Culled from the Fawol Media archive
Onumba.com, USA — …it all tallied up to a cool N38.75 billion. Calculator please. Thank you. Eh m, that’s about $250 million.
Nope ——- that is not the 2013 infrastructure budget for Taraba State. It’s not that of neighbouring Adamawa State, either. Pretty good guesses though, but no… that obscene and absurd lollapalooza of dosh in fact has absolutely nothing to do with the budget of any entity. Ladies and gentlemen of the corruption jury, that jaw-dropping figure is the combined wad of dough His Excellency former Delta State Governor Chief James Onanefe Ibori masterfully pilfered from his state’s till and thought he could get away with it. With his stolen sack of dough, he swooned in cockahoop, wide-jaw guffaw and salivary glee that after his massive lucrative gig as a public servant, he and his privileged family would be cemented for life in a comfy space of luxury and opulence at the expense of millions of his Deltan hoipolloi stuck in a tormenting world of gloom and doom.
Former Governor James Ibori
But thank goodness that won’t happen. His once heralded criminal triumph collapsed and came to a screeching kibosh. Now, Ibori, very condignly so, will spend much of the rest of his atrocious life in what I hope would be the unkindest calaboose ever, such as the Diyarbarkir prison in Turkey. The bad news for Ibori is that his trial played out in the United Kingdom, not Nigeria, where the rabid, vengeful teeth and claws of the law are sharp and shrill and usually strike with unforgiving fury on deserving culprits. With that, he knew not to hope for a NAMBY-PAMBY, mushy, baby handling and coddling of corrupt public officials he was accustomed to in Nigeria. In the UK, there was no way out and certainly no one to bribe to gain back his lost freedom. And for a hopelessly priggish man whose name, ironically, sounds like a fitting truncate out of the Igbo phrase for ‘You are a thief’ (Ibu Onye—Ori), aggrieved Deltans will surely be pleased to see him hauled off to prison for a long ruthless and teeth-gnashing comeuppance.
Darutichem a lesson!
Ibori, if I may helpfully remind you, was elected by the hapless people of his state to serve as their governor. He was there to solve their heap of problems and offer, if only, a modicum of succour to ease and minify their tormenting misery from years of malign neglect by his failed predecessors. But as we disappointingly now know, serving the poor plebes of his state was as far from Ibori’s plan as planet Jupiter is from mother earth. He heartlessly ran Delta State to the ground, turning it into a sweltering and unbearable Gehenna for millions of powerless and helpless Deltans now reeling in ululation as casualties of his mean-spirited abuse of power and corruption.
What’s more, all of this played out while he constantly jetted out of the country on cleverly orchestrated money laundry missions and lavish state financed jaunts for splendid dalliances with his wife and mistresses. On those pleasure and self serving trips, he unstintingly took good care of a retinue of family members, a camarilla of close boneheaded advisers and a convoy of feckless gubernatorial minions trailing as lucky beneficiaries of his vast spoils of power, of course, all on the public dime. One of those lavish trips was to Columbus, Ohio where he was treated to a special baronial and boisterous Nigerian style welcome. At the shindig, Ibori was showered with a generous outpour of paean. Nigerians in Columbus pulled out all stops to welcome a bona-fide thief who jetted around the globe having fun at the height of his looting triumph.
Off course he wouldn’t admit it but the purpose of the foreign trips was to hide and secure his loot and purchase pricey pads and other modcons. According to the Metropolitan Police, Ibori purchased houses in London and Johannesburg. He bought an armada of armoured Land Rovers and a $20 million private jet. Perhaps, he needed a nice jet to conveniently ferry him around, from his plush pad in London to the lush mansion in Johannesburg.
Inside the super elevated walls of his bulwark in Asaba, guarded by a phalanx of armed security men, was where he cooked the books, stole a lorry load of money and covered up all his sleazy acts. As a governor, his daily moxie was serving his own selfish interest fuelled by greed and gluttony. While Deltans thought he was inside his rampart office working for them, patiently waiting and dangling on the pendulum of hope for their gloomy condition to improve, he was actually there conspiring and plotting, wheeling and dealing, heisting and gobbling up their resources and worsening the plight of tormented folks already being pummelled hard by multilayered social and economic glum in the country. For the eight years he was governor, Ibori engaged in baneful political barbarism, epic thoughtlessness and massive White-collar robbery to support his Brahminic lifestyle and other elitist indulgencies, thereby bedevilling his state and deepening the social and economic despair of his people.
I am not Ibori’s fan, in case you have not figured that out. In short, I am not a fan of political thieves, and all thieves.
To add insult to injury, during his historic trial in London’s Southwark Crown Court, Ibori had the brazen gall to attempt a laughable and insulting defense for his smorgasbord of crimes, somehow suggesting that his arrest was “politically motivated,” futilely casting himself as the wronged and aggrieved victim of a calculated witch-hunt and unfair conspiracy. What a side-splittingly bloody bouffe, a claptrap at the highest zenith. Surprisingly, this shameless pusillanimous lout who was flat-out caught with his grubby hand in the proverbial cookie-jar was in a hole and for the life of me kept digging. The unmistakable fact, which is good news for relieved Deltans, is that his arrest, which came a bit late (but better late than never) saved their financially-depleted state from sinking further into social and economic abyss. The impugned tomfooleries and titanic murrain of a thief with few parallels was halted after years of viciously sucking life out of his moiling Deltans, greedily sponging up the treasury of his poor state during the period he was in power from 1997 to 2007.
By the way, it immensely helps to note at this cusp that Ibori’s epic crimes and shenanigans are no longer mere allegations. It is easy to think so if you are not following the story closely. After his nonsensical, irrational, unhinged and acrobatic defense decrying his troubles as being “politically motivated,” which unsurprisingly is typical in high profile criminal cases of this nature, he pitifully succumbed to the mountain of iron-clad evidence against him and recently pleaded guilty to massively fleecing his state, agreeing that he in fact stole millions from Delta State government. An avaricious Ibori saw public service only through the prism of a giant un-policed ATM machine. For him, Delta government was a baceiferous tree bearing sweet pomes of Naira berries. We hear so much about “Abacha loot”. It has become a popular slogan in media conversations as well as in Nigeria’s war against corruption. There’s also the “Ibori loot.”
A museum of unflattering monikers describing big name thieves like Ibori offers a salmagundi of fitting choices. Pick the one that warms your little heart. Call him a thieving monster, a wicked Beelzebub, a selfish idiot, a bumbling buffoon or simply an empty headed oaf. You can’t go wrong with any of those. But mouthing off a boatload of scornful names for a criminal of this monstrous proportion isn’t enough. Ibori deserves no mercy and revenge is always a dish better served cold. He should unpityingly rot, along with his Jezebelian wife Theresa Nkoyo Ibori, lest we forget her enabling role in all of this, in the filthiest gulag in UK or in an equally sullied gaol elsewhere.
This is why Nigerians all the time are befuddled in collective grimace and hopelessness, profound disgust and searing anger, deepening frustration and maddening acceptance of their despair each day wondering where their country is going, despite her enviable depot of natural resources and decades after independence. After all these years, the once promising country, the “giant of Africa,” is still mud stuck in a battered and moribund condition. Thanks in large part to heartless political bandits like Ibori whose desire to govern was totally devoid of any intention of developing his state. None. Yet they swaggeringly masquerade behind pricey caparison and Agbada getups parading themselves as authentic and reputable public servants. The truth is, they are rabidly greedy and slick crooks pillaging the public coffers for personal gains and lavish lifestyle.
What’s worse, these empty-headed dunderheads and sanctimonious charlatans openly talk a good game about good governance and effective leadership, but practically deliver utter pittance and morose, malaise and misery. Their flowery rhetoric and high-minded talk of bringing effective governments in speeches and public pronouncements amount to pure codswallop designed to prey willy-nilly on the helpless masses. Those callous pronouncements, often delivered with straight faces, were nothing but vicious deception, systematic pandering in support their lucrative criminal enterprise, all of which masquerade as heartfelt concern for the people. Their rosy promises are nothing but glib lip service, clever gambit, hollow shibboleths and impeccably packaged effluvium of lies designed to dupe the people. Even as they cast themselves as social and economic redeemers of their hapless guttersnipes, all of that is worth diddlysquat. It is depressing, to say the least. They peddle false hope to tame the visible and understandable rage of the people, sort of conniving and stringing them along long enough to fill up their enormous sack with stolen money – and then vamoose scot-free in time to make room for the next pack of crooks in waiting. And that sits at the core of the crisis of Nigerian Democracy. The classic pitfall of politics in Nigeria is the habit of believing the hackneyed piffles and picayunes of these pharisaic pied pipers. Nigerians are petered out from their bunkum.
Yet, sadly, that is Nigeria.
How do Nigerians respond to stuff like this? Sit, suffer and wait for things to get better
But let’s be real. It is not as though Nigerians, despite their visible laconic response to their deepening pain and plight, are a pack of oblivious naïfs and dangling clods unaware of the sources of their despair and torment. No, they know. They know they have rotten and greed infested governments managed by corruptocratic coyotes and vultures ravaging and pillaging their country. But quite often, perhaps depressed and distracted by the combined burden of their individual economic torment and daily struggle for survival, they tend to look the other way or gloss over the sobering meaning and impact of this kind of criminal conduct for the entire country. Put differently, they become wimpy milquetoasts good at disregarding or suppressing their entrenched and deepening rage concerning their collective wretched condition, almost to the maddening cusp of masochist recklessness and unfathomable calm. By doing that, they pretty much indulge in a communal taciturn that imperils the future of their children in a nation dangerously on the throes of volcanic collapse. At the very least, that mind-numbingly silent posture conveys a passive acceptance of the status quo in the face of a debilitating crisis of political and economic failure by these dysfunctional and do-nothing Nigerian leaders guilty of chronic perfidy. They run these governments as their personal fiefdoms where the delivery of services by governments is often viewed as favor
and largesse for the wretched hoipolloi. Such vapid and defeatist response by Nigerians is both depressing and unbecoming. By now, you would think they would be going bloody-bunkers about effete leadership and rampant corruption ravaging their country, rather than viewing these corrupt politicians as displaying gales of thoughtfulness and compassion each time they receive much needed health care center. Don’t thank them for providing health care center. They are supposed to do that, and it’s your money. And nowhere should the people’s rage be more visible and furious than Ibori’s parasitic heist, where this monstrous and hard-hearted bastard practically and single-handedly wiped out his state’s coffer amidst the searing and blaring despair mercilessly pummeling his people, crumbling infrastructure all around him, bedraggled schools in cities and tanks town alike, and mind-boggling substandard hospitals immensely critical for saving lives. Deltans toiled in sweltering squalor, apocalyptic impoverishment and teeth gnashing morose while he feverishly scoured his state for treasure trove of lolly to be stashed in foreign banks for him and his pampered family. This should profoundly piss all Nigerians, from the North to the South, off.
Just consider this. It will cost only a tiny fraction of Ibori’s grand loot to repair all the schools in Delta State and stock the hospitals with lifesaving drugs – only a small fraction.
This is profoundly infuriating.
Now, a disgraced and impious Ibori is off the street, so to speak, and no longer a problem. He is now in more hot water than a Chinese tea bag. The problem, however, is that there is a determined phalanx of corrupt politicians of his ilk as we speak busy rabidly pillaging the treasury of governments in a hopelessly unpoliced three-tiered Nigerian political structure. After decades of independence from Britain, Nigerian leaders of both military and civilian regimes have done nothing, and I mean nothing to advance the country to a status of a modern nation. It is very, very, very shameful, to say the very least.
How much more can Nigerians stomach before their simmering tinderbox of misery and apoplectic rage boil over into a full blown uprising?
In closing, I strongly advise they read about Turkey’s Mustapha Ataturk.
