Amuta
Our federal capital could as well have been a perfect setting for a series of gangster movies from Hollywood. Perfect scripts. Excellent casting. Professional rehearsals. The dry runs are already provided by the existing government bureaucracy with its rituals and pomp. The voluminous costumes of agbadas and starched kaftans make it nearly complete. It is just that most of the action is not exactly a joke. The subject is some serious criminal enterprise designed to further enrich already fat government cats located in the highest places of state power. The script originators are political entrepreneurs of sorts. These ones are no longer content with the usual kickbacks, handouts and percentages from contractors and wheeler dealers. It is better to set up parallel respectable looking and sounding government agencies funded directly from the official mountain of confusion and bureaucratic mayhem that passes as the budget of the federal behemoth that we call a government.
Those who have characterized the Nigerian political landscape and machinery of state as a crime machinery may not have been too far off the mark. At any point in time, our political leadership is embroiled in one scandal or another. The EFCC and ICPC are constantly engaged in investigating one murky deal or the other. Even the most ordinary reflexes of government these days read like excerpts from a gangster script. It is as though some invisible paymaster is somewhere doling out unimaginable quantities of cash to hungry gansters condemned to fight and kill each other.
At other times, segments of the populace that are considered of great electoral value are taunted with huge sums of cash to fight over. In a new fad of vote buying, no need for the ruling party to station vote buyers at polling booths at election time for retail purchase of a few votes. That is old fashioned retail vote buying. It is better to purchase the votes on a wholesale basis well in advance through the holding ‘companies’ of interest groups in question.
The raging star case is the “investigation” of a mega phantom government agency that was set up and funded ostensibly from the office of the president’s Chief of Staff. Then things went bad and a big fight broke out over a sharing formula for the loot among the privileged equity holders. The huge camel of fraud passed through all the bureaucratic needles initially before the cookie started to crumble. A dodgy appointment letter for the Director General was allegedly passed through a proxy in exchange for a princely courier fee of N400 million but the courier of the letter and the money is now reportedly dead and the hotel where the transaction took place was quickly burnt down. Typical gangster script!
Meanwhile, the phantom agency opened an account with the Central Bank, got a slot in the 2026 federal budget, got a legislative budget approval, was allocated a commodious office in the Federal Secretariat right in the middle of Abuja. The phantom agency was parading a gamut of staffers with the usual fancy titles and interacting with diplomats and other big government agency officials. Then boom!
Yet another government agency – the Border Communities Development Agency (BCDA) is effectively under two conflicting leaderships both claiming legitimacy and inflicting charges on the public treasury. A former head resigned to contest the 2027 election. The resignation was accepted and a replacement was duly appointed. The former gentleman sauntered back to wield office and authorize expenditure in conflict with the new boss. One agency, two heads! The mess is yet unresolved up to now.
Further down the road, a few scandalous acts of government generosity have mushroomed. The federal government has announced a N22.1 billion Naira Palace projects fund for 106 beneficiaries spread all around the country. It does not matter whether all parts of the country have an even spread of traditional rulers let alone palaces to be fixed. Mr. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the ADC has kicked against this gesture and asked for details of beneficiaries.
In yet another interesting money game, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representative one Mr. Benjamin Kalu, reportedly inserted N781 million into the 2026 federal budget. The sum is is said to be for youth reorientation and support in churches in his home Bende constituency. It is ordinarily his own private constituency project. He is to share N3-5 million a- piece to churches in his Bende constituency as funding for the acquisition of musical equipment for church choirs. Pressed further, he said the funds are youth assistance funds to be disbursed “ecclesiastically” or something in that line! The festival of money sharing does not end there.
Still feeding on the unguarded budget pie, the Tinubu government is reported to have inserted a provision of N6.4 billion for a Special Presidential support Group for the just completed World Cup tournament. There has been no report that the provision has been scrupped or removed from the budget. Opposition politicians have variously cried blue murder in the knowledge that this huge sum could go up in the smoke of corruption unless urgent accountability steps are taken.
In yet another act of unwarranted generosity, the federal government has been reported to have awarded a strange ‘scholarship’ to an undisclosed number of students of the Baze private university in Abuja. The unconfirmed report indicates that the federal government has awarded N1.34 billion to 254 students of the university. Available evidence indicates that the first tranche of N673,849, 864.55 totaling 50% of the ‘scholarship’ has been released to the institution. It comes to an average of N5.31 million per student.
No other private university has been reported to have benefitted from this generous offer nor has there been any official announcement from the Ministry of education on this. There is no indication as to where this strange award fits into the existing students loans scheme or other student empowerment regimes previously announced by the government. Underground rumours have attributed the ‘award’ as a thinly disguised subvention to Baze University which is owned and run by Mr. Datti Ahmed, Mr. Peter Obi’s running mate in the 2023 presidential election. Mr. Datti and his elder brother Baba Ahmed , the political gadfly, have recently variously disowned and excoriated Mr. Obi in the run up to the 2027 general elections.
In the meantime, all manner of financial scams have been reported in ways that can only be understood as large scale pre-election bribes to buy votes on a wholesale basis in advance of the 2027 elections. It is of course common knowledge that of the factors that determine the outcome of Nigerian elections, cash remains the paramount factor. An incumbent government usually relies on its control of the treasury to source funds to fund a succession election. That is precisely the process that seems to be going on now.
The national budget has since become the easiest target for easy access of funds for political ends. The reason is simple. There is a long- standing notion that the money in the national budget literally belongs to no one. It is public money, believed to be derived from oil and gas royalties and big corporation taxes that notionally belong to no one. The executive can dip its hands into the treasury to access such funds for all manner of frivolous corrupt ends.
There is however a more fundamental and deep malaise. The Nigerian state has gradually degenerated into a criminal enterprise. High officialdom have become. bastions of nefarious enterprises. Bribes, kickbacks, racketeering in perquisites and the funding of all manner of wasteful projects have in themselves become major undertakings of government. Year on year, the same projects remain on the ‘to do list’ of government leading to an avalanche of uncompleted projects. Ajaokuta, Mambilla Power, the East-West Road, numerous other highways that lead to nowhere as well as power projects that were started before the internet age, hence the darkness persists.
Progressively, the business of state has departed from national development and the pursuit of the common good. In their place, the state has been privatized and its agencies converted to the pursuit of the financial and material good of individual political entrepreneurs and operators of the new power industry governed by primitive accumulation. In the process, the state and its capacity to govern have declined and weakened. Its capacity to assert itself has become vulnerable to the antics of competing contenders for power supremacy such as corrupt bureaucrats, terrorists, bandits, casual killers and freelance scammers. No one fears or respects the Nigerian state anymore. What should ordinarily be the deep state has become a miserable remnant of ragged miserable bureaucratic minority outgunned and out manoeuvred by the multiple adversaries of the Nigerian state.
