By Sir Don Ubani; KSC, JP
Okwubunka of Asa Gburugburu and Oke Amadi Nd’Asa.


.

It is necessary to differentiate between a wicked man and a foolish man.

A wicked man is simply defined as a man who is evil or morally wrong or deficient. On the other hand, a foolish man is one who has no sense or wisdom. His judgement will always be faulty.



In any case, either of the two is a minus to human society. It is, however, an unmitigated disaster for one to be both wicked and, at the same time, foolish.




For purposes of this piece, I will make it as brief as possible since some of my friends, such as Inyom Ngozi Onyioha-Orji, have, of recent, been complaining that my write-ups are becoming too long for their liking. I pray they would not, after all, write longer essays than mine.




Back to the subject of this essay, the major objective of governments, especially democratic governments, is to guarantee the security and welfare of the governed. This is the essence of the Theory of Social Contract as propounded by Thomas Hobbes.



Nigeria’s federalism is characteristically odd and strange. Unlike the Federalism envisioned and conceptualized by the founding fathers of the Nigerian federation, as exemplified in the 1960 Independent Constitution and made clearer and more plausible in the 1963 Republican Constitution, 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as variously amended, is the antithesis of what Federalism stands for.




Otherwise, why should the federating units be dispossessed of almost all their natural and mineral resources by the Federal Government of Nigeria?



The consequence is that state governments go almost cap in hand, to Abuja every month for what is termed as Statutory Allocation. The irony of it is that the federating units are not even in a position to ascertain how much money accrues to the Federal Government per month.




Nigeria’s awkward federalism has, as a consequence, enthroned two evils in Nigeria’s governance. One, State Governments have been made to be unduly lazy and hardly thinks out of the box. Two, corruption has become the order of the day.




The recent directive by the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria; Mr Godwin Emefele, that certain monetary currencies in circulation in the country will cease to be after January 2023, has exposed how wicked and foolish some former State Governors were, or even are.


Some of the Governors were so wicked that they greedily converted more than 70% of the statutory allocations that came to their State to their private fund. Funds that the States should have raised by way of internal revenue generation were never accounted for.




The consequence was that they became richer, from nowhere than the State.


Imagine a State that had three parasitic locusts; the Governor, his son and wife, voraciously hibernating on lean resources of the State!



As it would turn out, taking into consideration that it is only someone that suffers from Poverty Mentality that would rush into this level of crude looting of the people’s resources and embark on primitive accumulation of material wealth, the former Governors and members of their family did not invest the money they looted in any productive enterprise.




Foolishly as it were, and widely alleged, those public rogues having been deprived of the least iota of common sense by nature, only felt that burying the money they had heartlessly stolen from the people that had, rightly or wrongly, elected them to serve them as Governor was the best way to secure their loot.



With the CBN directive, those unintelligent public rogues must have now found themselves in a dilemma.



The money they primitively stole for which they left their people and State in the most wretched condition, a condition that will, forever, be a judgement against them and their family, has become useless. A large quantity of their loot even got badly defaced in the places they buried them.




If they had used the money for the development of their State, they would have earned the respect of their people. The goodwill arising from such altruistic deployment of the people’s resources would have made them very respectable and would have been more than material riches which are quite ephemeral.




Today, those fraudulent former Governors neither command the respect of the people they had once presided over as their Governor nor have the money they stole which the fear of anti-graft agencies could not allow them save in the Bank.
This is the wicked foolish former Governor’s dilemma!




Sir Don Ubani is a former Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Abia State and writes from Asa.