What devil has possessed the soul of this nation? What exactly is wrong with this otherwise great country that it continues to slide into the abyss?
Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Governor of Central Bank, is a first class brain.
He is intelligent, highly cerebral and hugely eloquent. But the affairs of the apex bank of a country should not be left to the whims and caprices of a Robin Crusoe.!?
Only God can tell what exactly went into the riotous and roaring mind of Mallam Sanusi forcing him to conjure a crazy idea of imposing a 5000 Naira note on Nigerians while his masters in Britain still hang on to their 50 Pound note as their highest denomination and Canada and the US would never foolishly go beyond their 100 Dollar highest denomination!
What is the compelling reason to make currency change in whatever form a priority now that our economy is crumbling in the face of the existing choking devaluation and resultant inflation?
How does Sanusi want to combine and confuse Cashless policy with printing huge cash?
Why does anybody want to kill this country?
Last Thursday, I looked at the bust of fiery Murtala Muhammed sitting majestically on the 20 naira note dedicated to his memory and I had to fight back tears. I recollect that in 1981 at the formal dedication of my country home in Ago-Iwoye not a single guest pasted 20 Naira bill on my forehead. The highest denomination of Naira the wealthy in the gathering could part with was 5 Naira note. Recollect also that at that time a crate of 24 bottles of Coca-Cola was only 2 Naira.
Just thirty years ago a Peugeot 504, one of the leading vehicles in the market at that time cost about 5 thousand Naira. And today you need about triple that amount to buy just one tyre for the same 504! The same goes for the escalation in the price of Coke.
You will need ten times the amount you paid for 24 bottles in 1981 to buy just one bottle of the same Coke now! Whereas the difference in the price I paid for a bottle of Coke in England in 1977 and now are perhaps a few pence more.
What went wrong?
How come our currency, the symbol of any nation’s sovereignty got so devalued almost to a point of extreme worthlessness? How come that one kobo, twenty kobo, fifty kobo, and one naira had all disappeared from our currency usage while Britain still proudly parades her pence and America her cents?
A Nigerian Professor teaching the same course to Nigerian students here on the Nigerian soil will be paid almost a tenth of what he will be paid in the US for the same course and to the same number of students. This is a clear case of devaluation of one’s service; one’s labour, one’s worth on one’s soil.
Searching through all possible reasons for the degradation of our individual and collective worth as a people and as a nation, the only answer I found was the unpardonable devaluation of our currency by successive regimes, most especially by the Military and latterly by the civilian governments.
Lack of commensurate productivity had always been cited as the major culprit of our woes, but the real reason of course is the lack of political will and the greater lack of the understanding of the dynamics of international politics and the dynamics of power and the pride of sovereignty. And this is the crux of my treatise today.
Nigeria for most part had been administered by nincompoops masquerading as national leaders. Buffoons who knew next to nothing about any subject under the sun but who unfortunately [for all of us] got catapulted to the undeserved position of power through either the barrels of the gun or the ‘do-or-die’ political abracadabra had been calling the shots.
And once they got into power, even a tout-turned Governor or Senator or even Local Government Chairman would start pontificating on every issue as if becoming a Council chairman automatically opens up a person’s skull and puts an encyclopaedia there.
And as I ruminate over this sad situation I cast my mind back on the good old days. Nigeria had not always been like this. We used to have leaders that anybody would be proud to call leaders. The great Obafemi Awolowo was acknowledged by a one time British Prime Minister as a genius capable of administering Britain and the United States put together. He was a Nigerian.
The great Nnamdi Azikiwe made his inimitable mark both in the US and Ghana before coming to mesmerise his peers here in Nigeria.
The great Ahmadu Bello opened the giant North to modernisation. And to cap it all he understood the dynamics of power and the prime place of the military in power equation.
In that era, our enlightened leaders did not consider themselves inferior to any pink skinned individual from any part of the globe.
They did not behave like the latter day morons who believed that a ‘Whiteman’ was an equivalent of God. We had bright, brilliant, bold and confident men and women steering the ship of our state.
Tragedy struck when morons descended on the land and like locusts, ravaged our soil.
They brought the country down to their own hardly recognisable levels. They understood neither politics nor economics. And so it was difficult to decipher the sheer devilry of the Euro-American economic deception and they swallowed whatever the World Bank and International Monetary Fund vomited into their usually unclosed mouth.
Perhaps I should hasten to clear the air on a possible misconception: I am not saying there were no morons in the early sixties.
There were. There were people who scored E E at the Advanced Level General Education Examinations, but there was no ‘do-or-die’ political machinery to force them on the people as ‘leaders’. And even these days that most of our university graduates are poor copies, there are still very few geniuses coming out of our universities. That Nigeria has well over 30 thousand leading doctors in the US alone speaks volumes for availability of leadership materials.
Now back to the morons that have high jacked power. A former Deputy President of Nigeria’s Senate once told me in a conversation that Kenya was the capital of Nairobi . And he was not joking. “Yes. I have visited Kenya several times. It is a nice city. It is the capital of Nairobi ” He insisted.
Another Senator gave me a letter with Nigerian stamp affixed to it, and asked me to drop it in post for him in London for onward journey to Oxford town address!
There had been Military leaders who were completely intellectually barren, and yet would want you and I believe that they were intellectuals.
You look at the quality of most members of the state Assemblies across the nation, the House of Representatives and the Senate, and you ask why God has been this unkind to Nigerians and Nigeria. How come this is the best crop that would dictate the direction for this country?
Even as poor as the quality of the membership of the state and national assemblies is, I am aware that there is still a good number amongst them who are both brilliant and vibrant and are incorruptible. It is these few men and women of honour and integrity who must call Mallam Sanusi, who is obviously an agent of some dark forces, to order. His Finance Minister, ‘Prime Minister’ Okonjo-Iweala should also be constantly checked and her World Bank sponsored motives and designs thoroughly examined.
We do not need a 5000 Naira bill. The money earmarked for this drunken misadventure must be utilized to create industries and enterprises that would employ our millions of unemployed graduates.
Our national currency should not be further devalued and defaced. We have enough factories manufacturing toilet papers, Central Bank should not compete with them!
We have been devalued enough as human beings, whatever remains of our individual and collective human worth as Nigerians should not be thrown to the dogs.
In the present circumstance who would summon courage and political will to fix our national currency and stop this choking devaluation of our sovereignty? Who will reverse this money guzzling presidential system of [mis-] government and restore Nigeria to the less costly parliamentary system and return Nigeria to the path of sanity? Who will give us true federalism and national fiscal responsibility?
Who will give us a country led by informed and knowledgeable men and women and not nonentities slammed on our throats by international conspiracies and local collaborators??
The National Assembly, the state governors and the entire membership of the National.
Economic council must rise up to stop this unmitigated madness. Nigerians must in unison stop these foreign conspiracies that are hell bent on destroying our economy, our lives and our humanity.
What Mallam Sanusi should actually be considering is how to re-decimalise our currency and re-denominate the valueless 1000 Naira to 100 Naira so that 100 Naira shall be our highest denomination, and we come back to a Naira to a Dollar. He should go to Ghana and see what patriotic Ghanaians have done with their Cedi re-decimalisation and redenomination.