Your all know the Bible story very well. It is a popular story, more appropriately, a lesson in the Bible which was recorded for our benefits/to learn from. In Genesis Chapter 41, Pharaoh had a dream and sought for interpreters. He got one prisoner, Joseph, who divinely interpreted the dream accurately. Not minding the profile of the interpreter, Pharaoh listened. Egypt was saved the worst (?) famine recorded in the Bible, seven years of famine after seven years of plenty.
Few years ago, a barrel of crude oil at a point hit 140 Dollar and Nigeria was doing virtually nothing but looting by those privileged to have remote or direct access to the national wealth. Nigeria had no dreamers or interpreters or both for those years of plenty. Now, there is famine in the land and we are all blaming the “unfortunate king” that emerged after the wasted years of plenty harvest.
Can’t Nigeria unite for once to fight the looters or at best canvass for capital punishment for confirmed treasury looters? It is worst crime that can be unleashed on fellow beings. I trust North Koreans, Chinese and few other nations that are desperate to make things right. Their citizens would have mounted a campaign to get rid of few enemies of all no matter the cultural or political divide.
In China, the managing director of the company that produced adulterated baby milk was executed in less than six months of arrest and trial. That is where we have responsible leaders, judiciary, lawyers and active citizens. It is still not too late.
We trivialize and glamourize looting here. Those people deserve the worst punishment that can be given. That was how many sane countries we admire now emerged.
India did not take Coca Cola, ride bicycle or take white sugar for years because their Prime Minister said until they can produce their own or the capitalist corporations teach them how to make such things. That was a hard choice and the entire nation chorused “yes, so be it”.
Have we lined up behind our leaders for hard choices like that?. It is all politics. Funds meant to fight a deadly onslaught of Boko Haram were shared individually and the persons who presided over such never-heard-off criminality are still being picked and granted bail? No. No.
Dollar is hitting the roof and there is agony in the land. Why will it not? We pride ourselves using anything foreign, oppress ourselves with looted funds, and buy poultry and cooking oil from Benin Republic. Simple economics should have taught us that such is not sustainable. Dollar is a question of productivity, DD and SS.
If poor people cannot do anything, at least they can protest. The Middle East crises that have consumed many leaders in that axis were sparked off by a young graduate who was molested by tax officials while going out searching for work. He set himself ablaze and the conflagration started. He is gone but he set the pace for greater reforms that now follow.
Anyway, a nation gets the leaders it deserves.
Moshood Isamotu, a social commentator, contributes this from Lagos
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