Oduah's BMWs Bought At Nigeria's Price

It might be that the cars are the most expensive BMW automobile ever paid for. There is a possibility that the cars were not correctly appropriated in the budget. Some things definitely look irregular, but the cars were bought at the correct Nigerian price.  

You may ask, what is the Nigerian price? It is succinctly the actual price plus anything added by the buyer and seller as a reward for being in a special position. The Nigerian price is the cost of goods and services at a price that the Nigerian leaders have decided they can buy and sell things without spending more than a few weeks under the EFCC radar, to which the Nigerian people have decided to look helplessly and hopelessly, and for which the Nigerian press will play the watchdog for just a couple of weeks longer than the EFCC. It is a price that makes sense to Nigerians and no one else.

This price has permeated every section of life, to the extent that even private business has adopted it as its modus operandi. Contracts are tendered, awarded and received at costs that are purely Nigerian – and delivered at qualities that are at variance with the cost. Those prices will not be found anywhere in the world; they may even look unreal, but they are as real as night and day. Foreign companies doing business in Nigeria are those that have adopted the Nigerian price as a way of doing business - only in Nigeria. They will incorporate what they may not attempt to do in their home countries.

I rarely consume Nollywood products, but I do pay attention.  One movie story told by a friend, which name I don’t know, was that at the induction of a Nigerian politician, he was asked to calculate the sum of 2x2. His answer, funny enough, was 4. Long story short, that new politician learned that in Nigeria, 2x2=22. That is the kind of calculator that is being used every day in Nigeria and is the reason why the country has always won annual awards on the Transparency International corruption index.

The Nigerian calculation of everything is very “Naija” and defies logic and reason. To get things done in Nigeria, a friend who does international business advised, you need to understand how the Nigerian mind works; how it calculates time and money and the extent of its tolerance for the unthinkable. The friend theorized that you have to format your mind to be successful at doing business because what you know as a fact is not true when you operate in Nigeria.

Let’s start from the top. It is only in Nigeria that the presidential air fleet includes 10 aircrafts, costing about half a billion dollars.  This is so that when the president’s wife needs to go to the market, she just rides a Bombardier. The president’s son needs to play XBox with school friends, he just rides a Boeing to Lagos. The Vice President forgets his wallet in Kaduna, he quickly commandeers the Air Force fighter plane to get it. Of course, the fleet is also used for official trips but there is no clear-cut separation of what is official or personal.  The president’s food budget will blow your mind. Those in the presidency spend as much money on food as it may cost to feed millions of Nigerians. It is pointless to ask how many cars are on the presidential fleet. The Nigerian presidency has the highest cost of sustenance among known democracies. No one can calculate, even by using a Nigerian calculator, how much it costs to keep the presidency functioning. The accountant who can come up with a correct number has not been born.

The Nigerian Federal legislature. Those are the lords that Nigerians serve with all their money and sweat. Each federal legislator earns more than the US President Barrack Obama, just on the basis salaries and allowances. Should we count all the perks and freebies, such as budget-season inducements, each Nigerian legislator can easily make more than all the US White House staff combined. That is why no one can even dream about becoming a Federal legislator in Nigeria except he or she is already a real millionaire or is sponsored by one. You have to be rich to be richer at the National Assembly. Nigerian legislators are paid the highest wages ever known to modern democracy, only followed at a far distance by Kenyan lawmakers. They pay themselves as if they own Nigeria. As with the presidency, knowing the real cost of maintaining the legislature is an accounting dilemma – it would take spiritual discernment to figure out the real number.

The judiciary; maybe, we should skip those people. What they lack in official rake-in, they make up for in judgment fees. You are probably wondering what a judgment fee is. I made it up for lack of a better description. It just means that judgment is sold to the highest bidder. This is why judges are probably richer than any other group of public officials. Nigerians pay the price one way or the other. The cost is incalculable by whatever measure because there is no dipstick that measures secret bribes and their effects on social and economic justice.

The rot runs deep in every lower segment of governance.  In all, more than 70 per cent of Nigeria’s income is used to service the pay of its top officials. The situation is so bad that a member of the inner court, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, lamented that Nigeria was doomed if it kept giving all her income to public officials. As I write, there are revelations by the same Central Bank that much of Nigeria’s oil income in 2013 has found its way to the Bermuda Triangle, where things just disappear mysteriously. The results are roads that are mere gutters, hospitals that are mere motels and an aviation industry that sends up aircrafts that are doomed to fall, while Nigeria buys things that she does not need at prices that reasonable people can never grasp.

Don’t for one minute think ordinary Nigerians are just victims of this atrocious spiral of wrong and failure. They are like fans in a stadium, applauding every move of their team. The Nigerian is a willing accomplice to the desecration of his nation. This much Iyabo Obasanjo, the daughter of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, affirmed in a public letter to her father. During elections, they collect bribes from politicians; and, sometimes, openly at the polling centers.  The Nigerian electorate listen to all the political lies, accept them and live with them until the next opportunity to collect opens. They discuss and argue loudly about how badly things have gone at social engagements and pepper soup parlors, but have no clue how to engineer a better future because of their own fears and greed. Those who have good ideas are quickly shot down, allowing Fela Kuti’s refrain “everyday na the same thing” to remain ever fulfilled.

Nigerians support and condone theft of public funds, wastage and mismanagement. They embrace and nurture corruption even in their own lives. To an average Nigerian, corruption is either normal, abnormal but acceptable or unacceptable but allowable.  In normal life outside of bureaucracy, Nigerians do the same things that politicians dish to them. Most people care not about their salaries, living fat on illegal, immoral or improper sources of income, known as “egunje.” I am not just talking about the police here. Bankers, pastors, lawyers, civil servants, journalists – just about everybody – build houses, sponsor kids to expensive private schools, ride cars and live fat on incomes that cannot be disclosed. The moral justification to accuse the politicians of wrong-doing is not there. Universities established by religious organizations charge fees that they know parents cannot deduct from their salaries. Donations to churches by members extremely surpass what can be reasonably earned at any job.

With this being the norm, politicians are upping their game. If they buy a can of milk for one million naira, what the heck can Nigerians do?  Are those politicians not just a mirror of the society? Look around – how many people really live according to their normal earnings? The expensive cars on the streets of Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Lagos that you see, how many were bought through honest means? Do not tell me you have never seen a mid-level civil servant whose kids are in private universities in Europe. Have you never heard of a banker going on overseas vacation repeatedly as if his salary can pay for it? Is it difficult to find a university lecturer living above his means? And could you not have seen a pastor riding private jets as if they are just motor vehicles?

Do we need the evidence of two BMWs purchased for N225 million to know that corruption is the way of life everywhere in Nigeria? The EFCC need not be funny by spinning into action like a security guard trying to slap a thief that was already caught by the owner while the guard was asleep. Let’s be real for one minute and stop fooling ourselves. This hypocrisy kills me. Deals such as the one that is now on the pages of all Nigerian mass media are done every minute and every day in Nigeria at every level! This is not to accept what Stella Oduah has done. The point is that she hasn’t done anything that is unusual. Corruption needs to be attacked at the root. Let’s not think that removing a fruit from the tree will stop that tree from producing the fruits.

Until Nigerians can begin to see that the problem starts with them, they cannot demand probity. It is breathtakingly cynical while at the same time unconscionable for those who enjoy collecting “egunje” to demand honesty in exalted offices. There is always a cost when the wrong price is paid, whether by the people or their government. Nigerians pay the wrong prices every day, and it is costing them a lot.

The Nigerian price costs national development and advancement. It robs young people of their future. It steals dreams and cuts progress. This price is at the root of shameless and barefaced rip-off at all levels of governance. It is the amount of punishment that Nigerians are willing to unleash upon themselves for failing to put their house in order, exhibited through rotten infrastructure, bad schools and dilapidated hospitals. It is the weight of self-imposed greed. The impact of admittance of immorality in public life. The crushing blow to a nation where anything goes.

The two BMW cars ordered by the Aviation Minister, Mrs Stella Oduah, were purchased at the price that Nigerians already negotiated willy-nilly with their government, accepted and are willing to live with. Were it not so, she would not even have dared to think about buying those cars and many more that she bought around the same time. It is much ado about nothing.

What Nigerians really need to ask themselves is if the price of corruption is not too high to sustain.