The Seamstress and the Oil Bloc

By Joseph Edgar…

I have never had the pleasure of meeting this titan and must confess that I would rather not savour the pleasure. For she symbolises to me a vestige of a cracked system, an idiocy which characterised the dark days of military rule. A system that throws up rent-seeking as a respectable and honourable vocation with tremendous rewards if you get it right, rather than a system of balanced governance. A system that sweeps under the foot mat hard work, transparency and equity in dishing out rewards.

So, we have a Forbes-acclaimed billionaire, infact they say the richest black woman in the whole world without any real input in the amazement of this stupendous wealth aside the fact that she was once the fashion designer to the very influential wife of a military dictator. The source of this wealth will remain a shame to Nigerians, keeping us permanently etched on the pantheons of global ridicule each time this lady makes the prestigious list and the source of her wealth like those of her colleagues is narrated.

So, on the Forbes list we see people who by stint of hard work, tinted with high level of visionary talents, tinged with almost inhuman perseverance, creativity and a burning desire, provide for mankind services they would be more than willing to pay for. These super humans are usually celebrated and admired. Thrown up on high pedestals to serve as beacons of hope and inspiration for the vast majority of us who remain cocooned within the embers of poverty and hopelessness.

Read also: Essays in Nation Building – an open Letter to Professor Adigun Agbaje

And on that list Nigeria throws in our own representatives. We throw in a deserving entrepreneur who by dint of hard work built a huge business empire spanning so many industries and climes, we throw in men who have really put in blood to forcefully grab a seat on that list and in the mix a ‘’seamstress comes in’’, her major qualification being the favourite designer or is it stylist to an egocentric wife of a mad dictator.

This you see is the folly of our collective existence, when one puny lilly-brained soldier suddenly decides to seize the destiny of millions of people and start ruling them from the barrel of his guns and from the urges in his loins. He begins to dispense rent and rewards to sycophantic allies who bend down and allow him fart as much as he likes into their noses. In return he rewards them with tremendous wealth and power, sacrificing integrity, sacrificing capability and in the long term short-changing the very people who should be the end line recipients of good governance.

So the seamstress is rewarded with an oil bloc for the beautiful fabrics or should I say designs and then she goes along to sub-contract the oil bloc to more serious minded people to exploit for a fee which throws her into the billionaire club and in her attempt to give back, she deepens the ridicule of the Nigerian people as she tells us how GOD gave her the oil bloc and just how she emerged a billionaire without going to school.

The damage, this particular personality is doing to our youths, to the society cannot be measured. I will dwell on that in another piece but for this piece I would like to exhort our leaders, our people and the guardians of our institutions of state never in our lifetimes or in the life to come would we ever allow any arbitrariness in government under any guise. The system that allows for authoritarianism, destruction of separation of powers and the limitations that comes with responsible governance should be totally resisted otherwise, we would soon start seeing housemaids commanding the Army.

Nigerians have kept quiet for too long and have merely watched this parade for so long. We remain happy for her and her ilk but let us say it out here that it will never happen again. Not in this life time and not for ever, for we will enthrone responsible government laced with strong democratic principles which would guarantee collective decision taking and responsibility within the prisms of constitutional governance. We have spoken.

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