The discovery by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission [ICPC] last week of a [fake] National Brands Development and Made in Nigeria Special Project Office, neatly hidden inside Secretary to the Government of the Federation’s offices, hot on the heels of the scandal over the [fake] Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council headed by Mathew Adeyemi, a scramble has started in Nigeria to create many more, much more useful [fake] agencies.
Look, money is difficult to get in Nigeria. A few years ago when a British lad complained that government policies had made money difficult to get in Britain, a member of the British House of Lords said he was 90 years old but could not remember any time in the past when money was easy to get. Imagine; if that was the situation in Britain, here in Nigeria, where it was the same British that first brought this money and imposed it on us, money is doubly difficult to find.
We are hustling for money day and night, come rain come shine. Over the years, Nigerians have tried many fast money-making schemes ranging from 419 to drug trafficking to money laundering to ghost workers to budget padding to kidnapping to small arms smuggling to fake currency printing to bank fraud to hacking people’s accounts to baby factories to ritual killing to oil bunkering to pipeline vandalism to cattle rustling to floating human rights and civil society groups with the hope of attracting foreign money.
Nigerians have now invented another clever scheme of finding easy money, all thanks to Mathew Adeniyi Adeyemi and to Prince George Buchi Nwabueze. It is reminiscent of the story we read in our primary school English textbooks, about a man called Abdul, who “wants to get rich quickly but he did not want to work,” so he sold to the King a fake coat and said only good people could see it. This Nigerian scramble to create fake agencies promises to eclipse the 19th century European Scramble for Africa, led by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, when agents of 14 colonial powers sat down around a drawing board, pencil and ruler in hand, and partitioned Africa the way you partition a birthday cake.
Why should anyone waste his time smuggling arms, rustling cattle or running baby factories when all you have to do is to print a [fake] presidential appointment letter, deliver it to the SGF’s office and get choice office space allocated to you in the Federal Secretariat, deliver another copy to the Head of Service’s office, get a waiver to employ hundreds of staffers and get several directors deployed to you, then cross over to the Accountant General’s office and get a treasury subhead, take the same letter to the [rubber stamp] National Assembly to speedily pass it into law, then get a letter to Central Bank to open several accounts, with money pumped into them for you to host foreign ambassadors and international conferences?
It is as easy as that. Never mind that last Friday, ICPC chairman
Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu said President Tinubu ordered the arrest of Prince George Buchi Nwabueze and also ordered the immediate suspension of three Federal Permanent Secretaries, without saying precisely what they did. It is a new development, that the Presidency could suspend people even before investigation is complete. The suspensions however stopped short of the Big Fish in whose office the fake agency was said to be domiciled.
Trust Nigerians. We have since learnt that nine new [fake] agencies are hidden in several key federal ministries and agencies, hidden in the budget, approved by the National Assembly and already feasting on funds in authorized accounts. All the new agencies have artfully created for themselves specific mandates carefully tailored to address the Federal Government’s decades-old obsessions. Our sleuths have discovered that there is a [fake] Presidential Task Force on World Cup Sweepstakes. It was founded, allegedly, by an Olympic medalist together with a former lawn tennis champion who once dominated the Ogbe Hard Court and Kaduna Clay Court tournaments. They sold it to the Government with a mouth-watering mandate, which is to ensure that Super Eagles win next year’s Africa Cup of Nations and the 2030 World Cup, for Super Falcons to win next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup and for Nigeria to grab ten gold medals at the 2028 Summer Olympics, and finish ahead of Cuba.
I am not sure about this one, but rumours have it that there is a [fake] Special Debt Relief and Reparations for Slavery and Colonisation Commission, located somewhere on the Fifth Floor of the Finance Ministry. Founded by a former Central Bank top shot and a reputable international finance guru, it proposed to government a scheme that will bring in $200 billion in reparations and debt relief by the year 2040, which will wipe out all our budget problems. I don’t blame the government for allocating choice office space to this agency, speedily waiving for it the embargo on employment, deploying two dozen experts from the Debt Management Office and creating for it a First Line Charge in the Federation Account.
Nigeria is full of rumour mongers masquerading as investigative reporters. One reporter told me there is a [fake] Presidential International Artifacts Recovery Task Force, founded by a specialist arts curator, who has hired an international arts expert from Poland. Its mandate, carefully crafted, is to retrieve Benin bronze and Nok artifacts, retrieve Danfodio’s books that Hugh Clapperton took away, retrieve remains of Dan Baskore’s horse, Rabeh ibn Fadlallah’s head that fell into Chari river when French shot him, as well as King Jaja of Opobo’s royal beads that the British hid in the Canary Islands.
Another “eye witness” swore that there is, hidden in the cellars of the Federal Ministry of Education, a [fake] Special Task Force on No Child Fails Examination. Top Education Ministry officials hurriedly accepted it because it promised to unveil a formula that, within ten years, no child anywhere in Nigeria will fail NECO, WAEC or JAMB exams, that every child will get at least 300 points in UTME. The founders of this agency, one of them a professor emeritus and the other a veteran school principal, said in their memo that even though Professor Ishaq Oloyede made stellar achievements at JAMB, he did not make sure that every child passes UTME. They assured government that they will correct this mistake.
Federal Ministry of Health did not want to be left behind in this [fake] agencies scramble. I hear that there is a [fake] Health For All by 3000 AD Actualisation Task Force, that Health Ministry gave it well furnished premises in one of its Teaching Hospitals. Remember, back in 1975, World Health Organisation [WHO] promised us Health For All by the Year 2000 AD, which was never achieved. This [fake] agency, founded by a professor of Community Health, promises to wipe out malaria, cholera, guinea worm, sickle cell and COVID from Nigeria by the Year 3,000. Federal Government is very happy to divert money from the war against banditry in order to finance it.
Look here, there is in existence a [fake] Presidential Panel on River Rechanneling, Lagoon Clearance, Pond Drainage, Flood Control and Tsunami Combatting. Rumours are that soon after the 2027 elections, the man who founded it, said to be a hardworking but rambunctious minister in charge of a key portfolio, will be redeployed there to tackle this existential threat. He is the only one in Nigeria who can shout at an earthquake or at a tsunami when it approaches our coastline and force it to retreat.
Hidden in the Federal Ministry of Justice, someone told me, is a [fake] Presidential Commission on Constitution Rewriting, Restructuring and Cloning. Founded by a SAN and a Law Professor, it proposes to extract key elements from the Constitutions of India, Russia, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, China and Japan and graft them into our 1999 Constitution.
Yet another sleuth said there is a [fake] Presidential Commission on National Territorial Expansion. This commission is so special that it was allocated space right inside State House. The President is not happy that Nigeria has only 923,000 square kilometres of territory, compared to Canada’s 9.9 million km2 and Russian Federation’s 17 million km2. A top official was said to have expressed dismay that Nigeria covers only one time zone while Russia covers eleven time zones. So, one former head of a key security agency founded this commission, with a mandate to regain Bakassi Peninsula, regain the whole of Lake Chad, absorb all the Gulf of Guinea, regain for Nigeria all Yoruba speaking parts of Benin Republic, all Efik speaking parts of Cameroon, all Fulfulde speaking parts of Chad and westwards all the way to Fouta Djallon, and all Hausa speaking parts of Niger Republic, Mali, CAR and millions of Hausa speakers in Sudan, who got stranded on their way to Mecca.
Remember, we once had a Federal Ministry of Cooperation and Integration in Africa. Having disbanded it, the Presidency, I hear, has handed over its old offices to a [fake] Presidential National Taskforce on Total Africanisation. Founded by a former diplomat who worked in ECOWAS, African Union and United Nations, its mandate is to ban wearing of European style coats and suits, ban Northern Nigerians from wearing Arab-style jallabiya and abaya, ban eating of pizza and drinking French wine, replace military, police, paramilitary and NYSC uniforms with adire. In the 1970s when Tai Solarin visited Nairobi and saw whole families sitting on the same table for dinner, he said Kenya should be expelled from OAU. This Taskforce aims to ban video games in Nigeria and restore grandmothers telling tales by moonlight.