By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo

When late Houphet Boigny made the state treasury his own , his madness allowed him transform his village of Yamoussoukro into a tourist attraction. He saw St Peters Basillica in Rome and greed couldn’t stand in his way as ego propelled him to replicate it in his home town in Cote d’ivoire. That project may be dumb but our politicians make Boigny a visionary.

Those whose unrestrained access to the Nigeria’s central bank’s vaults left them with more cash than the entire nation had for capital projects left the wretchedness of their villages intact. What about a seven star military hospital ‘for the war against boko haram’? No, they wont see that. Their madness is the sort that leads to compulsive gathering of empty cans , bottles and rags in cars and houses and foreign banks accounts.

But you would think that the rich whom greed has made destitute of morality would act out of prudence. Wouldn’t even selfishness dictate that stashing billions abroad and living in Nigeria where there are no good hospitals is sheer madness? The dependence on air ambulance and foreign hospitals is too much of a gamble because a mere slip on a staircase could make the one who owns half the world die like a rat in a decrepit local hospital , unable to board his air ambulance.

When you steal communal wealth then you must make living and living long a priority. Why then wouldn’t they know that defibrillators should be at malls and airports and public places with trained hands? Everybody now knows what ONSA means – Office of the National Security Adviser.

The office where all things were possible and financial abracadabra once lived. It would appear that the postponement of the election that office conjured was by its real standards a mundane stuff. If the allegations against that office are well founded then that office could have sedated whole institutions like INEC with cash and twisted the elections.

We were perhaps fortunate. But , seriously, the best hospital in Africa could have effortlessly been planted in Otuoke or Sokoto to take care of health emergencies money cannot prevent. Just a piece of paper from the NSA to the CBN governor and some suitcases filled with dollars would walk to some Chinese contractors and a replica of St Mary’s Hospital in London will stand in Orodo or Suleija .

Former national security adviser of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, Sambo Dasuki  

And that wouldn’t mean that a few suitcases wouldn’t be allowed to wander and get lost. So everyone will be happy. And perhaps Dele Momodu wouldn’t have to go so far to get his interviews and photographs. Billions have been looted and re looted. And suspected looters are all falling sick in epidemic proportions. In the military school, malingering was cowardice, a sin.

Today, once a man is invited by the EFCC or the senate for that matter, an illness either locates him or he locates one. There are persons being dragged around by the EFCC and CCT but who are still well because they can’t afford to lose their positions. Had they been out of office, they would have been asking the court for leave to travel abroad for treatment too.

We have seen pictures of Diezani. Soon we may be confronted with pictures of Dasuki recuperating in Europe. Dokpesi has told the judge of his illness. Dudafa, Jonathan’s domestic assistant, who was positioned to be a governor, is at large. Kuku is sick and no one knows where he is. The pharaoh that was at the Customs resigned and fled. We must expect more pictures. Pictures that will tell tales of persecution, innocence and ill health.

A few months ago the pictures they made us see told a different story. Then, as cheerleaders of president Jonathan who was flaunting youthfulness , senior officials jumped and kicked with enthusiasm . Theirs was the party of the healthy. Or so the pictures said. Their spited opponent was supposed to fret at their vigour. The electorate was supposed to buy the impression that they were brimming with the health and vitality needed to govern.

That was long ago. Those who mocked the perceived frailty of others now disclaim all associations with well-being. These politicians, who can understand them? Poor, irredeemably naïve, Nigerians , always at the receiving end, will succumb to one mawkish sentiment or the other and believe that the looting of the public treasury, the carting away of dollars from the vaults of the central bank, is less an offence than the robbery of a bank by an armed gang in Festac, Lagos.

Perhaps if the Festac robbers were ‘respected big men’ , belonged to one of the major parties with cyber mercenaries in trenches, claimed persecution based on their championship of one ethnic or religious group , and had the effrontery big men have by nature and told a judge they would want to be treated abroad, then they would get public sympathy.

That the lynch mob in Ajangbadi never bothers about ethnicity, party , religion or physical health which the lynch mobs of cyber space are preoccupied with tells a story of servitude. The poor find excuses , justifications and sympathy for political robbers but wont spare poor robbers

Politicians are wily. They make ethnic and religious differences seem important and the acrimony they stoke will turn in a harvest of ‘blind , deaf and dumb’ support . Pickpockets, whether in politics or at Oshodi bus stop, know that so much depends on a good distraction .

When monies leave the central bank vaults to private homes in suit cases on the authority of flimsy papers which make appropriation bills seem outdated, the nimble fingers that do the giving and taking have no use for the differences they have sold to us, that exist between the Cross and the Crescent. The diversity of partakers in the evil communion held at the expense of our foreign reserves suggests that the rich are a shrewd tribe.

They remember and care for themselves, ordinary Nigerians should glimpse and learn oneness and unity of purpose wherever they can find them. Retired politicians of all hues, from far and near, were dusted up and given consultation fees the gods would envy. They left us quibbling. While they shared our patrimony we were sucked into artificial , superficial, controversies. “There is God!”

With materialism on the throne , ordinary citizens will remain eternal serfs. The worship of money is the transformation of the rich into gods. In an environment where even the money is to a large extent obtained by stealing, cheating and lying then the worshipper is in a particularly pitiable existence. For the gods he has accepted to serve lack even the benevolence gods should normally have for committed subjects.

These gods wouldn’t even spare him human dignity because in the kingdom of such materialism subjects are objects. Things are used, dumped, discarded. With an electoral system that makes no pretenses about its ties to money and violence , ordinary “godfatherless” Nigerians are largely precluded from elective positions. But more godlessly, the poor majority are also made redundant , powerless , sidelined by rigging and buying of votes.

The supposed electorate are in effect voiceless spectators in a contest that they should be ultimate umpires. Bayelsa has a registered voter population of about 500,000. It is true that state is not conversant with contested elections but how couldn’t we force a free and fair election there? The poor are used as thugs to service the rich and less than 250,000 people that turned out couldn’t vote freely even with the entirety of the nation supervising.

Lamentations won’t be enough. But before I stop , why aren’t the poor majority given to real anger. And I mean anger not whining, the sort of anger that turns whining and moaning to some effective resistance. Nigeria lacks health care for the poor. The budgets regularly reflect only the wishes of politicians and contractors .

Aso Rock kitchen would receive regular Buckingham palace treatment while LUTH is left in shambles. When they steal , they stash away, and keep with Europeans who would use and develop themselves. Since the rich wont be treated in Nigeria; since only the rich will win elections and become even richer; since those who win elections wont allow funds to go to the building of a good health care system;

since even the national and teaching hospitals are of standards below that required to attend to infirmity of the rich; since the rich whom we have managed to ask to account for their stewardship fall ill with reckless ease; and since they wont let their cases in court run smoothly without the interludes of hospital trips abroad; since the poor aren’t as foolish as they think: let us propose that this animal farm be sanitized.

Since people claim possession of the right to seek medical care wherever they may find it; but since the assumption of a senior government position is not a right free of conditions; since our leaders cannot empathize with the poor and have left them without good health facilities; and since the leaders cannot live in a bubble and will fare better if they shared the same reality with ordinary folks , because experience teaches better than tales, lets us therefore propose a real change.

Let any desirous of occupying a high government position of level 16 and above and political equivalents be made to meet a new condition. That such persons while in office cannot receive medical treatment outside the shores of the country except if the illness is an emergency that occurred while outside the country.

And that even in such a circumstance the sick official must notify the public of the nature and severity of his affliction and must return to Nigeria within a week to continue further treatment except if medically unfit to fly. Let us propose that any official who insists on seeking medical care abroad relinquishes his position and that he automatically looses such a position once he receives elective medical treatment abroad .

Lets us therefore propose that an acceptance to serve at any such high positions will be a forfeiture of the right to travel abroad for treatment when being investigated or prosecuted for offences that border on embezzlement of public funds even after leaving office. These people and their sicknesses sicken me.