Oyinkan MedubiPeople have been said to build houses with billions of Naira and I have asked, do such houses take away ones high blood pressure when you enter it' If not, then such houses are utterly uselessFOR electricity, these days, I have noticed that most families have taken to employing one of these strategies: using a generator, solar, inverter, stars, or just plain old rubbing sticks together to bring out fire. The reason is that the government cannot give her citizens no more than two or three to six or eight hours of electricity per day when and where they can. The remaining hours are given to moonlighting, if you know what I mean.Recently though, I noticed that IBEDC, my own distribution company, tried to increase the hours of power they give me. Bless their little hearts, though, they started to give me eight to ten ours of electricity in the night. When I asked people whatever for, no one was able to give me a satisfactory answer. I mean, do I conduct a night vigil just to iron my clothes, blend my pepper, and do my other electricity related stuff'So I just prayed that IBEDC would quickly see the light and reverse their nocturnal habits. They did and they have gone back to giving me the few hours of daylight electricity so that I can see the sun better. I also prayed that they would pay the bright fella who gave them the idea not to have any other good ideas. I think they have done that too. So, with the world back to abnormality, I have taken to supplementing the few hours of IBEDC electricity with Gods own unfailing light: rubbing sticks together.Yet, going by the sums of money this country has voted, or claimed to have spent, on upgrading and repairing our electricity generating devices, any other country would have been able to put air conditioners on their streets into the bargain. Not us; um hun, not us. We, we prefer instead to do things the most difficult way, the way of the devil.The way of the devil involves doing the crooked such as diverting/ embezzling three-thirds, thats right, three-thirds of a vote for a project for personal use. I have asked many people what this personal use means but no one has been able to give me a satisfactory answer either. I think I ask too many questions. I mean, it cannot possibly be for food because I dont think anyone needs to store up 50 billion Naira just for food. That would require an extremely large stomach that would probably include stomach-donations from every person living on planet earth right now.So, I have tried to find out just what Nigerians use their stolen funds for and the answer has astonished me, mostly because of the futility of it all. To be honest, I did not think that it was possible for some of those reasons to be tenable for totally denuding a nation of all its resources but lets see.The first reason I heard about was that some people aim to seize control of the state funds in order to be able to buy and control their fellow men. In other words, they seek to have power over them. Wow! Those, I said, must be very insecure people who absolutely desire others to worship them. Such people must be hollow inside and can only find fulfilment when they know they have their feet metaphorically on other mens necks. Such people are counterfeit human beings.Yet others, I am told, need to gain access to huge sums of the nations funds in order to gain access to the good life. The good life includes, so goes the explanation, being able to send ones children or family abroad to school or live. Again, wow! I think one of the most unfortunate privileges that Africans have, and I believe this is even at the heart of the African corruption, is the fact that there exists a ready market to receive this ill-gotten wealth in Europe, America and so on. The bane of our lack of development is actually the developed world. If these developed countries did not exist, the sense of greed would be infinitely reduced in the African, I think. Well, thats my theory. What do you think' I mean, dogs bark less when they cannot perceive the aroma of food coming from the next house.Too many people are said to borrow funds so that they can go and enjoy themselves in the lands of enjoyment. They conveniently ignore the hard work the natives put into making their own lands enjoyable. Anyone who does that obviously has not heard of the concept of hard work which maketh a man rich. Wealth, I think I have said here once, is not obtained by illegal means.An offshoot of the enjoyment syndrome is the fact that people are said to use embezzled funds to build state of the art houses and fill them with state of the art furniture. Unfortunately, furniture is still made for sitting on by our dirty behinds. People have been said to build houses with billions of Naira and I have asked, do such houses take away ones high blood pressure when you enter it' If not, then such houses are utterly useless.Reader, we are still trying to account for what people do with our stolen common wealth because the lack of development in this land or even in Africa has been tied to this penchant for helping oneself to state funds. The one I find most amusing, if it wasnt so sad, is that of using pilfered monies to keep and control a string of women or men. Now, how is a lady being maintained in her expensive habits by the equivalent of a local governments allotment to feel towards everyone else' I would be disdainful of the rest of the country even, thanks.I am told that yet others use such pilfered funds to purchase expensive vacations abroad. There we are, abroad again, the bane of our development. Honestly, I am wondering how that vacationer can honestly sleep forty winks knowing that the money for his or her lounging by the beach is coming from some hapless fellow not getting access to medicines or education or potable water or good road.Worse of all, among many others, I am told that pilfered monies go to making illegal purchases such as recreational drugs, as many of our pilferers, I understand, are on one illegal substance or the other. It is very unfortunate, indeed, if the nation has to pay for someones bad life choice such as drug habits, dont you think'Naturally, the nation loses in more ways than one from all these illegal transactions. The most obvious result is the absence of a national coherence. As we stand today, Nigeria does not make sense. Worse, she cant even make sense of her structures and institutions. Her electricity is almost non-existent, there is no sensible transportation system, the roads are bad, notwithstanding Minister Fasholas claims, a large part of the population has no access to potable water, etc.The staggering wastefulness of the countrys resources being placed in private pockets is more painful when we realise that it is all so futile. When an individual seeks to advance his/her own comfort by helping himself/herself to funds meant for millions of people, nothing good can ever come from that venture.To start with, no individual, no matter how much he or she tries, can ever get through spending such colossal amounts in one lifetime. One requires several lifetimes to get through them. Using two wristwatches at once attracts a doctor, the worst kind. More importantly, one disease or the other soon interrupts that one lifetime. So, why bother' This, reader, is the sum of our lives. We need to get wise.
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