for this country? Or was it a question of simply angling for a monopoly for himself and his friends, a case of the rest of us living at their mercy?
Today, the cost of that act of treachery runs into the billions of dollars every year while he and his can afford to have fresh chicken and fish on their table every day for next to nothing while the rest of us rely on rotten food from abroad at cutthroat prices.
How about his fair-skinned 'younger' brother, IBB? This is the one man who can be credited with institutionalizing misappropriation and misapplication of public funds in Nigeria. It was through his dubious ingenuity that Nigerian public office holders learnt the art of stealing billions of dollars. Before he came to power, most reports of official corruption was in the millions of naira and not in the billions of naira or billions of dollars as we saw during the virulently corrupt regime he presided over.
As problematic as elections were in the 1st and 2nd Republic, almost non of them dealt us the kind of blow this fellow delivered when he annulled the 12th June 1993 presidential election. This nation is yet to fully recover from it. So, to cap it for this evil reign, IBB again innovated a new epoch, one that was to evolve into a huge monster: that it was alright to fiddle with the nation's electoral process. Today, it's almost a given that any election conducted anywhere in the country will return with a warped result and to compound the problem, the players now do it with brazen impunity.
I challenge anybody with the resources to do a study with the aim of unraveling how much of Nigeria's commonwealth is in the pockets of these two men and their ilk and then do another to determine just how much of Nigeria's future they're angling to own. It'll be an interesting read!
#nigeriansgovexoneday
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