Yes, only a handful of aristocrats and wealthy men perhaps have a heart of gold. The majority are slaves to riches. Like the proverbial Midas, all that they touch, turn dead and cold.
Forget the glitter of their wealth, several billionaires are stingy to the bones. Stinginess is a crude survival trait among their ilk. And no paint or dye could diminish the screeching shades of their niggardliness.
Whether an oil magnate, dandy bank chief or merchant, the average rich patrician is mean to the bones.
The disposition of the few with money is that of the proverbial scrooge who covets riches at the expense of everything that should make him human; he forgets that a selfish life is as empty as a candle sitting astride of a grave that is doomed to blow out with the next puff of the dry wind.
No paint or dye can reveal so garish a tint as the darkness in a miser’s heart.
The depth of his darkness is greatly enhanced by his lack of soul. Consider, for instance, the sad case of a billionaire magnate who fired six of his employees immediately after he discovered that they were building their houses.
Then there is the sad case of a butler, who joyously ran to inform his billionaire boss that his son had secured an MSc scholarship abroad but he lacked the means to support him financially.
Hence he requested that his employer, a popular clothes merchant, give him an advance of his salary so that he could spare his son some travel money; to his chagrin, his employer scoffed at him and wondered aloud how any university worth its salt would grant a postgraduate scholarship to the son of a nobody.
“Who would take over from you when you grow too old to continue as my butler?” he queried the dumbstruck butler.
“I have no money to spare you as advance. I will pay you at the end of the month,” he said.
The butler was devastated. The truth dawned on him like a shackle of eternal damnation: “My employer does not wish me well. He had never wished me well. He wants my son whom, I laboured to educate, to take over from me, as his butler or driver,” he lamented.
The butler was eventually sacked, 10 days after the incident, for failing to place a tumbler properly in the tray, while serving his billionaire boss his daily dose of white wine.
In another incident, a Corporate Affairs Manager (CAM) with a Nigerian bank almost lost his job immediately after his boss, a popular billionaire philanthropist, discovered that he had built a duplex somewhere in Alimoso local government of Ogun State.
Even though he scoffed at his choice of location for the house, the billionaire bank chief stopped, indefinitely, the quarterly allocation he gives to the image maker to grease the media and quash news reports perceived to be uncomplimentary to his bank.
He accused the CAM of diverting the funds to his account. “If not for the money you are stealing from me, where would you get the money to build a duplex? Imagine the insult, I live in a duplex and you had the effrontery to build a duplex too,” said the irate bank chief.
The CAM has been in the doghouse since his billionaire boss discovered that he did a good thing by building himself a house, after 18 years of service or thereabouts.
With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in their capacity to parade their wealth, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.
In their eyes, the merit of an object which is in any degree either useful or beautiful is greatly enhanced by its scarcity, or by the great labour it requires to collect any considerable quantity of it, labour which nobody can afford to pay but themselves.
Not a few people, of Yoruba descent, revealed to The Capital that they had always found it easier to reap benefits from their relationships with their compatriots from northern Nigeria; whether Hausa, Fulani or Kanuri to mention a few, the northerners have always turned out to be more benevolent and supportive of them.
Also listed as beneficent souls are the billionaire magnates of the south-south; the latter, like the northern billionaires, have always gone out of their way to assist every acquaintance irrespective of ethnic, religious and political differences.
But “the Yoruba billionaires are devious to the bones. They only find amusement in showing off their ill-gotten wealth. They do not help anybody. Not even their blood relatives.
That is why you would often see a Yoruba billionaire magnate spend a fortune to court and sleep with a professional escort, commercial sex worker, and even another man’s wife, while their siblings, childhood friends and trusted employees roast in poverty,” said a Lagos-based entrepreneur, whose billionaire sibling “had never helped.”
Another Lagos-based mogul revealed that he wouldn’t have made it in life but for the amazing friendship of an elderly Ijaw acquaintance, an older friend who spared no effort to support his business at its teething stage.
“He supported me with money and priceless wisdom of the ancients when my own Yoruba kin scoffed at me,” he said.
They argued that The Yoruba billionaires are always more comfortable seeing people around them grovel at their feet. Unlike President Tinubu, who had solely groomed and empowered a league of Nigerian billionaires across religious and political platforms.
Some of his proteges include the former Vice President of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, former Minister of Power and two-time Governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola, former Lagos governor, Akinwunmi Ambode.
Others include former Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, and former Lagos commissioners, Muiz Banire, and Abdullateef Abdulhakeem.
Lest we forget the incumbent Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake, the Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Yemi Cardoso, among others.
The jury is out on the capacity of Tinubu’s beneficiaries to pass on the privilege of support to promising but less privileged individuals within their immediate and remote social and political circuits.
