by Ife Adebayo

These are important questions to ponder on. What fuels your fight against corruption, what fuels your acts of corruption? Is the Nigerian conscience present? Or is the Nigerian conscience on holiday? ‘The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.’

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines conscience as “the part of the mind that makes you aware of your actions as being either morally right or wrong”. In the last few weeks the Nigerian Minister of Aviation has been in the news for issues bordering on corruption and abuse of office. Interestingly with the ongoing senate committee hearing on the issue we have realized that this was indeed a complex web of corruption involving the minister, federal agencies like the NCAA, the customs, vehicle importer Coscharis etc. Given the poor standards of our aviation currently in the country it is safe to say that the Minister and her cohorts have what I will call “an absence of conscience”.

When a Minister of Aviation appears before a senate committee investigating corruption in her ministry and she moves responsibility for the corrupt practices down to her subordinates just a few weeks after she called a plane crash “an act of God” I think it is only fair enough I assume her conscience – “the part of her mind that makes her aware of her actions as being either morally right or wrong” is absent.

The Minister of Aviation is not the focus of this article. The focus of this article is on whether the Minister’s absence of conscience is an attribute peculiar to her or if this is a national problem. I am tempted to go with the latter. I’ll tell you why.

Yesterday I received an email with an article written by Ijeoma Nwogwugwu on the back page of This Day Newspapers titled “The Kero Subsidy Scam”. In this article she mentioned how “the House of Representatives Committee Chairman on Petroleum (Downstream) Dakuku Peterside criticised the federal government and NNPC for frittering away N634 billion on subsidy for kerosene and it hardly got a front mention on any of the front pages of the national newspapers”. The irony of this is that I never knew there was a kerosene subsidy scam, not to mention being aware it was up to a staggering amount of N634 billion. Considering I just recently wrote an article on my blog titled ‘Funding Nigeria’s Undergraduate University Education’ in which I suggested a total loan of N300 billion annually to fund our undergraduate education, it is interesting that we have scams of hundreds of billions carried out by a few people and being unreported.

In view of the limp, closer-to-dead-than-alive state of almost all sectors such as our education sector, aviation industry, health sector, manufacturing industry, infrastructure etc., in contrast with the staggering corruption in the land with a reported N273.9 billion pension scam between 2005 and 2011, almost N1 trillion naira petrol subsidy scam and the unreported N643 billion kerosene subsidy scam. It is safe to say that the number of Nigerians with an absent conscience, or should I say “a conscience on holiday” is staggering.

In her article for This Day, Ijeoma noted that “If it were petrol, not only would it have been accorded space on the front pages, the headlines would have been sensational. By today, if it were petrol, rallies and threats of strikes would have been issued by groups to register their displeasure with the federal government’s mismanagement of the subsidy on petrol. But since the subsidy scam that is being perpetuated by NNPC is on kerosene, no one cares. Relative to petrol, kerosene is consumed in infinitesimal quantities by the elite. It is a commodity used mainly by the lower strata of the society in urban and rural areas. For six years, the price of kerosene has been pegged at N50 per litre so that it can be made available to the poor at a cheap, controlled price. Yet not a single household that uses kerosene to cook or light their lamps is able to
buy it at N50 per litre. Kerosene, instead, retails at both the fuel stations and other outlets at a minimum of N120 per litre”.

The question I ask myself is this; if there are to be calls for a street protest on kerosene today will I be there? Am I only bothered about Aunty Stella’s new BMW toys because I fly the skies those funds are meant for? Where is my conscience? Where is my concern for the poor? Where is my love and concern for my neighbour who has to buy kerosene at double the retail price even after it has been subsidized? Could this be why we all forget so easily about the ALUU 4? Why we will soon forget about the Stella BMW issues? But why we fought tooth and nail until petrol prices were reduced? Is ASUU on strike because they love Nigerian education so much or is it because these matters directly hit their pockets?

These are important questions to ponder on. What fuels your fight against corruption, what fuels your acts of corruption? Is the Nigerian conscience present? Or is the Nigerian conscience on holiday?

‘The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.’
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Ife Adebayo is an IT Consultant with work experience in Germany, United Kingdom and Nigeria. He currently runs his own IT firm in Lagos, Nigeria. He is an ardent believer in the Nigerian project and encourages all Nigerians to become actively involved in making Nigeria a better place.

Ife is a registered member of the Action Congress of Nigeria, Epe Local Government, Lagos State. He was an active member of the UK branch of the party, holding the post of Youth Leader for the year 2010/2011.

*This post has been updated

 

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