Sometimes, I feel so choked up, right inside my soul, by merely thinking of the gargantuan nature of the stupidity, the sheer irrationality involved in the matter. So, I just have to let it out, though I don’t think I am the only one affected by it. For I know for certain that it is something that is not and cannot be peculiar to me alone. Indeed, I feel certain that it also preys greedily on the psyche of a majority of Nigerians out there. And what is “it”? It is the question: how can people be so blind, in fact so stupid, especially the so-called leaders as to descend to the level of stealing state funds and doing it so shamelessly? What else do they want from God or from their country for bringing them up to the level a they find themselves in life? The very act of “stealing” seems to me to be such a lowly and debased conduct that I just can’t figure out how an grown man or woman who did not have it in his or her chromosomes or in the chromosomes of his or her forebears (please pardon my seeming coarseness: not intentional) could suddenly acquire the virus overnight upon becoming a President, Governor, Minister or any other high political office? You may think that questions like these are a study in platitudes, but I think that can only be because you don’t feel the way I feel right now regarding the issue at hand. I mean, what can any sensible and right-thinking person possibly want to do in all his/her lifetime with 1 billion dollars or pounds or more, stolen from his/her country’s treasury – and knowing fully well that one day, just one day, he/she will certainly end up in a casket?
During his illustrious days on earth, my late father, anytime there was an occasion for it, would always quote the opening “Question” from that fear-of-God-inspiring Islamic religio-literary composition known as “Sabura”:
“Which of you is aware of the certainty of death and yet he laughs?”
I think the foregoing may pass as an equivalent of the famous Biblical tract “Vanity upon vanity…all is vanity.” But more than that, the seemingly rhetorical question posed by the Sabura (quoted above) also instructs one’s mind with the dreadful “aftermath” of death: ACCOUNTABILITY BEFORE THE CREATOR.
Which of you is aware of the inevitability of death, and yet steals billions of Naira, dollars or pounds from his/her country’s kitty? I don’t know about you, but to me, it seems unimaginably stupid. You are starching away billions upon billions of public funds illegally taken away by you. One day, you are struck by the arrow of death due to stroke, cancer or any other agent of Nemesis, and then you stand there, naked, before His Throne, the throne of accountability, while all the billions you had stolen from your country or any other entity while on this earth would fall into other people’s hands for them to enjoy. You face damnation in heaven and damnation on the earth you left behind. So the question is: was it worth the theft!!!!? Haa..That is it!
Barr Yemi Mohammed
is an Avid Writer and Critique.
A Legal Luminary
