The Air Force General, his wife and the soak away pit

By Joseph Edgar . . .

You see this is a story of utter crassness. Petty thieves who have taken advantage of our system to climb the ladder and reach the peak of what could have been a prestigious career. This goes to show that despite all the training, discipline and exposure, this person remained a petty classless thief, or how else would you describe a person who would go as far as to hide raw cash in a soak away pit meant for his waste.

It is illuminating if you consider the fact that this General chose the cesspit to hide his loot. Just tells you were his mind is. This is a total disgrace and I hear most of his colleagues and other public office holders have done the same. The question is how did he intend to spend the loot. Was he like the famed Colombian drug baron going to build a tunnel from his house straight to Cuba or some South American Banana Republic where he would be able to live the
life?

The illiteracy in some of these people speaks volumes. There is no way in hell you can hide a billion dollars. You cannot even hide a billion Naira. How will you spend it, how will you launder it. This is just madness and a lawyer will still attempt to defend this in court.

Taking that kind of amount out of circulation does a lot of damage to the economy. It’s just a vicious circle because at some point you will be cut. You cannot hide this kind of cash forever no matter how savvy you are at stealing. The best thing would have been steal a lot less and working with very good fund managers, gradually throw it into the system through a complex intertwining network of blind trusts from where it would be laundered either through the Stock Exchange, mutual funds or savvy investments in huge multinationals.

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That way the money is working for the economy and creating jobs. Even when you are being investigated, it would take years to unravel everything, by that time you would have been long dead and your great grandchildren would be the ones negotiating with the people. See my brother Abacha years after, they are still unraveling and his descendants are cutting deals, being allowed to keep a certain percentage in exchange for releasing the bulk.

So my brother General the soak away pit is so vulgar an insult to our collective intelligence and a slap on the face of our Fund Managers. Since this act has shown that you really do not have the confidence in their expertise or otherwise. Anyway, as you face the gulag, I send my greetings.

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