HUNGER, POVERTY AND LEGION OF LOOTERS
The government’s reaction has been customarily caustic and short fused. Those involved in the looting of a warehouse belonging to the Agric Department Strategic food store, located at Tasha area of Abuja, on March 3 have been arrested. To the government, there is no justification for criminal behavior, only the convenience of choice, and choice compulsion.
The looting following similar looting across the country as hunger and anger are mounting in the country. It also brought memories of the coronavirus virus pandemic, when warehouses around the country were ripped open as enraged Nigerians went on the rampage. During the ENDSARS protests, Nigerians did not express their hunger for food. Rather, it was their hunger for justice that saw multiple public buildings attacked.
The 15 persons arrested for looting the warehouse may be an infinitesimal number of Nigeria’s surging population, arrested for their attack on the warehouse, but numbers don’t lie like Nigerian politicians. Pictures hold nothing back, like the legislators who hoard their constituency allowances.
In more ways than the authorities would care to admit, Nigeria is a looted country, a plundered country, one long subject to the depredations of men. There were the slave dealers who fronted the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Then came the colonialists, who held sway until independence in 1960. If independence was supposed to be Nigeria’s salvation from the plunderer’s poleaxe, the shackles have held rather firm.
Democratic governance in Nigeria lasted all of six years before the military intervened. Because the military was desperately ill-suited for the cut-throat nature of civilian politics, Nigeria soon found itself at the mercy of the depredations of an internecine civil war. It is alright to say that the country has never been able to recover from the depredations of that war, despite the best efforts of Yakubu Gowon.
In many ways, Nigeria is a looted country. From the artefacts stolen from the Benin Empire, many of which are yet to be returned, to the Abacha loot which continues to trickle down to the country to the warehouses looted at intervals in the country.
With this identification of a surfeit of loot, it may be an irresistible temptation to ascribe ease to the identification of the looters. The country of those who colonized Nigeria is not hidden. So is Abacha’s grave, as is the identity of the warehouse thieves. The problem is that beyond those that Nigerians know, there are others. Many of them, indeed, who have either conspired or are complicit in the looting of Nigeria still walk free. Shoulders stiff, heads high and eyes straight, they tower above the law in Nigeria, which rather reserves its bite for Nigeria’s great unwashed.
The warehouse may have been looted, much to the embarrassment of those who have been desperate to project Abuja as exempt from the chaos eating up Nigeria, but the looting blueprint was set a long time ago.
It is not even about the current administration, which is showing all the signs of classic cluelessness. It is more about those who have now been forced out of office by the brutal transience of power.
Hunger scythes through Nigeria and though contributors include the war in Ukraine and the disturbances in the global market, corruption is responsible for the wounds Nigerians feel most deeply.
It would be easy for those responsible for stealing the country dry to cry themselves hoarse over Nigeria’s worsening insecurity. But who will blame the hungry for grabbing bread hidden in plain sight? Who will blame those whose residual theft was easily nudged awake by the hunger rippling through Nigeria?
The overwhelming temptation is to feel a twinge of sympathy for the Tinubu administration. It is unusual for a new administration to be beset by a multiplicity of such ferocious challenges. But any temptation to sympathize with him must be tempered by what has gone before.
President Tinubu wanted to be Nigeria’s president. He clamoured for it, worked for it, and orchestrated his victory in many ways and over many years.
It was even as step in the right direction of his presidential ambition so deftly realized on May 29, 2023, that he midwifed the seismic electoral upset of the People’s Democratic Party in 2015.
Thus, any temptation to sympathize with the Tinubu presidency over the mounting challenges in Nigeria must be put within the context of the fact that perhaps, he worked too hard to be president, which was in itself suspicious. His unflagging desire to be president must have been with a plan planted somewhere. Did that plan include the welfare of the poorest of the poor in a country where more than a hundred million people languish beneath the international poverty line? If it did, how is the implementation going? This last question appears superfluous in the light of the looting in Abuja and the protests and looting that have rocked parts of Nigeria.
The law In Nigeria criminalizes looting of any kind. Of course, when it has to do with the poorest of the poor, such legislations and their enforcers sharpen their teeth. Expectedly, they slacken and struggle when it has to do with holding to account the powerful, whose power comes from looting public funds.
Self-preservation goes to the core of every human being. Hunger seeks to upend that core, and so it is instinctive to seek to sate one’s hunger. No one can legislate hunger. Unless something is done fast about the hardship grinding down lives and livelihoods in the country, there will soon be a legion of looters hunting down every warehouse in the country.
Kene Obiezu,
