(Voice of Paul) – Someone said Nigeria is a crime scene, and I agree. How do we justify the financial crime that the President of Nigeria is committing against her people in broad daylight?! One day we will be here cheering the citizens on to support the president on his reforms, the next day, the news will hit mainstream media that he acquired a new presidential jet while a Nigerian who is not in the elite class would not be able to find a job to feed him or herself.
What defense can we have for purchasing 150 billion Naira for a new presidential jet or the 21 billion Naira they spent on renovating the presidential villa? This practice of enriching one’s associates at the detriment of a country’s citizens is called Kleptocracy.
In a country where 3 state-owned refineries are completely inactive but the government has been very comfortable refining those products outside the country for decades and yet, a citizen with a private investment of 19 billion USD could not get the crude oil from inside his own country to refine and re-sell?
What justification can we have when farmers are unsafe on their farmlands? They get kidnapped, robbed, and maimed even after they have paid millions of Naira in ransom and yet the government could not do anything. Previously, I was very aggressive on issues like this, but that did not produce the needed result and this is why it is necessary to teach the people. What is baffling is the logic behind why some people are adamantly in support of this daylight robbery of the citizens by their government.
In ancient Greece, divide and rule is a political and social strategy that emboldens an already existing division between a class of people through, intimidation, suppression, or buying some members of the group over and eventually weakening their power and eventually ruling over them. I am very confident that the President is playing this card very well.
I am urging every Nigerian to see the fight against poverty as a collective effort, rather than playing up the ethnic card that the elites in the country are already exploiting. Our diversity is not a curse, but we must see each and every ethnic difference as a uniqueness in driving our nation forward. Until Nigerians unite under one voice as one people, the elites among us will continue to exploit our ethnical differences.