I knew I couldn’t trust Bill Gates to stay beyond the tenure of his good friend, the incorruptible Muhammadu Buhari. Not especially when Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government is witch-hunting Buhari’s most trusted incorruptible cabinet members and their families. It wasn’t long that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) declared Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, the best performing governor of the Buhari era and a close ally of the Buhari family, wanted. They’ve only come short of putting a ransom on Bello’s head. He looks like the kind of person that American bounty hunters would be interested in hunting down if the price is right.
Then, last week, Mr Tinubu’s anti-corruption officers picked up Buhari’s second most prominent minister, Hadi Sirika, and his daughter. Sirika smashed records when he established an e-airline for Nigeria, went to Ethiopia and borrowed proper airplanes just to demonstrate to Nigerians what a real aircraft looked like. He was kind enough to print Air Nigeria stickers on the planes and to make sure they actually flew and touched down in Abuja. Now the EFCC has arraigned him, his lovely daughter and the husband for so-called corruption. As they say in Nigeria – who does that?
Worried about the optics of these all, Mr Gates asked his company, Microsoft, to close its operations across Nigeria. To really spite our beloved president, Mr Gates did this at a time when Mr Tinubu was at the holy gates of Jannah asking Allah to make his one-year tenure in Aso Rock truly memorable.
Not that there are no memories of the Tinubu presidency. Ask even the Iyalojas around Tinubu Square in Lagos and they would tell you that their beloved son, former governor and godfather of Lagos politics, hit the ground running. While campaigning under the banner of emi lo kan (it is my turn), Tinubu did not lie to voters. He told them pomp and plain that he would remove the subsidy on petroleum products even if they had the address of Angel NNPC who is in charge of petrol and its derivatives. He did not disappoint on that score.
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Just as the prices of commodities hit the roof and the labour unions were threatening fire and brimstone, Mr Tinubu courageously endorsed the increment in tariffs for electricity. That targeted those that reportedly enjoy the essential commodity for 20 hours a day, which if you were to conduct a census would not amount to much. Of course, Mr Tinubu must have heard the tale of the wickedness of the house rat. In Yagba folklore, it is believed that the rat never bites its victims without fanning the wound. Our dear president later increased the salary of public servants, giving the redundant National Assembly leeway to increase its own jumbo allowances for minimum work done.
The litany of achievements did not end there. Mr President tested the ground with revenue generation when he initially allowed his beloved son, Yemi Cardoso, of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to announce overnight a so-called cybersecurity levy on all withdrawals within the banking sector. That was when the opposition rallied and roundly threatened to make Nigeria ungovernable for President Rehoboam. Even for his celebrated courage, our people-loving president has been forced to ask his guy to stay action on those levies.
With all these goodies coming from our brand new old president, where else should a serious company like Microsoft be hoping to do business except Nigeria? It is very sad that Mr Gates could not break into the business potential of Nigeria beyond the tenure of his good friend, Buhari. Instead of taking advice from Tinubu’s friends, he appeared to have pitched tents with Nigeria’s enemies including Procter & Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Nigeria Plc, Sanofi and Bolt Food. One message for all these quitters – they should remember the saying that quitters never win. Our prayer is that they survive long enough with their divestment from Nigeria to see what our great nation would become under Tinubu.
Readers may be tempted to ask what our National Assembly was doing while all these things were going on? Fact is that those guys were very busy at work dealing with the issues that affect Nigeria and Nigerians.
Last week, they exhumed Decree 20 from Buhari’s delete folder and returned to prescribing the death penalty for drug trafficking. These overpaid and underperforming drones discovered that if they killed people for drugs, Mr Gates and his cohorts might return to do business in Nigeria.
Who does not know that addiction kills the hope that Tinubu promised to renew? Only those who live outside Nigeria. Nigerians hate debauchery, and drug is soiling the nation’s garment of spirituality. If there are factories left by the fleeing companies, we all know they’d be taken over by spiritual houses. Go to Canada where the sinful Trudeau government made $5.07bn in cannabis sales last year and you will see the full picture of people roasting in hell on earth. America, the global democracy police, scooped $37bn in similar income in just five or so states where the sale of the devil’s food is legal.
Check every vice you see in Nigeria today and you find drugs behind it. All those accused of corruption are drug addicts. Ask Buba Marwa, the NDLEA chief, or Pastor Olanipekun Olukoyede of EFCC and they will corroborate this fallacy. Why do you think Mr Kayode Egbetokun is opposed to state police but keeps mum about the establishment of religious police? Drugs, guys, drugs like the sweet codeine.
Our eyes are too dainty to behold the sales of codeine for fear of addiction. Our hisbah, the religious police, constantly carries out raids on federal highways to confiscate transported alcohol that may tinker with the reasoning faculty of our precious youths that enjoy generous allowances from the government to prevent them from missing heaven.
From time to time, hisbah publicly destroys litres of seized alcohol to preserve the sanity of our jobless youths. Nigerian converts to foreign religion are so pious that they now set the standards of worship for those whose grandparents converted them. They sometimes commit arson to protect the pristine sanctity of their religion. They constantly tell Egbetokun and any other pretender leading any federal security agency that divine law is over and above national law or interest. Nobody dares challenge them on that.
The only barrier against the global declaration of Nigeria as the holiest land is in the lack of a consensus on the status of federally shared revenue. The states of sin that generate from every form of haram usually dump them into the same treasury account. Every month end, saintly governors are forced to gather in Abuja, the headquarters of sleaze, to share this money. They return home with the polluted money and even use some of the proceeds to sponsor mass weddings and holy pilgrimages. This may be another reason why God is punishing us by driving employers of labour out of our shores.
Those in support should agree that the ayes have it.
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