If the purpose of democracy is to engineer social change and societal advancements, then Nigeria’s democracy has failed miserably. Rather than unshackling Nigerians’ bountiful energies and nurturing and directing these energies towards engineering productive accomplishments, democracy in Nigeria has majorly enthroned a vicious predatorial system of oligarchal and aristocratic shackling.
The magnitude of the ‘system failure” is such that significant groups and institutions, including even the national assembly, are scrambling to find redeeming fixes. Propositions ranging from jettisoning the American-styled presidential system, abolishing the states, and returning to the regional structure of old, up to the “get rid of it’ statements that are being uttered by some highly regarded elder statesmen, – statements that are essentially interpreted as calls to ‘throw overboard’ the present western liberal ideological framework, are being floated and circulated. While the search for a “permanent cure” continues, some suggestive ‘quick win” amends to the torn fabrics of Nigeria’s “democracy” could be tailored to stem the accelerating ruination of the Nigerian state and society by the present system and style of politics and democracy. Some suggested fixes are discussed here.
RIGHTSIZE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
It is quite obvious that the bicameral federal legislature has become an unnecessary burdensome money-guzzling boondoggle. The upper chamber, in particular, has metamorphosed into a retiring home for ‘EFCC dodging” ex-governors and crime-stained oligarchs; most of them, are bearers of dual passports. These are the ‘senators’ adorned in symbolic caps of servility, who outdo each other in sycophantic renditions of ” on your mandate, we stand” ego-messaging anthem to a geriatric mandate thief. The main preoccupation of most senators has become to cozy up with the presidency in cooking up crooked “budget padding ‘schemes; a euphemism for the organized looting of the national treasury. Broke and debt-riddled Nigeria can no longer continue to shoulder the maintenance cost of entitled gerontocratic senators and their insatiable appetites for graft and corrupt accumulations. They take their senatorial placements as political sinecures. They do no meaningful work. And they are detached from their constituents, to whom they project to owe no obligations.
The House of Representatives should serve as the sole federal legislature. It should be based on equal representation per state, with each state, contributing no more than 12 members. And they should be deprived of the powers to legislate their salaries, allowances, and, statutory perks; which should be calculated and set at levels commensurate with the national public service wage structure. There should be a single, uniform national wage structure. Not different ones for the “privileged’ classes – political office holders, judges, central bankers, NNPC workers et al. After all, we all buy from the same markets!
Some would question why anyone would want to go to a national assembly unclad for its excessive privileges. The answer is those who want, and have the capacity, know-how, and zeal to serve the country.
With the economy tail-spinning in uncontrolled degenerative spirals, the country does not need professional “retiree legislators”, the vast majority unqualified for the job. Rather than ‘system men” politicos populating parliament, the emerging geo-political and geo-economic challenges of the present world, and the emergent dynamics of multipolarity, require that the serious work of national parliaments be entrusted to competent and knowledgeable visionaries and salvage workers – not journeymen apparatchik policos; concubines, wives, girlfriends, ‘dynastic’ princelings and mandate snatching hoods men who are alluring for free money to grift. They should have no place there.
PATRIOTICALIZE NATIONAL POLITICS; FENCE OUT THE DOUBLE ALLEGIANCERS.
Too many ranking members of Nigeria’s political elite, elected and appointed, such as members of the National Assembly, cabinet ministers, heads of agencies and parastatals, state governors, and top staff of the presidency are bearers of multiple foreign passports. This makes them subjects of dual loyalties; which, if truth must be told, is treasonous. Nigeria’s “international citizens’ maintain second homes in foreign metropolises – Paris, California, Florida, London, Switzerland, Dubai, etc. This is where their best investments and priciest possessions; latest wife, pampered princelings, newest limousines, yachts, etc, are harboured. For this political elites, who have gained access to important circles of American and European political leadership either because of their being educated or trained abroad, or by their statuses in government, have become so deluded to the extent that they deem these Western metropolis as their idyllic paradises on earth. To them, Nigeria is merely a wealth extraction opportunity, a goldfield to be mined to their heart’s content. This money and luxury-craving elite have become stooge viceroys, bought and paid for, by their Western masters, who honor them with citizenship, and who are the main decision-makers in their dealings in Nigeria. That is why they operate as parasitic leeches, living and thriving off the many tensions and crises that their treasonous policies, actions, and activities foment in Nigeria, their second-place country. And in any case, their fleets of bombardier private jets are ever on stand-by to whisk them away at the first whiff of trouble. Take ex-president Mohammadu Buhari for example, who proudly announced that he is ever on standby to relocate to Niger should Nigeria turn hostile, and whose wife, Aisha, the beautician, lived in Dubai through most of his time as president. The allegations that many high-ranking members of the Nigerian government are bought and paid agents and provocateurs of foreign governments cannot be far-fetched.
In any country serious about guarding and defending its sovereignty It would be unthinkable to allow so many people with dual allegiances to occupy commanding heights of the decision-making apparatuses, institutions, and establishments of the state. In many countries, holding a second passport is an automatic disqualifier from elections and political offices, and in others, maintaining a home in another country red cards one from sensitive appointments, jobs, and offices. Unfortunately, there are just too many figures in the Nigerian government space with dual loyalties to other countries.
It is time to address this misnomer which serves as the major gateway to the treasonous neo-colonial extraction and expropriations of our national wealth and patrimony to the benefits of foreign metropolis.
‘Foreign agent’ and double allegiance laws are being enacted in many countries around the world to curtail the harmful activities of comprador elites. Similar laws have to be enacted, and enforced, to protect against persons who are ‘sitting on two chairs’. Anyone with other loyalties to any other country besides Nigeria should have no place in leadership positions.
INTELLIGENTIZE THE PARTY SYSTEM
In his highly recommended book “Court and Politics’ Umar Ardo, PhD wrote that “the Nigerian political landscape is filled with all sorts of unable characters as elected representatives of our communities …the bulk of participants at the legislative, state executive and Local Government levels are made up of incompetent politicians of lowly character, many of whom are deliberately chosen purposefully to be ‘yes men’ and pawns for more astute selfish politicians… party manifestos makes no meaning to these elected politicians”.
Dr. Ardo’s statement is too true to be good!
The Nigerian political parties, devoid of any ideological priming, have turned into corrupt, degenerated oligarchal platforms that exist solely to grab, snatch, and run away with political power. In organization and operations, apart from their names and logos, all the parties smell and taste the same – even surpassing Pepsi and Coca-Cola, or Fanta and Mirinda in their resemblance. The ranks of party executives, called working committees, are filled with pliant yes-men, carefully handpicked by oligarchal power mongers – former and serving governors and billionaire corporatist financiers, in controlled conclave orchestrations that are passed as elective party congresses. In the end, the ‘elected’ party working committee exists only to do the bidding of their nominating puppeteer masters, no matter how unreasonable, unconstitutional, and nonsensical. Their primary mandate is to act as gatekeepers of the candidacy process by fencing out any person not approved by their puppeteer masters from accessing the corridors of power via the party’s platform. They set unattainably high nomination fees to barrier out intelligent and competent, but financially un-endowed aspirants, but are quick to waive away such fees for girlfriends, relations, and anointed candidates of their master overlords. And by such doings, they populate the elected and appointed public offices with numb-skulled charlatans, ranked buffoons, and scare-mongering demagogues.
Nigeria is in the deep crisis of governance it is today because through the warped use of an imported instrument called ‘democracy,’ we have successfully catapulted a lot of ranked fools into exalted leadership positions cutting across the most important sectors of society – education, healthcare, lawmaking, etc. How we got it so successfully wrong is because of the blatant failure of the political parties to serve the country, rather than serving as readied staging platforms for the gluttonous designs of predatorial oligarchic power mongers; the nefarious viceroys who are draining the life force from out of the country. The sad state of the country proves the truism that a country in which fools occupy important leadership positions cannot but fail.
The entrenched system of the cultic capture and control of the political parties, which is based solely on the corrupt use of money, and quantum quantity of money, has to end to bring sanity to the political parties and to national politics.
Given that the national constitution provisos that,” no person shall qualify to be elected into either the legislative or the executive branches of government except he or she is a member of a political party and is sponsored by that party”, then, to end the entrenched mediocrity, and to enthrone competence and meritocracy in governance, the time to intelligentize the political parties, who factually, are the true owners of all the governments, local, state and federal, has come. This is where the NNPP should be commended, for recruiting Dr. Ajuji Ahmed, a cerebral academic and intellectual, as chairman – obviously to drive their reworked manifesto which prioritizes education.
In the same way, corporations desiring to stay ahead of the curve or who are restructuring to revitalize their operations, carry out rigorous recruitment exercises to fish for the best candidates to fill their vacancies, political parties, scheming to run present-day Nigeria, a near-bankrupt graftdom gasping in comatose death-spasms, must have to recruit the best of the best of its members to fly their election flags. And if they cannot find sufficiently competent hands from among their ranks, let them tweak their recruitment process. They could consider advertising and opening the offer to any interested, and suitably qualified, citizen of the country. After all, not so long ago Her Majesty’s Royal Navy (UK), not satisfied with the competence level of the officers in her ranks to command its most modern fleet of warships and submarines placed public advertisements, inviting any persons from any country of the world who is sufficiently versatile in naval operations and systems to apply for the job. Crass, dumb, and mulish buffoons should no longer have any place in the governance stratums of present-times Nigeria.
RESCUE INEC FROM THE CLAWS OF A MARAUDING PRESIDENCY.
Many people continue to moan, denounce, and demonize Professor Yakubu Mohammed, and his INEC, for the way elections are being conducted under his watch. The 2019 and the 2023 presidential elections were undoubtedly rigged by the ruling APC, who could not countenance losing power through ordinary ballot papers, despite their, to date, very sub-par governance performances. Did the nepotist-in-chief, Mohammadu Buhari, win the 2019 elections? He didn’t. Who truly won the 2023 elections? The answer is neither here nor there, INEC’s opaque mechanism (they are yet to unblock their IREV portal for proper authentication of the results they declared), makes it so. However, it is, highly likely, that the APC/Buhari presidency decided to grab, snatch, and yet again, run away with it, and gifted candidate Bola Tinubu the presidency.
The power-lusting Nigerian presidency can be a bestial, vile, and nasty predator, impossible to resist by its institutions and nomenklatura. Is there anything that Professor Yakubu’s INEC could have done to stop the presidential rampage, and the consequent electoral legerdemain of 2023? Some say, that if pressured, he should have resigned. Very well so. But then, he would have, very likely, been permanently disappeared thereafter. If in doubt, ask the savvy reformist, Audu Ogbe, about his experience as party chairman, attempting to resist Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidential midnight vampiric blood hunt. Ever wonder why decades after, Professor Humphrey Nwosu is yet to summon the courage to tell the story of President Babangida’s’ abrupt annulment of his NEC superintendent1993 presidential vote? Normal, sane humans, the likes of Goodluck Jonathan, as Nigerian Presidents come rarely, mostly, they come as money-lusting, power-mongering, bloodhounds who surround themselves with dangerous, money-craving cabals, who are prepared to hang on to power by all means, hook and crook.
No Nigerian Elections umpire, be it FEDECO, NEC, or INEC has ever been truly independent or structured to be able to even minimally resist presidential dictatorship. The presidency holds its purse strings; and appoints its staff and leadership, whose tenure in office they decide. Constitutional checks don’t count because both the judiciary and the legislature have been brow beaten by the rampaging presidency, and turned into suppliant floor mat carpet baggers. At the states, no one bats eye-lids at the way the state elections boards conduct council elections, which as a given, return,100%, all the hand-picked candidates of the governing party as winners. Why then is it expected that the ‘lord and master’ of Aso Rock villa would act otherwise, especially in elections that determine his tenure renewals?
Elections, as the constitution stipulated ways to give or take power have become wasteful, comic farces. One way to change this is to take INEC completely out of the talons-like grip of the presidency. Given that the legislature and presidency are equally interested parties, then, if INEC can’t be made to be truly independent, the nearest best alternative is for it to become an autonomous or semi-autonomous parastatal of the judiciary. In such instance, its chairman should be a retired judge of the Supreme Court with a steely backbone and ‘cojones’, and who bears no baggage of past corrupt underhand dealings. And, its budget should be calculated and derived from that of the judiciaries.
Demonizing and hating on INEC and its staff is a futile exercise. The demons of kakistocratic meddling in the election process are in Aso Rock villa and the government houses. Let’s rescue INEC from their steely talons to save democracy.
Depower the presidency, Empower the states; Restructuring!
The constitution proclaims Nigeria a tri-polar federation, but vested too many powers and responsibilities on the federal government, such that in reality, makes the country a unipolar unitary state. The federal claims of the 1999 constitution are patently dubious. The worst part is that, despite the enormous powers ceded to the federal government, the clueless, money-grubbing Abujacrats remain insatiate. Hence, the presidency, in cahoots with the pliant national assembly kept creating ministries, multiple commissions, agencies, departments, and innumerable legislative Acts, calculatedly to grab more powers, circumvent the constitution, and weaken the states. Every-where Development Commissions (South-South, North-North, North-East, South-East, South-West), Every-where Basin Development Authorities, Mecca and Jerusalem Pilgrimage commissions, cattle and poultry ministries, River Banks Right of Way Act, Federal Lottery Commission, Nomadic Education Authority, on, and on, and on it goes, and even more, are in the pipeline Many of these creations and enactments are not only money wasting and ineffective, but if truth be told, constitutionally illegal, as they are largely encroachments by the federal government on the spheres and rights of the states. The failure of governance, the economic wasteful boondoggles, and the consequent poverty being experienced by Nigerians are easily traced to the greedy federal government biting more than it can chew and stomach. Much of the pains of the country can be reduced by simply knocking the excessive load off the back of the overburdened and collapsing federal powercraft.
Consider that the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, with its innumerable commissions and agencies, cannot tackle mass hunger; talk less of assuring national food security. The Works Ministry can’t build passable roads. The Ministry of Education cannot provide education of any quality. Nobody knows what the ministry of blue, red, or white economy does. The Finance Ministry has turned into a mere tax collector. Ministry of Water Resources cannot water anything; agriculture, industry, or homes, and, since General Abacha’s observation, the Ministry of Health’s hospitals have remained mere ‘consultation clinics’. Whatever it is that these federal bodies exist for have been inadequate and ineffectual. However, their budgets, for recurrent expenditures and ghostly ‘constitutional projects’ keep increasing, year after year. Since the subsidy is gone, gone, gone, and everything hereafter; education, health, electricity, water, transportation, housing, and even security has been privatized, hyper-taxed, or decreed to be self-provided, why then do we need these many numbers of money guzzlers and their grifter Abujacrat leaderships?
Our power-mongering Abujacrats have to be persuaded to cease the endless power grab and allow the states to do their jobs. Otherwise, the call to jettison the failed unitary ‘federal’ superstructure, and return the country to the regional governance structure of old must have to be answered. The blatant lootocractic idiocracy superintendent in Abuja, which is being passed for ‘democracy’, must have to end.
RETOOL AND RE-MOTIVATE THE MILITARY-SECURITY ESTABLISHMENTS.
The military-security establishments, consisting of the military, para-military, police, and intelligence services, are collectively responsible for assuring the internal and external security of the country – in both areas, they have failed, woefully. This is chiefly due to the entrenched culture of corruption, nepotism, and tribal exclusivism. Internally, our streets, highways, and farmlands are not safe, and large swaths of the country have become ungoverned spaces – under the dominion and rule of ransom-taking kidnappers and insurgent bandits. Externally, jihadist insurgents crisscross our borders at will, visiting mayhem on hapless border communities. After many years of its forays into politics under corrupt, clannish, and inept leadership, the Nigerian military has since lost its potency as a credible fighting force. This is why, in an unprecedented contrived ICJ judgment, President Obasanjo surrendered, and ceded large swaths of Nigerian territory, including oil-rich Bakassi, to Cameroun, allegedly because, he knew that the Nigerian military was ill-equip to engage the France-Cameroonian gendarmerie in an inter-military shoot-out. So, to save face, he quickly flew the white flag.
The Nigerian military-security establishments are inept and corrupt, supremely corrupt. Services like immigration, customs, prisons, and police are so patently corrupt, and so badly run, that they could as well be declared RICO – Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. Racketeering and corrupt dealings appear to be the raison d’être of their existence.
The works of the military-security establishment center on guaranteeing national security, which happens to also be a main reason for the existence of the Abuja-based federal government itself. Yet, rather than concentrate on the job they exist to do, Abujacrats encroach on the duties of the states, creating useless basin authorities, pilgrimage commissions, cattle ministries, lottery commissions, et cetera, where they position armies of unelected numenklatura to grift money. While this expensive wastefulness goes on, Nigerians are left to suffer lawless brigandage in city centers and hinterlands, and to fall under the suzerainties of foreign-sponsored jihadist insurgents; because, according to the Abujacrat grifters in government, there is no money to retool, enthuse and deploy the military-security establishment to discharge and live up to its responsibilities.
Talking about responsibilities, for far too long, the Nigerian soldiery, especially the army has been operating as a roguish institution. Its officer corps consists mostly of money mongers who willfully loot service budgets, steal the salaries and duty allowances of servicemen, pilfer the pensions of retired officers, and at any given opportunity, collaborate with domestic and foreign gangs to facilitate heinous economic crimes and sabotage; oil bunkering, gun running, smuggling escapades et al.
Like the officer corps, the poorly educated, poorly trained, poorly motivated, and ill-disciplined non-commission rank and file is thuggish. On the streets, the entitled mobsters see themselves as some superior beings, thumping out their hairless chests in brawls, brutalizing ‘bloody civilians’, Nigerian citizens, at the slightest disagreements, the same way they routinely attack and brutalize sister services; the Police, Road Safety, and Civil Defense men. Every given day, these feckless dumb-bums, who are very good at making cry-baby video narrations of their failures containing Boko-Haram jihadists, go about disgracing the country in the eyes of the international community with their unmilitary, thuggish indiscipline.
What the imbeciles in fatigues have not been told is that any soldier, no matter the epaulet he hangs, is just a security guard. Their duty, what they are hired and paid to do, is to guard and protect Nigeria and Nigerians. In the same manner that we all hire security guards to gate our homes and business places. Just as it is inexplicable for any gate man we hire to claim to be master over our businesses and homes, no soldier should ever be allowed to assume any over-lordship over Nigeria and Nigerians. That would be some unacceptable mutinous aberration.
The Nigerian military has carried out some very serious, unacceptable crimes against Nigeria and Nigerians. Crimes such as the genocidal massacres at Odi, Zaki-Biam, and Zaria, for which the bloodhounds who gave the orders, Olusegun Obasanjo, Mohammadu Buhari, and Tukur Buratai, are yet to be held to account. Any military that aggresses its citizens, turning the nozzles of their rifles the wrong way, upon citizens of the country, rather than upon external foes, ceases to be a “peoples” army. It becomes an army of occupation. This is why the military-security establishment is not respected or trusted by the Nigerian citizenry. They are not seen as protectors, but as oppressors; a comprador army of occupation. Nigerians don’t report crimes or share intelligence with them because they know that they don’t belong with them. How then can such a graft-inclined traitorous military-security establishment, superintendent by an equally treasonous comprador political elite, resolve the worsened climate of insecurity pervading the country?
Pumping ever more money into these services will not resolve the national security challenges. On the contrary, the money will be promptly spirited away by a money-monger officer corps. What needs to be done is the complete remake and reorientation of the mentality and loyalties of the security services, particularly the military and police services. Colonialism by the British ended in 1960, but the army and police remain “hung over’ with the mentality and orientation of a colonial force, loyal to their political overlords, and detached from the country and its citizens. And, like the political overlords to who they pay all their allegiances, they see Nigeria as just a money-making opportunity, and ordinary Nigerians, as preys to freely predate upon.
This is where we can find valid work for the National Orientation Agency – one of the federal agencies we are pressed to ask what they do to earn their salaries. The NOA should be saddled with the task of re-educating, re-orientating, and re-motivating the Nigerian military and policemen. To re-orientate the police, away from its tattered image of an aggressive “egunje’ (bribe) seeking force, and to reform and rebrand it into a ‘peoples’ police . Likewise, the national soldiery should be re-educated and re-orientated into becoming a “peoples army’. For this, a lot of inspiration can be found in countries like Egypt, Burkina Faso, and China. There, in towns and villages, community-based infrastructure projects, such as rural roads, bridges, water supply schemes, and health centers are routinely built by soldiers, who are often seen working alongside civilian community volunteers. In this way, the people see the army as working for them –as “their army’, and not as some alien force of occupation. Here in Nigeria, we are wont to ask what the army really does for a living besides their daily boutique parade pageants of left-right, right-turn, quick-March, etc, and preying on the nation’s resources and people.
When the Nigerian people can trust and be proud of the army and police, the country’s security debacle will begin to be resolved.
CUT THE BANKSTERS TO SIZE.
One institution and its operators that are expected to be major drivers of the economy – for the good of Nigeria and Nigerians, are the banks and bankers. They are expected to be loyal and committed to the economic well-being of the country. Unfortunately, they have not and are not being so. The banks and bankers, as the archetypical capitalist, are only loyal and committed to profit-making – by any means, straight or crooked, but mostly crooked. Therefore they feel no genuine concern for the economic well-being of the country, or even of their clients. Nigerian banks are being run as mafia gaming casinos, and the banksters who direct their operations are masters of financial legerdemains; the means, methods, and systems, to cheat and rob the country and hapless Nigerian bank customers. Thus, the CEOs of these banks have no interest whatsoever in salvaging the country and its people out of the drawn-out economic doldrums – preferring, like the insatiable vampires that they are, to profit and feed off the economic bloodletting.
In the ongoing competition for the organized looting of the country, bankers or rather, banksters, play in the premier league, because for them, no economic crime, no matter how heinous, is off-limits. The cunningly intelligent Billionaire CEOs who run these banks are, bar none, absolutely crime motivated, and unfathomably corrupt. They habitually cook their books, aka ‘financial engineering’ to cheat the tax authorities and their shareholders, they create phony overseas ‘companies for purposes of dubious ’round-tripping’ foreign exchange and ‘arbitrage’ deals that hurt the Naira, keeping it in spasmodic life support gasping fits. They collude with importers, especially, oil-marketers, to authenticate befuddling ‘ghost’ oil import tonnages – for which the government has to pay ‘subsidy’; costs that are quickly passed on to the accounts of ordinary Nigerians – a crime which is at the very foundation of the present existential ‘subsidy’ removal imbroglio, and its consequential inflationary spirals. They pimp themselves off as financial consultants to corporate titans and political office holders, especially the occupants of the country’s government houses; offering them opaque offshore banking services for money laundering purchases of luxurious properties in foreign cities – Dubai, London, Paris, New York etc – with stolen monies. They brazenly steal from their customers, leeching on their savings and deposits, through all manners of questionable charges and “un-rendered services such as ‘Commission On Turn over (CTO)’, ‘card maintenance’, ‘transfer charges’, ‘alert charges’, ‘statement of account cost, etc, etc. Worse of all, they are good at deliberately offering and luring unsuspecting customers into taking loans, with the primary motive of saddling them with unsustainable usury interest rates that are loaded to the hilt with unexplained ‘hidden’ charges and designed to ruin their businesses to foreclose them and seize control of every collateralized asset. The owners of Innoson Motors, and the defunct Visafone, will have much to say on this. On the other hand, they largesse themselves, their friends, and sundry accomplices, with elephant size uncollateralized loans, which are given and received with no intention of servicing or repaying, as they know too well that, ultimately, the central bank (CBN) will be bent over to subsidize the brazen thievery via the usual ‘bankters’ camaraderie bail out schemes which are supposedly structured in the overall interest of the economy. The blatant financial brigandage going on in the banks has to be rein-in for the economy to have any jot of a salvation chance.
One solution is for the government to curtail the excessive profit-driven financialization trickeries so beloved by the banking institutions by returning the sector to the path of developmental banking. If the government could decidedly ditch ‘Arise O compatriots’ and revert to ‘Nigeria we hail thee‘ and if propositions to return to the regional governance structure of yore are being flouted, then the federal government could as well consider reviving Babangida’s Peoples Bank, and the state governments their defunct banks i.e. mercantile bank, Pabod bank, Owena bank, Bank of the North, etc. which were government driven structures with provable records of benefiting the real sector; agriculture, manufacturing, industries and productions. What is not in doubt is that the present banking structure has failed to benefit the economy, and has become the ‘Ruiner-in-Chief’ (RIC) of the economy.
Of course, there would be fears of what state authorities could do running banks. But whatever, it cannot be as bad as what the private banking Mafioso is doing presently. In any case, the legislative houses, and the turn-by-turn election cycles, constitute levers of checks and retributive balancing to ensure that societal expectations are not willfully compromised.
The banking sector is too strategic a sector to be left solely in charge of unconscionable buccaneering banksters. The rampaging bankster Mafioso has to be reined in – one way or the other.
REPURPOSE THE CENTRAL BANK
The universally accepted norm is that central banks serve for the macroeconomic management of national economies. Macroeconomic management will not be painless if left in the hands of unpatriotic individuals who are clueless and ranked illiterates in the nuances of global geo-politics and geo-economics. Every known scheme in fiscal acrobatics and monetary gymnastics; interest rates tweaking wizardry, treasury bonds marketing, money printing sprees, currency redenomination, re-coloring, palliative distributions, etc has utterly failed. This is because liberal monetarism is mostly the trickery of financialization associated with junk Western economic theories. Western liberal monetary theories or monetarism, are consumptions promotions formulations that places the cart of finance in front of the horse of production. It doesn’t work.
Central Banking, for a developing country like Nigeria, struggling for economic survival, should be in the hands of top-tier economists; sound heads who are knowledgeable in developmental economics, and sound heads of the likes of the current president of AfDB, Akinwumi Adesina. Sadly, the very last time any seemingly knowledgeable economist led the CBN was during the times of Charles Soludo, presently, Governor of Anambra state. Ever since, the conclave of Nigerian Banksters have somehow connived and succeeded in convincing every president of the country that the CBN, and the position of CBN governor, is their lair and reserve. Central Banking is about intelligent macroeconomic acumen, totally diverged from the ‘book cooking’ and crooked ‘financial engineering’ acumens in which the banksters are the top adepts. What we’ve got, since the ‘takeover’ of the CBN by buccaneering Mafioso banksters, beginning from the era of the venerable emir, Sanusi Lamido, to the inimitable Godwin Emefele, and the governing crown prince of the day, is the operating of the CBN along the pathways and footsteps of the private usury salons posing as banks.
When they are appointed governor of the CBN, they carry over their banking rivalries to their new position as the country’s banker-in-chief, bestowing unmerited favors to ‘friendly banks’, blind sighting all their transgressions, and dishing them generous foreign exchange allocations, but discriminate against former banking competitors and rivals, who they sledge-hammer for the minutest transgression as they ceaselessly seek to find any windows of opportunities to ruin them. They turn the CBN into a contract-awarding bazaar akin to the “constituency projects’ market of the National Assembly. Devoid of any jot of patriotic developmental sentiments, their overriding interest is, firstly, to serve their club of private banks, which they consider to be their primary constituency, rather than strain their energy devising ways to salvage the national economy from its doldrums. The game-changing cure for the malaise of criminal, unpatriotic, and unimaginative central banking is to return the CBN to intelligent leadership – that means fencing bank CEOs very far away from the governorship of the CBN.
The CEOs of private banks are toxic. Having proven, bar none, to be unable to run their banks honestly or successfully without recourse to under-table criminal dealings, it is an economic crime in itself to allow them to transfer their ingrained economic insanity to the CBN, from where they afflict the national economy with their insane toxicity. Godwin Emefele ought to be the last bankster allowed to head the CBN. Qualified Nigerian development economists abound in the ranks of the members of the Nigerian Economic Society and from amongst the Nigerian ‘abroad’ Diaspora academics. They tower far and above, in macroeconomic acumens, beyond anyone in the Nigerian league of usury banksters.
And the judiciary?
What about the judiciary; the courts and judges? Those grotesque serpentine medusas. How can those freaky Frankenstein monsters, the master conjurers of the most demeaning “419” judicial legerdemains be ever salvaged?
As the shameful Dele Farotimi and Afe Babalola “Courts and Judges ” saga is revealing, the Nigerian judicial system has turned cancerous. What an untreated cancerous organ eventually does to a body is well known. Let’s be warned.
This article was first published on October 1, 2024. But it has now been edited as a commemorative article for the new yea 2025r.
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