By Busuyi Mekusi
Talents
and natural gifts, both human and material, are meant to enhance human worth
and existence. Humanity, nonetheless, get entangled in very many atrocious
webs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has posited that even though “man is born free but
everywhere is in chains”. This is more so as Georg Hegel has volunteered that
“the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from
history”. It is for the foregoing postulations that this piece would
interrogate what it conceptualises as the ‘Escobarisation’ of Nigeria talents.
Talents predispose the necessity
for profitability. This informed the biblical allusion of Jesus Parable of the
Talents in Matthew 25:14-30, which typifies two profitable servants who
positively appropriated the allocations made to them by their master, and the
third one who represents wasted investment through his act of hiding his one
talent in the ground. It is important to note that the rich master returned to
reward the two faithful servants and heavily sanctioned the wasteful servant.
While one gets burdensomely worried about the wastefulness of Nigerians nay
humanity, the servant who buried his allocation is representative of Nigerians
attitudes and behaviours of selfishly appropriating commonwealth and burying
them away while the legitimate owners wallow in abject poverty and lack of
access to very basic amenities.
This act of perishable
acquisition reminds one of the atrocious killer bile that wants the dog dead,
but is oblivious that the death of the dog means its own demise as well. Pablo
Escobar is a dangerous signification of so many Nigerians. He was the infamous
Colombia drug lord who traded heavily in the US coast in the 1980s. He was said
to be making a staggering of £45 million every day. After spending lavishly and
with more daily almost uncontrollable earnings, he opted to bury billions of
his incredible fortunes (made up of hard currencies and gold) across the
country before he was killed in a shoot out with soldiers in December 1993.
Before his death, and apart from the money he was said to have in his Swiss
accounts, which were not known to anyone just like the buried fortunes across
Colombia, Escobar was estimated to have buried gold and wads of cash from $50
billion drug fortune in secret locations. Swiss accounts are like the holes
used by squirrels to keep their stolen palm nuts. Yet, whiteness would define
corruption as pigmented with blackness! Escobar’s treachery was so unique that,
like a systematic evil person he was, he killed the men he used to dig the undergrounds
used to stash his valuables, in order to prevent any leak. A Nigeria ‘evil
genius’ was also rumoured to have applied the same model in the process of
building his palatial hilly mansion. News of missing Nigerians is rife still,
due largely to ritual killings, abductions, and so on.
Escobar was similarly reputed to be a ‘poisonous philanthropist’ who built a
new neighbourhood, Barrio Escobar, from scratch in the city of Medellin, with
1,000 houses for families who had lived in a slum called The Garbage Dump. This
is unlike Nigeria where local/swamp/slum dwellers are evicted from their
ancestral lands and displaced to the fringes of new cities built from the
relics of the past. Escobar’s Greek Gifts to the inhabitants of his contrived
city nonetheless turned them to his willing supporters and vanguards, who were
poised to protect him from arrest and cover up his criminal activities, at all
costs.
Escobar turned the entire neighbourhood of his newly-built city to havens for
drugs and illegal arms. Just like Escobar, so many Nigerians lay claim to
philanthropic posturing whereas their gratuitous dispositions are a product of
the advantages they denied Nigerians, but with which they corruptly enrich
themselves. Of very worrisome noting are politicians who claim to give
dividends of democracy to the electorates when they should have simply purged
themselves of their excess remuneration, to ensure social amenities are
provided for the people. Political baiting is a standard practice in this clime!
The Nigeria economy is informally queer, and would not respond to so many known
economic models and theories. The recent spates of arrests of drug peddlers,
increased payments of ransoms to kidnappers and bandits, etc., are suggestive
of the various sources of huge internal and external flows that are not
countenanced in the economic indices and parameters used to calibrate Nigeria
economy. Just as if learning from children stories and the metaphor of burying
valuables in the desert is a Nigeria trademark, there have been different
stories of how proceeds of corruption and illicit businesses get hid in
outlandish places, as they cannot be taken to formalised environments like
banks and stock industries. Illustrative of the fate that befell most of
Escobar’s buried fortunes, decayed foreign currencies were allegedly unearthed
in the house of a dead custom officer’s house during renovation work in Kano
recently. The recovered wastes were foreign currencies including U.S. dollars,
British pounds sterling, among others, wrapped in polythene bags. Apparently,
lack of information about the buried treasure, outside the perpetrator, made
the recovery of the fortunes impossible, before they receded to mere wastes,
which were induced by the angry ‘mother earth’ and her other constituents.
With Nigeria weak naira, most
privileged Nigerians have joined in the dollarisation of the economy, thereby
making the recovery of the economy difficult. The shrinking of the avenues for
foreign exchange earnings has been negatively complemented by the informal
hoarding of hard currencies that should have helped strengthen the struggling
economy and the weak naira. This is more so as the wealth of Nigeria, in
foreign currencies, stolen by some are either stashed in secret accounts
overseas or buried in graves on the soil of the country, etc. The unending
repatriations of the ‘Abacha Loots’ and the ‘goldmines’ of the former Minister
of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, are clear examples of how
Nigeria talents get buried the Escobar way. While the petro-dollar is not very
forthcoming as a result of unhealthy global oil trade, worsened by the COVID-19
lockdowns, ravenous mining of Nigeria natural resources is ongoing in Zamfara,
Osun and other states. Increasingly, Nigerian youths and their talents remain
untapped for national socio-economic and political rebirth. These talents, used
in other unexpected areas, and to better other climes, are needed for economic
engineering that would reverse the present precariousness in the nations’ socio-economic
and political life. Nigerian youths in school are distracted by Escobar’s
fortunes – illicit wealth from drug peddling, internet frauds, ritual killings,
new-found trade of kidnapping, corruption, etc. Stolen monies are kept in
secret ‘tombs’ instead of it being invested in the economy. No doubt, the grave
is always a holder of great talents and potentials, with many sent there
prematurely in Nigeria by reason of avoidable deaths on bad roads, through poor
health facilities, by reason of quackery, sheer impunity by security agents,
and mindlessness of leaders who eat fat and allow their followers to starve.
Workers are dying in installments due to amputated salary payment! Unlike
Escobar, Nigeria looters build expensive uninhabited estates, but continue with
the enslavement of the lowly, just like him.
With Nigerian Escobars
unflinching resolve to continue to tarnish the image of Nigeria globally, the
general attitude of well-meaning Nigerians, both at home and the diaspora,
should be that all Nigerian Escobars must ‘die’ now. These include the Escobars
plaguing youths for political capital; the Escobars keeping children and youths
for ransom; the Escobars killing citizens crudely in the name of invasion for
arrest while leaving bandits and ‘Ambassador’ Gumi to have a field day; the
Escobars that lampooned elected governors who rose to the defense of their
people for ganging up against PMB, etc. As our dear country continues to
throttle in the journey to decency and development, Nigeria talents need to be
recovered, very fast, from the sepulchers of wicked Escobars!
Busuyi Mekusi is a Professor of English Literature at Adekunle Ajasin
University, Akungba Akoko, Ondo State
Source: The Hope Newspaper
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