Loot of Riches – The Way of Fools
The country Nigeria and indeed Africa is on the verge of collapse. This is because the country and the continent are built on loot riches. Booty of riches is not the same as wealth. Therefore, it cannot last beyond one generation. It doesn’t just vanish; it sweeps away the people who did it and their immediate posterity. It doesn’t matter how many years it lasts. It does not go beyond a generation. No matter how big it is, as always it would be lost. The loot of riches leads to the waste of resources and lives. When you loot resources or public funds, you waste your life and the resources you have stolen. In addition, you place a scourge and, indeed, a curse on your posterity – children and relatives who depend on you.
The holy scriptures and philosophies are clear about the law of sowing and reaping. You can’t plant corn and expect to harvest apples. It has to be corn. You cannot sow hate and expect to reap love. “For whatever a man sows, that he will reap.” This law is immutable. There is nothing any man can do to change this law. Even the appearance of change in this law as a consequence of the tide of the times when everyone, including highly respected and dignified-looking men and women, steals public funds with impunity, builds castles and 1000-room houses furnished with the best and more expensive arabic chandeliers and decorations. like that of the state of Minna Niger, does not change or affect this law in any way. There are countless examples in Nigeria, in Africa, and indeed around the world that demonstrate that the looting of wealth is an evil that does no one any good.
When those in charge of public, business, organization, or community money steal it, they prevent the people the resources serve from having the social, infrastructural, and economic impact of the stolen money. The thief, whether he or she is a pastor, governor, minister, president, commissioner, traditional ruler, or company president or CEO, unknowingly meddles in trends that he or she has no moral power to control. Money has a life of its own. Fairly acquired or created as wealth, it changes for the better the man or woman who has done it. Most of the time this wealth creator becomes a social, moral and developmental entrepreneur. His influence produces a lot of kindness in society and among people. His life becomes a source of good inspiration for the people around him, especially for the youth and emerging leaders of tomorrow.
Money stolen from public coffers or business partners also has a life of its own. But instead of producing goodness, stolen money or the loot of riches produces more of the evil from where it originated. The man or woman who stole the money becomes an antisocial, immoral, bankrupt businessman. His influence produces more evil, rottenness, decay, and a multiplicity of other vices that defy the peace of the earth. As the proverb says, “the bird that perches on a clothesline and swears that the clothesline will never have rest, neither will it have its own rest.” As the people lose their peace, so would the thief, whether he be governor, senator, president, minister, or whatever title he has.
To sustain the riches of the loot, the thief-minister/governor/commissioner/chairman/managing director/senator/president or any title that gave him access to public funds would have to build a security apparatus that would require more and more money to keep. As people become more restless as a result of the decline and degradation of their opportunities for self-realization, more and more people turn to crime. As the crime market becomes more and more competitive, criminals learn and improve their sophistication. The growth in the crime zone decreases the effectiveness of the security apparatus in place, so the thieving senator or whatever position he holds would have to steal more money to improve the security infrastructure he already has. This is a vicious circle. No one, no matter how smart or stupid, can win.
It’s like the proverb “one sin leads to another”. This is the reality of looter life. That it takes a minimum of five lies to cover up a lie and, in multiples, become the life story of the smartest looters. As he or she grapples with the dilemma of managing the looted funds, the looter becomes antisocial, a harbinger of more evil. And like the proverbial sheep who dirty her tail thinking she is dirtying the barn for the owner to clean it up, this wicked man or woman plunderer defrauds himself while defrauding society. Looters are like people who load a gun and point it at their toe and shoot. As stupid as it is to shoot yourself in the leg trying to be happy or live a better life, so is every man or woman who loots to get rich.
A look at the lives of corrupt people from the first republic to this time and the businessmen who have scammed their associates or the professional advanced fee scammers or 419ners clearly shows that these people are a bunch of fools and jerks. A friend of mine said that if you are given a raider’s life with an extra million naira, you still shouldn’t take it. The implication: It’s all nonsense. In pitman’s shorthand of those days, we learn that “a fool and his money are easily parted.” The way and manner in which these thieving politicians and other swindlers lose the rich they stole is evidence that they can only be fools and imbeciles.
This has led me to conclude that looters are nothing but fools and jerks. Real men and women cannot loot. Wise men and women would not loot after all the examples from the lives of those who have looted public funds in the past. Wise people often learn from what happened to others. The fact that looting remains prevalent is an ominous sign pointing to a dangerous fact: Nigerians are being led by fools and imbeciles. Are you wondering again that there is no positive development in Nigeria and that crime and all other inglorious things are going on in an oil rich country?
The IMF president was quoted as saying that all the money stolen from Nigeria by politicians since independence when it was converted into current dollars and deposited one piece at a time in the ground, would spread to Mars and return, not one, but seven times. Juxtapose that with the misery, poverty and crime in Nigeria and you would have an El Dorado on this earth if they stole and left a tenth of what they stole to us ordinary people. Now, given the kidnappings, banditry, bank robberies, poverty, prostitution and deteriorating infrastructure in Nigeria today, isn’t all the looting of public funds since then equivalent to shooting yourself in the toe? of the foot, a proven act of imbecility? In fact, the looters are actually the poorest people out there. They have a poverty-stricken mind.
Most raiders see themselves as smart. Years ago, when I couldn’t even afford to eat twice a day after finishing high school, a man who dropped out of the same school with me at the same time without even a report card built a house, got married, bought a CD-195 and also a Volkswagen Beatle car. This was in the early 1980s, when the CD-195 was a symbol of success. When I asked him that he had done it, he told me that he had to be smart. When I sought to know how I could be smart, he suggested that he steal money from my employers, which he called an act of intelligence. Today, while I rule in the professional and social world, he is struggling to become secretary of a local auto park union, an agbero, in fact. Who is smart now, him or me?