Much learning earns you much trouble.
The more you know, the more you hurt.
Ecclesiastes 1:18 The Message (MSG)
Until I came across this verse of scripture, Dr. Amos Akingba had been my reference point on the danger of knowing more than most of your community. The elder statesman is fond of expressing regrets that he knows too much. “Sometimes I wish I don’t know as much as I do. If I were in some village chewing kola nut and drinking palm wine all over the place, I would not be in this agony as I would be swimming in ignorance.”
I feel like him when I look at the level of ignorance in our country today and the gusto with which they are expressed. While one could pardon the children of frustration on yahoo- the generation that went to school but learnt nothing- the same cannot be said of those who learnt but are now putting their feet in their mouth.
The ones who know yahoo more than history are not capable of arguing any subject. All they know is abuse,insult and curses. They are all over Facebook, Twitter and other platforms of expression of anger without reason. They are not capable of rational thought. They lack the power of analysis. They can hardly see beyond their noses. They have very few words in their dictionary :”clown”, “fool”, “idiot” “stupid” et al. This army of ignoramuses are complimented in our land today by the old peers who should know better but afflict the intellectual space with the vigour of the yahooligans.
Bakare on successful change
I read one of them in a Sunday paper about two weeks ago dismissing the seminal presentation of Pastor Tunde Bakare on “Roadmap To A Successful Change” and I could not but weep for this country. It was as if the old man did not read what he was reacting to. His take on the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference showed that he did not even bother to read the conference reports. And these are folks moulding opinions for some people.
When you share the same space with such people, you are tempted to think that something is wrong with what you are saying if you are not so sure of yourself.
However if you are made of steel you go on expressing your conviction knowing that whosoever wants to lead the orchestra must be ready to back the crowd.
A few months ago, the company of simpletons were all over the place hailing the ill-thought out bail out for the states as a great feat. The then spokesman of APC, Alhaji Lai Mohammed now Information and Culture minister was pounding the ground over the package. Said he: “Also, the President has approved a debt relief programme that will help states restructure their commercial loans currently put at over N660 billion. The implication is that the life span of such loans will be extended, while reducing the states’ debt-servicing expenditures, thus leaving the states with enough resources – which otherwise would have been removed at source by the banks – to meet their monthly salary obligations, among others.
”History is repeating itself before our very eyes. Some 31 years ago, Buhari, then as a military head of state, also inherited a huge national rot similar to what has been bequeathed to it by the PDP, and had to approve 480 million Naira for the payment of arrears of workers’ salaries. Truly, the President is a man of destiny,”
This column was not scared to call the bail out exactly what it was -fiscal irresponsibility.I particularly don’t like quoting myself but I have to do it often now in our season of peculiar mess in Nigeria.
Writing under “Fiscal Irresponsibility as bailout” on 8th September 2015,this column submitted as follows:” There was no legislative approval for these loans which were packaged under the table in the most brazen violation of fiscal responsibility. Shorn of all pretenses, the states drawing these loans are technically under RECEIVERSHIP!
What the Federal Government has done is akin to what someone who has a wayward relation living beyond his means would do to dig him further into the trench while deceiving himself that he is helping out. Imagine the scenario where a fellow who is earning N100,000 a month decides to go and rent a flat in Ikoyi where he pays a rent of N250,000 monthly. Within six months he has gathered “gbese” of N1.5m on rents and he runs to his brother to bail him out of the “quagmire “ (I borrow that from one of the chronic debtor-governors).
If the man he runs to has a better gumption than his debtor-brother, the first thing he must do is to get him out of Ikoyi to Abule-Egba where his income can comfortably pay for a house and still be able to meet other obligations and then find ways to clear the debt he is owing in Ikoyi to remove the shame he has invited upon himself.
But if irresponsibility runs in their DNA, he could choose to serve as guarantor to his brother to go and take loans from a bank to pay the six months arrears to be repaid over 20 years at 9% interest.The implication of this is that he would pay the arrears of his irresponsible lifestyle of six months and begins to acquire new debts on rents and the interests on the loan he has taken which would immediately reduce his income to N90,000 while he still pays a rent of N250,000 monthly in addition to outstanding principal. His condition has been worsened by the unreasonable “bailout”.
This is exactly what the Federal Government is doing to the states all in a desperate bid to keep the Abuja “command and control centre” when it has become all too obvious that the panacea is to restructure the country and create new corridors of prosperity that would give a new lease of life to the federating units. Restructuring debt to plunge into greater indebtedness over a longer period can only be a cause for celebration as is currently the case only in Nigeria. It is clear except to the naive that none of those states would be able to do any capital project in the foreseeable future. Little wonder the APC folks can make promises to a people like these and renounce them in 100 days and yet they are not asking what they should now expect in the remaining 1350 remaining days. Anyone still in doubt that these “maga” will continue to pay and the conmen will continue to shout “hallelujah“?
Federal allocation
The yahoo thugs abused all they could for telling the truth on this matter then.
On the 28th of January 2016,The Sun Newspapers reported APC governor of Imo state as confirming the truth we spoke six months earlier: “The monthly wage bill of the state is N4.2 billion which is far higher than what we receive from federal allocation including the internally generated revenue which means that the state government has always been operating on a deficit. As at December 31, 2015 the state received N1.9 billion from the Federal Government while the monthly wage bill of the state for the same period was N4.2 billion.”
“We cannot continue to patch a cracked wall as if all is well, we need to break it down in order to rebuild it, and the current wage bill of the state is beyond our capacity. Imo State now receives the least allocation among the South-East states because of the monthly repayment of the BAILOUT FUND which the state took from the Federal Government, a situation which has further COMPOUNDED THE FINANCIAL SITUATION of the state.”
We know these truths and we will continue to express them !
Credit: Yinka Odumakin