Muddied Ministers: Corrupt, Competent, Compensated???

ABCDEFGGHI = Avoid Bribery & Corruption Daily Everywhere For Good Governance Here Immediately.

Ministers at last, but will they serve only themselves? An EFCC investigation of many ministers leaves us disgusted by somersaulting court ‘technicalities’ and the political castration of EFCC. The lacklustre ministerial list many mud-stained is a poor outcome of President Buhari’s two month delay. Boris Johnson got ministers in hours.  ‘Things change, everything remains the same. Nigeria has diseases of political longevity and legitimacy. Longevity is not expertise. This is confirmed by ‘second term’ failures. Longevity or recycling misleads us by allowing ‘taking a bow’ without interrogation and goals.

The security of ‘longevity’ creates monster who may sometimes also be expert in corruption. Nigeria’s ‘Recycling’ is death to development. Continuity is important but useless without anticorruption strategies. Even on a minister’s salary alone, recycling deprives new ministerial families ‘financial security’ jobs which should spread around. Why enrich one person repeatedly? Developmentally, UN-SDGs are the new international yardsticks but Nigerian politicians corruptly fail to correct their salaries and perks which are far above internationally acceptable for Nigeria’s per capita.

Are our mud-stained ministers corrupt, competent or compensated? Legitimacy for longevity should come after distinguished service and productivity assessment and not just political support. There are millions of normal, morally good Nigerians qualified for ministerial appointment who outclass most senators in whom such qualities are not readily visible. Ministers lobbied and should prove their clean hands.

Politics is in the hands of ‘past political office holders’ many made moneybags by pillaging at will! Immediate Ex-Governor Okorocha’s travails with EFCC and the political powers sound like a repeat Nollywood soap operas made by failed past governments using other stars in place of Okorocha who have since metamorphosed into ‘new’ ministers haunted by ‘witch-hunting‘ EFCC discovering estates, hotels, plazas and business complexes. These assets were seized and suddenly returned. The power of prayer or ‘political sagacity’???? Abi No Be So? Were they pardoned, white-washed, forgiven or had their criminal files suppressed due to political gymnastics in exchange for their political support instead of risking angering them and fielding a puritanical campaign team without support from the political moneybags?  So theoretically Okorocha could become a minister in some future regime?

What manner of minister do we expect at this tragically dangerous time of Nigeria’s dysfunctional growth or regression or even as some would say at this stage of Nigeria’s death throes? Be reminded that, Nigeria’s death signs are all around us. Internationally, no one loves us and most countries worldwide and even in Africa treat us as a pariah nation, and our visa applicants and citizens like beggars and dirt, making travel a nightmare and life abroad a misery except for constant electricity, good public transport, good health and schools and access to decent pay for decent jobs which are all uniformly absent back home in Naija. This absence is in spite of serial mega-ministers and a gang of commissioners and 40+ strong cabinets and national and state executive councils and assemblies, and their hangers-on in thousands. Their collective agenda for being a ‘servant’ seems to be to cater for themselves, their families and their children and unborn grandchildren.

‘Generator, 24-hour fuel’ should be immediately removed from all political office holders. Fellow Nigerian youth, the pride and future and mega-resource of most nations, are forced to flee in 2019 and actually embark on perilous high-risk ancient trans-Saharan slave-trade routes and trans-Mediterranean voyages in sinking boats to escape the political failures in Nigeria. These, our youth try to enter countries which force the survivors of this death journey to Fortress Europe to become prostitutes, domestics and criminals.

This illegal migratory journey which has claimed over 10-20,000 documented and undocumented lives in the past five years, is filled with destruction, disease, desperate dangers, kidnapping for organs and slavery and outright murder with drowning at 20-40%-Nigeria’s new Option A4. Survivors are incarcerated for years in poor conditions  but some say better than at home! Abi no be so? Today, the Buhari ministers must combat the fact that going or staying seem equally dangerous with kidnapping, farmland violence already destroying the first fabric used to build a nation peace and stability.

South Africa, a great beneficially of Nigerian support against apartheid and Ghana, our truly sister country, now hound our citizens, good and bad, just like back home in Naija. Suffering ‘home and away’. Abi no be so?  When a Nigerian dies at the hands of terrorists and murderers that person is dead and Nigeria has failed the dead and is dead to that person. Nigeria dies a little every time an innocent person is murdered by any means or dies from neglect in Nigeria.

The ministers, old and new, tainted and whistle clean, have a huge task with an aging president and powerful kitchen cabinet. To keep them focused, ministers should have on their walls photographs of IDPs, a wretched school, the UN-SDGs and crimino-politically delayed Lagos –  Ibadan Expressway traffic chaos caused by vicious fund relocation of the 8th NASS which also interfered with an original Siemens Contract to raise Nigeria’s power output a few years ago. The Siemens contract seems back on track -three years late.

Ministerial work will be far beyond the personal acquisition of the people’s wealth and the paralysed reach of EFCC. Nigeria’s actual life depends on 2019-2023 ministerial performance as never before. Abi no be so?  Watch them closely!