I was born in the late 1950s, I was told. When I was about 5 years old, on a market day, I picked a 3 pence coin from the road to the market place [it ran by our compound]. I showed it to my father. He asked me how I came by that amount of money. I said I saw it buried in the dusty market road. “Return it where you saw it”, he ordered. The coin in my hand, I walked back to the road side and dropped it exactly where I had picked it. What am I saying?
I’m saying now we are another country where anything goes for good and ugly but more of the latter. Stealing is no longer a taboo but a way of life, not only at the personal level but national also. Someone enriches himself by stealing from the public purse; he isn’t ostracized but given a front seat in his local church and a chieftaincy title. He can even buy a Ph.D from a university. In politics, it’s very possible for a thief to buy his way to power, becoming the president even. Because nobody raises an eyebrow, the stealing becomes even more brazen and, shall I say, fashionable.
Let’s take the case of the the con-man who set up an office right under the nose of this government of President Bola Tinubu. In less than a year, he was able to “hire” 300 people, open accounts in several banks, including our all seeing and all knowing CBN and write his name in the federal budget to the tune of N1.3billion, which was unbelievably approved by our almighty National Assembly without a question asked. When the whistle blew last week, the man, one Adeyemi Adeniyi, said from the place where he was hiding, that the president’s chief of staff Femi Gbajabiamila worked the way for him. Gbajabiamila said no, it wasn’t him. The president said there would be an inquiry but hasn’t asked his chief of staff to step aside meanwhile. With Gbaja still in office while the probe is on, its integrity is jeopardized already because he can tamper with what evidence links him to Adeniyi, who has said he has “documents” he would release only in court. The question is whether an inhouse investigation is really what is called for to follow the long and convoluted trail of this affair. The government investigating its own mess sounds like a cover-up assured. Isn’t an independent investigator the right person for this job?
There is even a bigger question nobody is asking. How was Adeniyi able to snake into the very heart of the Presidency without being found out? Because the Presidency is a bumbling behemoth manned by self aggrandizing gatekeepers. President Tinubu, as of now, has over 40 ministers and deputy ministers who also have myriads of assistants. Besides the ministers there are hundreds of special assistants, many of them, of course, Tinubu’s people assisting nothing. The president doesn’t need this unwieldy bureaucracy to govern even when the Constitution says he must have it. A bureaucracy like this is financially corrosive because more money is spent to keep too many on their jobs than on providing essential services like health and education.
American TV evangelist Pat Robertson, in his book “The Turning Tide”, calls big government “the cookie monster that gobbles your flour and sugar and then passes the sweets to others.” In our case, the government keeps inventing taxes, keeps borrowing heavily both locally and externally, not to improve the lives of the already over taxed but keep a bureaucracy, that nobody wants, running. A bloated bureaucracy encourages fraud as we have seen happen in the PFIPC saga, makes governance tardy and promotes clientelism. Robertson advocates the dismantling of ” the out-of- control cookie cookie monster” and a return to “some form of responsible, limited government.” He argues that “government does not produce wealth, it wastefully redistributes wealth. When it distributes more than it takes in you and your children must pay back with interest.”
The trend in even economically strong countries is towards small government that works for the common good. In a weakened economy like us, the bureaucracy must take the knife now. But can Tinubu be trusted to wield it? No, not when elections are less than a year away and he wants reelection very desperately.
