Solution: Use Local Capital For Investments Not Tied Up Diversionary AIDS/LOANS

We wanted to crucify poor General Yakubu Gowon as a Head of State when he said Money was not Nigeria’s problem but how to spend it. In retrospect, the good General was right. Nigeria made relatively huge foreign income since the 1972 Oil Embargo while we watch helplessly and blame one another for laundering all the money on foreign imports. Capital took a flight from all resource rich African countries in exchange for glitters, kickbacks and indoctrination. No country in the world has an open liberal market for imports except African resource rich countries. When foreign Loans/Aids give credit cards facilities to boost their own markets, we celebrate and praise open free markets not available in any Western countries.

We encouraged and advocated free liberal markets tied to foreign aids and loans, like credit cards given to African drunken sailors to import all we want including pins, used goods or materials and junks stranded on high seas. Yet, there is enough capital in Oil Exporting countries to invest and lend cheaper at home in order to turn Africa around. Rather than going cap in hand begging for conditional foreign aid and investment, an intentional diversionary tactic. Mainly in exchange for attracting laundered, stolen and divested money. Available money badly needed to raise African countries beyond the standard of Arab countries.

Despite the uprising, civil and proxy wars going on in the Middle East, they are not in abject poverty Africans find themselves. No country in the whole world made money after the 1972 Oil Embargo and became the Poverty Capital of the world. Say what you want about Arab leaders' luxurious way of life and corruption, they delivered their people from poverty despite religious extremists. The most profitable endeavor in African countries remains politics that open up the Central Bank for looting at gunpoint, loot allocations, salaries and outright flagrant embezzlement within the ruling class. Therefore, everyone wants to be paid like politicians.

Foreign income that should have been used as local capital investments are diverted to open liberal markets for imports that are useless for youth development, infrastructure, industrial estates, education and hospitals essentially needed to provide an enabling environment for primary industries to produce basic needs. The excuse that the population of Nigeria is too big and the wealth would only make a difference to a few ruling class, ignore the old Asian famine that ravaged countries like China, India or Indonesia where the face of abject poverty have shifted to Nigeria.

So, where do we start or end with local capital flight? Once soldiers of fortune took over an African country or staged palace coups they became armed robbers in the Central Banks aided by professionals. Politicians and Militricians compete in a race to the bottom looting every allocation in sight. Even when the soldiers handed over to politicians, they stood on their shoulders, demanded contracts, kickbacks and poured money into bottomless pits, such as the Ajaokuta Steel Mill. The diversionary tactics to local investments by begging for foreign aids and budgets on foreign loans indoctrinated Africans to believe running to Sugarcane Plantations around the world is their only way to Salvation. Once in foreign countries you live, survive, and die on their terms. They despised you as invalids that cannot rescue themselves.

Murtala Mohammed gave up the loot he made during the Nigerian Civil War and paid with his life trying to clean up corruption. Obasanjo, the most benevolent dictator Nigeria ever had, said it: if Jesus Christ came down to Nigeria, he would be corrupt. So in his second coming as civilian President, he looted his own share of national cake. Gowon, became as poor as Obasanjo after his first reign as military Head of State. But under Ibrahim Banbangida, in a single audacious scoop, the $12 billion Oil Windfall disappeared in a jiffy. IBB, the first Head of State linked to the drug mule: Gloria Okon disappeared. IBB supported the Police and Army “family allowance” at roadside checkpoints. He canceled Nigeria fairest Election audaciously.

Dan Etete Oil Rig, PD&I, Power & Gas, Paris Club loan: two Petroleum Ministers Deals Riwalimu Lukman and Allison Diezeani, Attorney General(s) made deals to defraud their own country in return for peanuts and they almost or getting away with it. Each of these could have been Investment Capital in any African country that could have brought dividend returns back. Royal Dutch Shell and Italian Agip-Eni, taunted as international foreign corporate salvation giants in oil and gas industries, paid out about $1.1 billion to Nigerian petroleum minister Dan Etete who was convicted of money laundering in France.

Nigeria’s ex-attorney general Mohammed Adoke faced corruption charges over his involvement in one of the oil industry’s biggest corruption scandals. Reports have it that most of the $1.1 billion eventually ended up in private accounts with about $801million directly going into the account of Dan Etete, including Mohammed Adoke, the then attorney general. Process and Industrial Developments (P&ID) Ltd, an empty shell company, signed a gas supply and processing agreement (GSPA) with Nigeria to develop a processing plant in Calabar, Cross River state pocketing billions in advance paying peanuts to insiders that facilitated parasitic fraud of their own country.

Rilwanu Lukman was the minister of petroleum. If these had happened in any other country, they could have been jailed or shot in China. But a Nigerian politician said it out loud that they looted because nobody stoned them. If you push normal people to the wall, they fight back. In Nigeria, we melt into the wall or commit suicide if we cannot Japa to where they despise us.

Why did Nigeria’s Paris Club debt balloon by $23 billion over 20 years when debt owed to other creditors fell by more than half? In brief, the Paris Club creditors stopped making new loans to Nigeria because they disliked the country’s military dictatorship. The bulk of the $23 billion increase represents interest arrears, interest charged on these arrears, and penalties that accumulated after 1992 when the Paris Club creditors refused to negotiate a debt workout for political reasons, compounded by adverse exchange rate changes. Less than $400 million of the debt represents post-1985 borrowing.

Seriously, they are the foreign International investors like Procter and Gamble that decided to join easy women of virtue as importers, you call that salvation? Indeed, Nigeria had enough to contribute as a potential Regional Power to world investment growth rather than the Poverty Capital of the world. Anyone that tells you foreign capital is needed to develop Africa in the 21st Century is using diversionary tactics to enrich his pockets. It is the same solutions they have been selling for the past centuries as each African country becomes poorer. There is simply no demonstrative or empirical evidence to back up the parasitic propaganda in Africa.

The amount of money transactions made by Africans in the Diaspora to their countries surpass foreign aid or loan. But no matter how long it took the Africans in the Diaspora to work for the money sent home or how much; black market exchange takes place instantly, on the street without going to the bank. So, we are not surprised that the amount of foreign money laundered out illegally and legally far outweighs the money coming in as Foreign Aids and Investments.

The fact that African leaders bought into this vicious circle for centuries even after Slavery, only indicates that they are not better than the chiefs that sold them into Slavery in the first place. There is much more to gain from capitalism than sheer exploitation of the masses, sharing national cake at the top. Even the chronic capitalists have come to realize that without welfare of the poor and working classes, the rich would have nobody to eat but themselves. There would be another Bacon Revolution as in 17 Century Virginia.