“World’s 8th Most Violent Country” By Seyi Olu Awofeso

Columnist: Guest Columnist
Dear Seyi: Hope all's well with you on the other side of the Atlantic?
You'd barely exited our barrio when Maria got moody at your absence.
She's not left Belgrano ever since or reset the guest-room you'd
stayed, as her in terrorem stance she'll do neither until you promise
to visit us again in Argentina.
We never get to read much about youcountry in our newspapers here.
It's nearly blacked out, as nothing good seems to be happening over
there, and now, putting the on-line news together, your country seems
to be looking straight into the abyss; with aHobson's choice between a
religious civil war of mass murder, and, a bloody revolution to
prevent a religious civil war, as the obvious options.
A wretched choice, to be sure, but between an imminent religious civil
war and a revolution, a rational person would prefer a revolution,
because a religious civil war will cost no fewer than 20 million
innocent lives if bombers strafe territories across the Niger and
Benue Rivers, and turn your entire country into a battle-field, since
religion is a common feature of your citizens.
Whereas, a revolution will aim only atthose fostering the destruction
of your society – who devalue the worthof honesty and competence
alike, by devaluing alongside both, all university certificates, to
create 75 million un-employed people, withoutcomfort or hope. Take out
those 10,000 official thieves and roguish apparatchiks - elected or
appointed - along with proxies working for them as accountants,
lawyers and businessmen, and real change shall have come to your
country without having to bomb a street market of theinnocents, as
happened in 1967.
Truth is, everything else has failed to stop those ruining your
country from continuing. The sermons of the Pastors have not dissuaded
the rogues anymore than the tafsir of the Imams; and not even the
gilded pages of the United Nations Merida Convention which your
country rushed to Mexico and hurriedly signed amid pomp on December
13, 2006, abated the horrific thefts, despite your country pledging by
signing that multilateral Convention to forswear official thefts.
In political science, a practical solution to your country's type of
sclerotic breakdown of its social codes separating right from wrong,
with 5,000 people murdered already, and with your official rogues
still taking the people for granted by stealing and haemorrhaging the
country, is a revolutionary band that could swiftly take your
country's official rogues out of business, forever, and begin the hard
work of mending those fissured social codes - without which public
ethics, no progress is ever possible.
Your country's abiding illusion is that time will make your country
good, but that's a slightly crazy thought - to be polite. No country
ever became good or liveable as a result of time alone. My country,
Argentina, was the fifth biggest economy in the world at the turn of
the past century. A hundred years later, we are worse and nervously
swatting off some bad fairies from our bedside – those bad fairies
being our overseas creditors who'd bought our sovereign bonds.
We tried clever wheezes to refinance the bonds, but the clever
hold-outs demurred and took us to the United States federal court.
We did everything to win that court case; including getting our
biddable parliament to pass a law barring repayment on the initially
agreed terms of the bonds, and we then argued that the pari passu
clause in the old bonds is in-effective at law against a sovereign
country's public finance. We lost on all counts and were thrown out of
court.
With pains we've learnt our lesson in Argentina that neither time nor
theft nor fraud can build the wealth of a nation.
Your own country is much unlike mine, because you are trenching on the
fringe of the lunacy of a misbelief in your country that stealing the
treasury dry could create a peaceful oasis for the pilferers and yield
national peace and cohesion to make your country liveable.
In your own country the basis of existing private wealth is theft, but
only a revolution can solve such a property-relations crisis, not a
war. For now, your country is a shambles ofstutters and gristles, and,
that's also close to the official thinking out here in the western
world. At 53, your country is too old to be held by the hands and
taught the basic ethics of right and wrong. That's why no western
country will commit its soldiers to pre-empt your country's
contradictions from exploding into a massacre, unless you resolve it
all by yourselves.
A country carrying on recklessly as yours must rue at leisure for
merely winking or hissing as a whopping 600 billion dollars was openly
stolen by your officials, and their partnering business criminals, who
then lodged it into their own private accounts to buy villas and
luxuries for themselvesin Europe, thus intentionally ruining the
posterity of all other citizens, in consequence.Reuters newswire just
recently brought home the news to us here in Argentina that your
country's President with a phalanx of 20 Cabinet Ministers went
a-begging for one billion dollars loan in Beijing three weeks ago or
thereabouts. But that Chinese loan is a smidgen one-seventh of the
total amount stolen at your Central Bank last year – when your Finance
Minister and the Accountant-General, in tandem, robotically kept
signing counterfeit invoices with almost criminal negligence, twice in
excess of the national budget, and passed the bogus papers added by
forged bills of laden onto your funny-looking Central Bank Governor
who then recklessly paid cash twice over the limit set by federal law
- in intentional violation of a reasonable banker's obligor's limit.
Through that criminal conspiracy alone, a staggering 7 billion dollars
was stolen from your country's treasury last year, with official
assistance - under the pretext of oil subsidy reimbursement. A year
later, your country's President would be scurrying to Beijing in China
to beg for one-seventh of that money as foreign loan, repayable with
interest. This is the story of your benighted country.
Whereas thus far, your country's 7 billion dollars remain stolen,
despite the huffing and puffing sounding in the official
self-exculpatory rhetoric of your country's government, which nobody
overseas believes as true. A mere 5% of that 7 billion dollars is all
that has been officially recovered till date - with no government
official named or arraigned for any offence for this daylight theft
occurring solely through official approvals of forged bills of lading.
Rather, we are told here in Argentina by Reuters news agency that your
country's President and the Petroleum Minister, a few days ago,
jointly approved more oil lifting contracts for a clutch of about five
entities out of the 48 companies criminally indicted by your
parliament for stealing last year's 7 billion dollars on these oil
lifting contracts. So, the punishment of sin inyour country is wealth.
Is this any way to run a country? Surely not, but your country's
politically naïve people acquiesce by sitting on their hands and doing
nothing, after their initially focused street protests last year
January had forced the issue. So, your governmentofficials now rightly
feel more able to live by plunder, since the people never seriously
seek freedom from slavery.
When last month armed vigilantes sprouted in the north-east of your
country to counter certain Islamic militias running amok, your
government praised that armed struggle initiative, and your government
was right, even if your government had covertly created andarmed those
vigilantes. By law constitutional freedom in a democracy includes
self-defence. And since freedom is not mere liberty to wander the face
of the earth like a destitute, an armed struggle in defence of a
concrete right to the benefits of the resources of one's country of
birth; as communal property to be used commonly, is legitimate. That
is why armed struggle against official thefts is by parity also
authorised by international law; including your country's own laws,
but helas, your grossly mis-educated middle class folks never once
before sought that law's grace – even under British colonial rule. So
if your people are slaves, it is not because they are in chains, but
because they voluntarily refuse to unlock the chains, despite having
the keys in their own hands.
It utterly beggars belief how your people carelessly concede the
resources of your country to the government officials as private
property and prefer beggary as a way of life. The people only wish to
be mercifully given a slight fraction of their entitlement as
citizens, but only by begging their state officials. Self-esteem is
surely the first casualtyof wholesale capture of a whole country by
thieves.
But worse of all, your nearly crazed middle class of lawyers,
accountants, engineers, doctors, bankers, estate agents, journalists,
architects, and such-like, are quite happy to embracethis same beggary
as a way of life - though they make beggary sound nice by calling it
"connections", because they are proud to know someone who knows those
who own them as slaves, who can then plead on their behalf to be
granted a slightly bigger morsel, which – when given under the table
lest the other slaves revolt - the middle class gaily celebrate as
"success".
A people who accept to live by beggary can't ever progress, because
they invariably signal to their own children to do likewise. So, the
result is a historical cycle of mushrooming slave camps all across
your country.
At present form, your country writhes in economic dirt and political
mud; rolled into one – and now lacks asense of shame or future, as it
sets to incur another 800 billion Naira fiscal deficit this year, with
no concrete achievement to show for it. That fiscaldeficit will as
likely as not put further devaluation pressures on the Naira earnings
and savings of ignorantly innocent citizens, and deepen their general
poverty, following the crawling band devaluation emplaced since civil
rule began in 1999, leading to 100% devaluation of the Naira, in
nominal terms.
Today, your country is rated by the United Nations as the 8th most
violent country on the face of the earth, but i rather reckon it as
the most violent in Africa, because its bloody history of regicide
trumps the history of all other 53 countries in Africa. Almost
surreal, but it seems that spot 8th from the bottom is your country's
current addiction, because it is also ranked by UNESCO as the 8th most
illiterate country in the world.
Anything diverging from that figure 8 will probably throw your country
off its comfort zone, and hence, the current covert imports of war and
artillery pieces from Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine and Libya, ahead of a
promised ethno-religious war in 2015,regardless of the outcome of that
year's national election in your country.
Those importing these military hardware in preparation for war care
less for the total spend. They either insistently want to reset your
country's presidential terms to no more than 8 years (the same
recurrent figure 8) regardless of any extra time permitted by law for
your President's initial succession to office by his predecessor's
death, or, to resist any mutually agreed reset that may account for
and then off-set a residue of the un-used (?) tenure of a dead
predecessor president.
That's a total quagmire you've got right there; indeed, a sure-fire
recipe for ethnic war, because this controversy is not resolvable by a
common principle or standard. One side insists on the law to the
letter and the other insists on a region's ethnic entitlement to the
remainder of the 8-year tenure of a dead president.
Such a zany debate really does not interest the rest of the world.
That explains why no other country is voicing opinion on it at all. It
is your country's sui generis debate to carry on; not an intelligent
debate typicallyoccurring in a constitutional democracy and resolvable
by reference to a historical example. So, you'll have to solve it all
by yourselves, possibly by rule of thumb,even if that means burying
the hatchet on each other's head.
Keep safe in that cauldron, Seyi, and keep well, my buddie, and, do
please come back soon to Buenos Aires.
…Seyi Olu Awofeso is a Legal Practitioner in Abuja