If I had large sums of money, particularly if acquired illegally, and in the strange context of various currencies, would I keep the money in my house?
If I had papers indicating wealth of ownership of illegally acquired real estate, would I keep such papers in my house?
I remain amazed at what I see as the naivete of imagination some Southern Nigerians demonstrate when faced by high stakes politics.
Tricks dictators since Hitler, Stalin etc have executed across decades are conducted in Nigeria, by a government that is clearly far from honest and some are falling over themselves to swallow claims being made by the same government.
Even a person who has never watched a spy or crime film and has lived all their lives in a remote village in Okitikpupa knows that being a crook is not for unimaginative people who cannot at least make an effort to hide their loot away from locations where it could be easily found.
The person accused of accepting such huge monies in bribes could not even bury the money in a hole in his compound, with such massive sums he has no access to various accounts outside the country where he could have wired or deposited his loot in this age of digital banking but kept an incriminating amount of it in his home.
He has no safe deposit box anywhere where he could have stashed the papers indicating ownership of illegal real estate but kept it in his house where it could be conveniently found by a random security raid?
Haba!
People, I beg, struggle and educate yourselves on strategies of white collar corruption and theft as well as techniques of entrenching dictatorship. Look up the methods used by dictators to claim to be acting in the public good when in fact they are either striking terror into the judiciary to make it pliable or instilling the fear of death or ruin in others to make them open to control.
Try and also read Franz Kafka's The Trial, in which a man is accused by state security agents of committing a crime. "What is my crime?", he asks. "That is how the guilty talk", the agents respond. His futile efforts to discover the crime he is being accused of in journeys through the labyrinths of the law is the core of the novel. Kafka lived in pre-Nazi Germany and foreshadowed the dictatorial future that bloomed in the Nazi party.
Nigerians were sold the Buhari alcohol on the platform of anti-corruption. The same character has stepped in to enshrine budget padding yet claims he knew nothing about it, a most implausible and shameful claim coming from a chief executive, and of a nation, for that matter, his never found secondary school leaving certificate remains in imagination as he hires the most expensive lawyers to defend the indefensible in a situation where he should have been disqualified from contesting for the Presidency in the first place, he unleashes an escalation of Fulani herdsmen's terrorism across Nigeria in the massacre of hundreds in Agatu and more in the Middle Belt, individual and large scale murders in the NW and SE, with the active connivance of the security forces, and he arrests not one of these murderous characters, even when the murderers openly justify their bloodthirsty barbarism, but initiates a national military task force to protect the cattle of these private fellow ethnic/religious business people of his, arguing for why they engage in murderous raids and colonization strategies across the nation in the name of claims that they have the right to roam the nation at will with their cows and commit atrocities beceause their grazing routes have been overrun by farmers, along with claims of dispersion by desertification and displacement by Boko Haram terrorism, claims made in the context of this character's efforts to try to steal by law the nation's land for these terrorists instead of working out how to develop the region where they come from so they can thrive there, enthrones crass nepotism by beginning appointments with his ethnic/religious cronies whom he places in control of security agencies, the ultimate agents of dictatorship, and makes sure he can't be removed from office by making one such crony and relative the head of INEC, the national electoral body, integrates known thieves into his cabinet and military leadership and ignores all known dubious actions of these characters, Buratai, army chief of staff and his dubious Dubai properties, Amaechi and his multi-million naira Soyinka birthday and literary festival in a land of hunger, used in buying the support of the social critic for the dictator of whom the critic was the most avid opponent before this sell out, Fashola and the horror of an 80 million naira website in his own name, from the state's money, in an era of free websites, all these figures are in the highest echelons of this character's government and some Southern Nigerians whose eyes are blind to the tool the DSS have become are again jumping up and down to stories of arrests and unlikely discoveries of monies and real estate documents in judges' homes.
My people, please learn to ask questions. Study and understand varieties of political strategy. Don't take what comes from the govt at face value bcs you are desperate for creative change. This desperation has brought you the horrors I have outlined along with an economic recession significantly contributed to by a person who has weakened confidence in the Nigerian economy by running a one man government for months into his swearing into office, has no idea how to manage unrest in the Niger Delta oil source of the nation except to focus on murderous force in the region and against those peacefully agitating for a nation of their own,Biafra, who has no business leading you if not that you fell for the cocktail of lies in which he was covered by spin artists. Don't let them spit in your mouth telling you its champagne. Ask questions.
I remain of the view that we don't have nation but only a glorified prison. This destructive character can't be removed by the ballot box bcs he has done everything to make sure that is impossible. An overwhelming number of those who share his ethnic/religious orientation will also support him bcs religion and ethnicity are the most potent unifying force of his region. If the arrests had been in the Muslim North, these people would have asked, for example, why all these judges suddenly discovered to be so crooked are from the the Muslim North.
We need ethnic self determination to found nations based on common values. The domination of the nation's politics by desperate right wing Northern Muslim politicians and military figures, of whom Buhari is a representative, destroys all possibility of genuine ideological alliances across any boundaries.
thanks
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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