Aperson is described as possessed when the person is completely controlled by an evil spirit. This tendency manifests when the person madly, crazily, urgently, and cmpulsively becomes desirous to do or have something. The manner Nigerians, particularly our leaders, crazily and compulsively desire wealth and power through illicit means simply summarise them as possessed. In this race for material acquisition by these leaders and politicians, truth continually takes the back seat. Cal Thomas succinctly puts it that “one of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely any politician’s favourite. Elections and power are”.
I travelled abroad recently. As I entered the flight of a foreign airline in Nigeria, it dawned on me that the only occupants I saw were 100% Nigerian. In the eighties, if you entered any international flight, you would see a rainbow of heads. Whites, browns, blacks, etc. This indicates that foreigners are now avoiding our country like a plague. Obviously they don’t want to be possessed as we are. The only Foreigners that are still trooping into our country and out are the ones that are as possessed with evil spirit as their indigenous counterparts. Recall the P& ID company where the owners of the foreign company colluded with some Nigerians to defraud Nigeria of billions of dollars through strange arbitral awards. You must have been aware of how our presidential jets were seized by a private Chinese company as a result of the purported default in business agreements which the Ogun State government is trying to debunk. Little need reminding you that most of our solid minerals are mined illegally by expatriates with the collusion of our country men.The flight was one of the smoothest I have ever embarked on throughout my journey on air. The seat belt light was not put on for once throughout the flight. It was storm or turbulence free. The taking off and landing were so smooth that the plane behaved more like a bird than a machine. It simply perched at Heathrow airport. I openly acknowledged the expertise of the pilot and requested the Air Hostess to extend my commendation to the pilot. She didn’t allow me to land before telling me that they are mindful of how they praise their pilots because of the danger of allowing it to get to their heads. The airline was a government owned airline, efficiently managed by the government of the country.
In the seventies, Nigeria boasted of a national airline carrier, Nigeria Airways, that plied round the country and to some African countries. That was inherited from the colonial masters. The airline had the best of pilots and air crew who were well mannered and well trained. The best in Africa and one of the best in the world. Apart from its superb services to the nation, it was making profit. From the eighties, when our leaders started getting possessed with the spirit of stealing and corruption, the airline continued to decline until it became bankrupt. During Buhari’s regime, the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, promised that Nigeria will build its first aeroplanes before the end of Buhari’s regime. At the terminal end of the regime, the same Minister gathered Ethiopian Planes in Nigeria, repainted them with Nigeria money, and passed them off as the Air Nigeria national carrier planes. He is now facing trials for multiple infractions on the laws of corruption. If this is not being possessed, I don’t know what it is.
Same goes for Nigeria Shipping line. Obasanjo left about 23 ship on the high sea providing income, employment and expertise to Nigerians. in the seventies. On coming back in the late nineties, he was told that Nigeria had only one ship left, and even that only one was seized in a foreign country because of accumulated debts. Obasanjo graciously dashed them the remaining ship as the cost of maintaining it will be higher than retaining it. Are we not possessed?
The issue of the oil industry is even more pathetic. Nigeria is a major oil producing country in the world. Desert and arid countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate (UAE) used the proceeds of the sale of their oil to transform their countries from third to first worlds. They turned their desert soils to arable lands. Nigeria built four refineries to refine its crude oil and was a net exporter of premium motor spirit (pms) in the seventies. From the eighties, our leaders intentionally crippled our refineries in order to be importing refined pms so that they can steal our foreign exchange in dollars. For over thirty years they have been stealing our dollars without refilling it.
Can you imagine fetching crude oil in the Niger Delta with refineries standing about 10km away from the source of raw materials, which is piped to the refineries for refining, yet successive Nigeria leaders put the crude oil into a foreign shipping line and ship it abroad at a costly freight rate, probably to a refinery built abroad by themselves, and refine the crude abroad, which they would put again into a foreign shipping line and pay another costly freight rate to transport it back to Nigeria to sell to Nigerian people at an inflated price. With this conduct, Nigeria is outsourcing employment to other countries that are refining the crude oil, while our youths whose country owns the oil are parading the streets unemployed. The refineries till date are still not working despite billions of dollars pumped into them. The billions was stolen by the successive leaders in power. Today, pms price is about N1,200.00 per litre, yet it’s unavailable. “No be evil spirit be that?”
Most Nigerian Presidents are no longer masquerading the fact that they are corrupt. The only reason these possessed Presidents assume the leadership of the petroleum ministry as the Minister is to corner the illicit corrupt money to themselves. They sign off the oil wells to their cronies and corrupt party members who in turn sell them off to other more qualified entrepreneurs at exorbitant corrupt prices. They sign off the billions for turn around maintenance to fictitious contractors who embezzle the money without any punishment from the corrupt Presidents.
On the issue of rule of law, our leaders have not shown that they are free from the effect of these evil spirits. The law is that no leader can spend any money belonging to Nigeria without first getting the permission from the National Assembly. The Buhari regime spent about N22 trillion on ways and means, quite above the statutorily allowed limit and without the approval of the National Assembly, yet the Lawan-led National Assembly, on the eve of its departure from power, acknowledged the illegality of what Buhari did but rather than apportioning commensurate punishment for deterrence, lent its battered image to the illegality by unlawfully and retroactively approving such an illegality. The present President spends money anyhow in private jets and limousines while the people wallow in abject poverty only to seek and get approvals at will from a recluse National Assembly whose only duty is to rubber stamp the inordinate possessed profligacy of the Tinubu administration.
Journalists, protesters, trade union leaders are now illegally arrested and charged with treasonable felony for exercising their fundamental human rights of freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association and peaceful assembly. After the hunger and hardship protest by the #endbadgovernance and take back our country movement, this government has been busy chasing invisible enemies. The greatest enemy of this government is itself. Joe Ajaero was recently arrested at the airport and stopped from attending an international labour union conference for a yet to be known crime, while the politicians who steal money everyday are allowed to travel freely around the world to enjoy their illicit loot. At the international labour union conference which Joe Ajaero was disallowed to attend, Nigeria’s name featured prominently in the conference as a lawless country that arrests and dehumanises its citizens without due process of the law. Amnesty International has reached same conclusions on the poor human rights record of our possessed leaders.
The most important denominator in a democracy is free, fair, credible, and verifiable elections. The Nigeria electoral system has become bastardised with manipulation and intimidation. Our security agencies, who were very active in threatening to arrest children carrying Russian flags during a peaceful protest, must come out now to pledge their loyalty to the Constitution by defending the sanctity of our elections. Being committed to democracy does not mean defending an illegitimate government, it means defending democratic norms. Merrick Garland, the Attorney General of the United States of America said that the Department of Justice will not allow his nation to be a nation where the law enforcement will be treated as an apparatus of politics. This is why they are the most powerful nation on earth. Nigeria security agencies must not allow themselves to be used as an apparatus of politics by the ruling party.
Edo gubernatorial off-cycle election will soon hold on the 21st of September, 2024. The prognosis of what may happen in the election doesn’t look good. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Edo State refused to sign the peace accord because of an alleged partisanship of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This portends danger to our democracy and shows without doubt how our leaders have demonstrated being possessed by evil spirit, because INEC did same thing in the 2023 presidential election. The will of the people must be respected at all times to avoid the people using their might to remove an illegitimate government through revolution. Nobody is above the law, even if the person is a security agent. Nigeria citizens must find a legitimate way to enforce the law on the law enforcement agencies themselves and resist any attempt by any possessed law enforcement agent or INEC officials to rig our elections, because sovereignty belongs to the people not the possessed leaders.
