IMAGINE this! You are an indigent student. Most students  are usually not buoyant, but there are some whose cases are different. They are indigent enough that everyone knows their case, no matter how courageously they manage it.

Let us suppose your bank account has only N3,000. On a weekend, you walk up to an Automated Teller Machine, ATM, to cash N2,000, knowing the balance would be N1,000. You are wrong! The ATM informs you that the balance in your account is N9.3 billion!  Yes, N9.3 billion.

Confused, you rub your eyes and take another look at the printout. It is still N9.3 billion. To be sure it was not a glitch, you insert your card again, this time to withdraw N20, 000. The money rolls out. And your bank balance confirms that you are still a billionaire! What would you do?

A popular Lagos-based radio station posed this question to its listeners. Out of about 20 respondents, who were mainly young students and applicants, only three said they would alert the bank about the anomaly. The rest said they would take the money and run.

Some of them said, only “a fool” would get such a “divine windfall” and pass it up. Others said the money might even have been stolen by the person who put it in the wrong account in a moment of confusion.

At least, the respondents were frank, but their answers reflected a society whose future leaders had already been overcome by corruption, a deadly bug. The get-rich-by-any-means syndrome  is afflicting most Nigerians.

However, for Citizen Durojaiye Adeyemi Job, a Higher National Diploma Civil Engineering student of The Polytechnic, Ibadan, it was not a hypothetical case of what he would do. He found N9.3 billion in his bank account. The bank branch  is located in his school.

According to media reports, he brought the matter before members of his family, a true Christian family, who not only advised him to return the N20,000 but also insisted that he should report the error to the bank’s management.

The following Monday, the first working day, he complied. What an exemplary Nigerian! What a rare family populated by people of integrity even in its indigence? Who says then that Nigerians are waiting to get rich by any means? Members of the Job family are Nigerians.

Durojaiye had strong convictions about how to act. He also had the firm backing of his family. If the circumstances were different, he would have been tempted to take the money. If some crooked bank officials had known about it, they would have immediately, for a fee, offered him “technical advice” on how he could transfer the money, while he could go into hiding with his loot in some criminal haven.

Only a few who are tempted ever get the opportunity to think thoroughly about decisions of this manner.

Since Durojaiye returned the money, his life has never been the same. He has been reaping the benefits of his honesty, and from the way things are going, the rewards will continue.

For instance, The Polytechnic has offered him a scholarship and automatic employment on completion of his studies. The Oyo State Government has given him the Exemplary Leadership Behaviour 2010 Award. With honesty and integrity, the sky is the limit for this young man, for Nigeria needs people like him in its march to a future of greatness.

If the Bank had lost this amount of money, which was obviously wrongly paid into Durojaiye’s account, it would have caused a major crisis for the bank.

Vanguard salutes the courage and uprightness exhibited by Durojaiye and his family and commends their great example to the generality of Nigerians. Durojaiye has done more to re-brand Nigeria than the Federal Ministry of Information and Communications in three years of noisy campaigns.

People like Citizen Durojaiye and his family members deserve our national awards, not some serving and former public office holders whose wealth comes from looting the public treasury.

Nigeria should be proud of acts of honesty like this  and let the world know about it.  There are still honest and God-fearing people who would rather die in penury than soil their family names. As Citizen Durojaiye will discover, integrity is a convertible currency.

He can look forward to a future of happiness derived from the joys of his honesty and the clear conscience that he did not cheat the bank, though his indigence would have been a good reason to do so.

As we celebrate Citizen Durojaiye, governments, institutions and organisations should make a point of rewarding honesty, as a way of motivating Nigerians  to imitate their honest compatriots and correct the too many images of honest Nigerians who died in poverty.