It’s all about debt-repayment and the imprisonment of progress. If the Iborinic conundrum scares you, think about the phenomenon of trash senators and persons in higher places, who would ordinarily are not fit to lead motorpark associations, but are now warming seats in political powerhouses, with no input to nation-building in any sense possible.
Talking of society and debts, no doubt, the learned mind reflects first and foremost on state lending, interest rates, lending institutions and the generational transfer of repayment burden. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the much acclaimed system of third world impoverishment will not escape imaginations. In the Iborinic conundrum, however, there will be more facets to the notion of society and debt. But we will come to that later.
In the lending system of third world impoverishment, the rules are simple. A state ascertains its needs for a crucial project to better the lot of its citizenry. It needs, perhaps, to build railway lines to ease the conveyance of goods from the urban conurbation to the needy folks of the hinterland and boost economic activities across the countryside. It approaches the lending institution to strike a deal. The institution ascertains the feasibility of the project and is satisfied. It fixes an interest rate for the principal debt and creates a timetable for cash disbursement. It also works out a repayment schedule. In the end, the money arrives the third world country. The railway is not constructed but a few big men get richer and repayment begins the next year. A part of the interest is paid and rescheduling is requested. For short, the country is in trouble.
The same trouble accompanies the country, when we talk of moral debt on top of physical debt in cash and kind, in the pockets of Dicks and Harries of the highest echelon. It is a double jeopardy. But wait a minute. Remember the days? The days when the economy in Africa was cashless? The days when trade was done by barter? Corruption was not in our vocabulary. There were no lending institutions. There was no concept of stealing public property. The superiority of the ruling class was defined by divinity and metaphysical perceptions. Those days are gone but I have tried to relive them in my new book Lost In Democracy and that’s just by the way.
The reality today, though, is as simple as the murky rules of third world impoverishment. It is murkier. It is devastating not because of the lending institutions. It is devastating because it is Iborinic!
Go through life the normal way. Find a way to quit abjection and hit the streets of England and Wales. Earn yourself a living rocking through the lands in the bouncing routine of the clean-up crew. A few check-frauds here and there and get a brush with the law with sentences that don’t mean a thing. Then, end up one day as a Cashier in a Do-It-Yourself shop. Let your darling in the shop to lift some weight free-of-charge and brighten the mode of the household purse. You’re rocking the land. You’re Iborinic in a country far away from the land of your of birth.
Then fate smiles at you and you hit the right buttons meeting the Who-Is-Who of the land of your birth and you quickly become a Pharaoh of a state with milk and honey. With documents adjusted and history revisited, you effect an identity transformation for marketability. You symbolise a generation that the people yearn for. Young and dynamic and highly promising too.
Alas! The end shocked your beholders. Your pocket was transformed and your friends and family elevated. Roads were ignored. Electricity ignored. Hospitals untouched. Schools were hardly touched. Militancy thrived. Gangsterism too!
The Iborinic conundrum means wealth and power. Illicit wealth and power! The obsession with stolen wealth from public sources is unfortunately, a crazily hyped African affair. Nowhere else in the world is the obsession so great, with stealing as much as one can, when in positions of influence. Nowhere else is it so widespread than in Africa.
State funds became your private funds. Allocations were stuffed in private banks, far, far away. You ordered private jets. State-of-the art. You pay off your cashier-days-mortgage with the chicken feed of the funds of your state. Income was hardly generated for the state that you loot. Employees, who pay the tax to fund your state, will soon be left in abjection with salaries not guaranteed. That is the face of Iborinism.
The Iborinic conundrum means wealth and power. Illicit wealth and power! The obsession with stolen wealth from public sources is unfortunately, a crazily hyped African affair. Nowhere else in the world is the obsession so great, with stealing as much as one can, when in positions of influence. Nowhere else is it so widespread than in Africa. They acquire flashy cars and do not seem to care that there are no roads to drive them on safely. They acquire Bombadiers and fix a few airfields to suit their purpose. The bigger picture of fixing airports for the good of the state is not a bone of contention. Extremely poor villages and environmental catastrophes litter the surroundings of their private airfields.
In their obsession, they can’t have enough. They compare themselves and compete with the Rockefellers, the Buffets and all the Bill Gates of the world without an iota of common grounds covered by their biographies.
Having acquired stupendous illicit wealth ruining state resources, they move one step further to form alliances with political power houses with the ultimate goal of determining the political future of their ridiculed land. They seek to steer the boat of political leadership by aiming for the highest position for even more stolen wealth that neither they nor their family can ever spend in generations.
To secure the endlessness of their positions, they need thugs and gangster groups. Once used, the gangs are dropped to become liabilities to the bigger society. No life is safe. No hard-earned buck is safe from the abandoned gangsters. A few gang leaders are handpicked and pushed to elected positions in legislative houses through rigged and stolen elections. Elitism in the land is thus left almost exclusively, in the hands of mentally unfit and sub-intellectual creatures.
To ensure the endlessness of their status, they channel the funds of their state to the political ambitions of those higher up than them. They appease the establishment characters, who pull the strings from behind the scene. People that they seek to emulate and inherit by installing gangsters in higher places. In other words, the future of the nation is mortgaged for a few generations ahead, to a gang of kleptomaniacs, who know nothing about nation-building.
In the final analysis, you will be the judge. Wherein lies the yoke of third world impoverishment? Who are the culprits? The World Bank and IMF or the Iboris and Nwaoboshis? Your guess is as good as mine.
Hero-building becomes the ideology of the leading elite. They pay homage to those, who installed them while they too, seek to install further gangsters and good-for-nothing scalawags.
It’s all about debt-repayment and the imprisonment of progress. If the Iborinic conundrum scares you, think about the phenomenon of trash senators and persons in higher places, who would ordinarily are not fit to lead motorpark associations, but are now warming seats in political powerhouses, with no input to nation-building in any sense possible.
The story of an unknown senator, Peter Nwaoboshi perfectly suits this scenario. To boost the Iborinic conundrum, he travels to London to pump a lot of air into the brain of a celebrated looter and pitiable convict of the British crown. Irrespective of the trail of blood, economic and political devastation that lines the path to the packed reception room of the now officially coronated Criminal of the Delta State house, the deplorable senator lived up to Nigeria’s own conundrum with a pack of lies.
As if the bloating of the ego of James Ibori was what Nigeria needed most, we were thrilled to the lies of installing almost every powerful political personality in today’s dispensation, from the comfort of a modest British prison cell. No doubt, access to stolen state funds will have been granted and ordered from the prison cell and appeals made to the political surrogates of old including successors and aides, the margin of Iborinic contribution to the installation of a rogue Senate President and rebellious Speaker of the lower house can safely be described as marginal. Of course, the daughter of James Ibori may have been a beneficiary of hidden stolen funds and the benevolence of former surrogates of her father to gain an elected office. It borders on political rascality and a confession of crime to declare Ibori as the kingmaker from the comfort of incarceration.
In normal lands and climes, the unknown senator would, by now, have been treading a substandard path of self-pity and regrets under the grilling heat of the interrogation chamber. The debt that he thought he was repaying to the rogue of the Deltan Arabia would have been investigated with a view to repaying the overall debt owed to the state of Nigeria and its enslaved generations.
Unfortunately, none of this will happen today in a land, in which the budget-padding Dogaras and the document-forging Sarakis have become the darling of the highest office with eulogies as symbols of youthful gains in the political process.
In the final analysis, you will be the judge. Wherein lies the yoke of third world impoverishment? Who are the culprits? The World Bank and IMF or the Iboris and Nwaoboshis? Your guess is as good as mine.
Frisky Larr, a journalist, is author of Africa’s Diabolical Entrapmentand the more recent Lost in Democracy.
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