VOICE OF REASON 14/03/2014 WHAT I WOULD DO WITH 20 MILLION DOLLARS By Gbenga Olumekun As a younger man I had a way with myself. Whenever I needed to please and insulate myself from the realities of the moment, I engaged in dreams. I do not mean the sort that will come naturally when you are blissfully asleep and your subconscious tries to play mind games by conjuring up situations and circumstances of life. I am actually not talking of the sort where you have no control because the elements are the ones exercising the prerogative to decide how the whole process goes. Sometimes, this sort is spiritual and has connections deeper that one can fathom. Unfortunately, the sort I am talking of is the sort where I have absolute control and determine what must be. I used to love such pleasures and they have served as a blissful release from the pressures and the tensions of the moment. On many occasions I have driven brand new cars or lived in unbelievably beautiful accommodations. In those days I had the measure of the kind of wife I wanted and the sort of transient escorts I desired. Age has nothing to do with this really as I still take time to dwell on some of such pleasures once in a while. The beauty of such a vocation is that I am in total control and can decide how long the dream will last but eventually the dream dies because there is a tolerable time limit for any enterprise. This reminds me of a novel by one of my favourite writers; Harold Robbins titled “Dreams die first”. The main character, if I can still recollect, suddenly found himself at the head of an empire of casinos and clubs, movies and magazines, surrounded by models and pimps and set about asserting control. The rest is best told by reading the actual masterpiece. My own dream is one in which the likelihood of ever attaining such bliss is almost zero. However, dream I must, because that is the only palliative I have to keep my spirits alive. I need to believe in something or dream of an attainment before I can summon the courage to face tomorrow. I have looked at the hopelessness of the national situation and I often would love to raise up my hands in total surrender, however, it is my propensity to dream and forget my current challenges that has acted as an impetus to keep my spirits alive. I had been an admirer of President Goodluck Jonathan and for good measure I cannot help but like the man’s innocent mien. I like the way he swears he’ll get to the root causes of the problems besetting our motherland and I must honestly say that I really pity him in all the troubles that holding the reins at Aso Rock has foisted upon him. I tried to put myself in his shoes in one of my dreams, particularly when the Yar A’dua shenanigan started and he was being barefacedly outsmarted and out-schemed out of state issues. More painful for me was the fact that he had the constitutional backing to appropriate the reins of power but he waited patiently for time to run its course. This is a pure gentleman who would have done well tutoring his students in ZOO 201 rather than inherit all the curses that can ever be hauled at the perennial inhabitants of the Presidential Villa. Buhari was in Doddan Barracks and he was always constantly reminded of 2.8 billion Naira petroleum money speculated to have been stolen. This dogged him for so many years until, like all Nigerian issues, we decided to forget. Babangida’s own headache was the Gulf War 12 billion dollar windfall which luckily was quickly swept under the carpet. At least the powers ensured the issue was a dead duck as long as the man decided to forgo his many importunate attempts to go back to the villa, to retrieve possibly a few items he left behind during the hasty departure of August 1993. Even OBJ had the temerity to query him about what he left behind in the Presidential Villa but the old fox never relented until he got IBB permanently discouraged from aspiring to preside over activities at Aso Rock. We can never forget, by far, the greatest success of them all, General Sanni Abacha, who displayed banking ingenuity by turning every available space into vaults for the safe-keeping of our national reserves. I still remember one of his relatives lecturing us all that the man meant well and that all the looting he was accused of carrying out was because he had no confidence in the national treasury; hence he displayed his patriotic ingenuity by helping us to keep our valued resources in several obscure places. Some were as obscure as the vaults of Swiss banks and other off-shore havens, majority of which we are yet to discover and sadly WILL NEVER DISCOVER. His only failing was that he “forgot” to give the details to the CBN Governor. This oddity was only rewarded a few days ago when the nation graciously rewarded him for services rendered to the Nigerian project. I am really enthused that we have our own ways of rewarding those who had rendered “selfless services” to the motherland. Whether the rest of us would love to keep such company in retirement is another matter. Another matter is that in the typical Yoruba society, the sons and daughters of a thief dare not seek to even “raise a song” in any public gathering let alone seek a defence of the indefensible. Abacha’s sons are lucky indeed but that is a matter for another day as we continue the chronicle. After the Abacha dark days General Abdusalam went, saw and conquered, and consequently he is probably one of the richest Nigerians alive. OBJ too did very well. At least we are aware of several shares purchased for and on his behalf and generously disposed of, by Nuhu Ribadu. I don’t have to mention that the property profile of Temperance Farms, or is it Obasanjo Farms, grew so tremendously from the seed money of less than Fifty Thousand Naira said to have been what our Third Term General was able to boast of in 1998, after escaping the gallows of Sanni Abacha by the accident of fate. That certainly is not my brief as I didn’t originate the story. We have heard it a thousand times by those responsible for foisting him on the nation at a time when we needed a unifier as our President. The fact of the distinction of his civilian transformation notwithstanding, I can honestly and confidently state that OBJ has been responsible for several positive structural changes in the Nigerian polity. I really wished him a lot of success and he undeniably was about doing his best until the songsters furrowed into the man’s big ego and he began to think that the solution to all our national problems lay with him. This unqualified arrogance led to the “Third Term Agenda” which made light work of all his achievements and in hasty retreat he could not find anyone better to rule us than the colourless Umaru Yar A’dua. I can still imagine the regrets in the tummy of OBJ because “Umoru” set about dismantling every legacy and structure built by him. There is no worse punishment for a man who claimed to be our brains and the repository of our national GPS coordinates. President Goodluck Jonathan has done so many things. I remember when he first arrived on the scene and showed the whole lot of us how he wanted to be regarded as honest by taking a number of bold decisions. We may not like him as much as we did but a few of those decisions are still standing. Unfortunately, current affairs may not be a good judge but I hope history will not be rapacious in crass condemnation of his modest achievements either. He may have been soft on certain issues but he had been able to cultivate in us a tolerable likeness until the nation started perceiving that he was no different from many others before him. The alarm bells rang louder when the Lamido Sanusi came up with his stupendous calculations on the “missing” 49.7 billion dollars which by virtue of an amateurish “Add and Delete” mechanism became transformed into 10 billion and then doubled to 20 billion and I began to dream again. I didn’t really intend to dream in the first instance until I read Atedo Peterside’s brief which brought the immensity of our problem to limelight. This banker made it plain that whether it is 40, 50, 10 or 20 billion dollars or whether it is a paltry one billion Naira, the fact that it is public money makes accountability imperative. As for me I could do a lot with One billion Naira as an individual but here we are talking of a national treasure of immense proportions. I began dreaming and began to ask myself why I cannot become the President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Nigeria. After all, GEJ was just a bloody ASUU member like me! This feeling liberated me from my “grasshopper mentality” and really began to ask myself what I would do with a sum like 20 billion dollars if I were the President. I took my calculator and discovered that the too many zeros involved caused my calculator to give an error sign when I wanted to do a simple sum of converting all the dollars into Naira. Since my simple Primary Three arithmetic had not been forgotten I did my sum manually in my exercise book. As the President, I felt like beginning my budgetary appropriation from security. Immediately, I decided I would buy 50 Apache helicopters for the army and another 50 for the Air Force. What these machines did to Saddam Hussein’s army should be small matter if these are deployed against the marauders causing mayhem in the North East. To guarantee the safety of our soldiers I would purchase 500 armoured personnel carriers (APCs) for the Armed Forces and 50 Fast Attack patrol boats for the Nigerian Navy. These will ensure our naval personnel are well kitted to ensure our oil is no longer siphoned to foreign lands while also discouraging sea piracy. I decided I would also purchase operational helicopters for the police to pursue armed robbers, kidnappers and other villains. My own Police would be equipped with squad cars, not pickups. In order to check the menace of drunk and careless drivers on our roads I would purchase Breathalyzers and Speed radar guns for every operational unit of the FRSC. After dealing with security matters I would proceed to give Scholarships to every Nigerian scholar (please note the emphasis on scholar) while ensuring there is enough capital for business start-ups for those who have entrepreneurial abilities. One area I know I would be most active is the development of transport infrastructure all over the nation. Lagos – Ibadan expressway won’t need 170 billion Naira bond since I could conveniently source it from the remainder from the original 20 billion Dollars. The 2nd and 3rd Niger bridges would be built while I would dualise the Ilesa – Benin Expressway among so many others that I would conveniently do and this would no doubt include the Abuja to Ipele Road. I took a look at myself and really loved myself for being able to achieve so much. However, after pinching myself, I found out I was really dreaming but the sweet release was in the realisation of the fact that I still would not have been able to exhaust 20 billion dollars with all these accomplishments. Oh, how I wish I was President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, I definitely would have put in place a failsafe mechanism to determine whether the money was missing and if so, ensure complete recovery.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 07:20:37 +0000
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