Are you a senator, governor, currently looting the treasury' You may not be caught by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and may, unlike Mr Integrity, Mr Farouk Lawan of Nigeria's garrulous but desperately corrupt House of Reps, be no victim of a sting operation mounted by an aristocrat claiming dubious piety, economic parasites living on borrowed integrity. But you cannot escape meeting your doom in your daughters and sons, brutes who will take your malady further nine times out of ten. Does anyone know any of these treasury looters' children that is well behaved' Their homes stink to hell, but you cannot know when they sit at high tables giving senseless admonitions and pretending to be men of character. I would rather eat gari and dried fish in a happy home than pop champagne in a home reeking of hard drugs, drunkenness and the disgrace of the grey head. Go on stealing the money: you will have a grey head praying for the grave yard but unable to end the misery. Someone will hide the gun and monitor the ceiling.Most looters are like Oronte in Moliere's The Misanthrope. Oronte, a marquis of the Court, thinks that serious friendship can be struck on the basis of a handshake and asks Alceste, another French aristocrat who is a moral outsider in his community, to critique a sonnet he has written. Reluctantly agreeing, Alceste dismisses the poem and its author, suggesting that Oronte give up his aspirations as a poet. Insulted, Oronte slams a suit on him, seeking retribution. Except that, in their own case, these looters will engineer an accident and shed your blood, give you the Dele Giwa treatment or, at the very least, the beating of your life for failing to feed their vanity.The oil belongs to the Niger Delta people and so does the misery. The oil is in the Niger Delta, but it is in Abuja that you find the good life. The General had instructed his bank manager to put only mint currency in the customised ATM machine in his mansion, but the men behind the counter disobeyed the big man and put dirty notes (N3,000, 000) on top of mint (N5,000,000). Going to a 'parry', our girl needed some N20,000 and what tragedy did she find when she inserted her customised card! Dirty notes! Incensed and taking no second look at the notes scattered on the ground, she raced into her apartment, grabbed the nearest keys and fired her way to the bank at breakneck speed in the sleek and brand new SUV, blowing dust and reaping curses from shocked co-users of the roads. 'Are you the f..., hopeless bank workers who cannot carry out my dad's simple instruction to put only new notes in our ATM'' she cried as she entered the hall. 'What kind of f..k, hopeless bank is this! Are you so senseless and hopeless that you can't obey a simple instruction' Somebody tell me what kind of f..., nonsense is this'' In no time the manager was on the floor below and profusely apologising to the lady of good fortune, berating his men for the swipe at his job. 'Do you want me to lose my job'' he cried, eyes blood-shot.But the lady (all too often, these sugar cane-looking riff raff love to cry 'I am a lady') was not appeased. She placed a call to the General, detailing her embarrassment and saying how mean the bank workers were when she went there to lodge a simple, honest complaint laden with decorum. In less than five hours the bank manager was out of job, and the next morning found him on a flight to the world's third worst city, seeking men who would join him in the life-and-death, return mission to the FCT, to appeal to the great General to temper justice with mercy. And O, what mercy flows in Generals' bosom!At the General's home in the FCT, the big man was meeting with a foreign delegation, so the guests were ushered into another section of the mansion. No furniture, not even a local stool to sit on, and some of the peacemakers began to grumble. They were in the middle of their grumbling when a boy entered, saying 'I've been asked to set the sitting room for your sirs.' And then he punched a button, like you would switch on your video player. Pronto, a set of furniture emerged'one of the bankers was crying 'Blood of Jesus,' vowing that he would not sit on the aramonda (wonder) furniture. But later our men took courage and sat down jejely. Their bottoms felt very comfortable in the luxury furniture.Then the room setter informed : 'Please gentlemen, look behind you.' Turning, they saw words splashed across a giant screen. 'Each of these words you see is the name of a wine. Please choose your choice (sic) by pressing the screen.'One bold man did but the errant manager said no wine would appear, that he didn't believe such a thing was possible. The bold man pressed the screen 11 times in different places.'In this same house where furniture appeared from nowhere, on which we are now sitting'' one of the men cautioned him. In just about four minutes a trolley appeared with 11 brands of exotic wine.'Iru kile leyi o! (What kind of things is this!),' the offending manager cried, reaching for a bottle. Later when our guys got to the world's third worst city, a city audaciously corrupt to its dubious foundations, reeking of filth below a veneer of verdure, they discovered that the cheapest of those wines cost just N78,000 only. Don't shout: four boys in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, recently drank wine worth only a little less than N1, 850,000 at one go.Is the General angry at this expose of his world' The General is not from the Niger Delta. No, he does not eat poison in his fish. The people who do, the people who own the land, remain largely consigned to the margins of existence, betrayed by local lords and foreign economic desperadoes.As I write, the dirty notes probably remain before the befuddled ATM at our General's home. Now, his daughter is a gem, spoilt silly by stinking wealth. Has she learned to pound yam' Probably not. When she gets married, I suppose, a robot would pound the yam. But is she a real woman who cannot pound yam and make egusi (melon) soup' Is she a woman who is an expert only in cooking noodles, smoking marijuana and drinking the world's very best wine' The General is like most rich men: he lacks a rod and he spoils the child. But not other people's children, generations that he murdered to get to his present estate. He will go to his grave in tears.Elizabeth Kolbert, in her thoughtful "Spoilt Rotten" submits as follows: "With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It's not just that they've been given unprecedented amounts of stuff'clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie 'couture' has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.), they've also been granted unprecedented authority.In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn't working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.Well, that general luxury, I grant you, is lacking in the Nigerian climate. But spoilt brats of the General's brood live life to the fullest.They are very bold and very foolish and very bold and very foolish again and again and again.How many Nigerians mind having N5 million in dirty notes' Mint is the colour of wealth, wealth of a sad end.Awolaja is on the Politics Desk of the Nigerian Tribune
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