“Even me talking to you, what we did to Nigeria, we deserve to be jailed.”
Ambassador Ibrahim Musa Kazaure
If we said we knew how to react to what Ambassador Kazaure has said, we may be lying to you. We already know how it mostly goes: the politician is announced to have ‘taken’ money while in office, EFCC invites him, the court sessions last 600 years, after which he is jailed 18 months or the case is forgotten.
Ambassador Kazaure, 67, says he asked President Muhammadu Buhari – the one who promised to rid the country of corruption as soon as he assumed power – to arrest him, alongside all corrupt politicians.
“I challenge everyone in the country, even the president, go and check. I have spoken the truth. Whoever stole Nigeria’s money should return it. I told President Buhari that whoever stole should be arrested, including myself, we should return it if proven,” Kazaure says, according to a Radio France International programme.
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We would have loved to react to the statement about returning monies stolen, but we do not know if Kazaure has acted as a leader and returned all he has stolen. But, Kazaure ends that statement with “if proven”. If that means we would have to wait for the court, we may wait till half of the population of Generation Alpha have gone to see their maker.
It is surprising that Kazaure will speak that way, but it is also no news that the individual who had the audacity to steal from the country’s coffers may not have the same guts to return the monies, even when born again – in any religious way.
Kazaure may have borrowed some lines from one of Mayorkun’s songs: everybody is a thief (better said in Yoruba), because he said:
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“The truth is that we are all the same. What we did during our time wasn’t what we should have done, because some of us got the opportunity and some did not.”
Regret? Seeking penance? Forgiveness? Call for the government to eliminate corruption from our dictionary? Whichever it is, it does not look like any of those. It sounds like a comedian on stage asking the crowd to stone him for bad jokes.
Kazaure is not a man without knowledge of the system. He is a former minister of works, and if he indeed manipulated the system to loot funds as he has confessed, he surely knows how to lead the way to return stolen funds. He may also know how to aid the government’s efforts in tackling the epidemic of greed in Nigeria.
He said the level of stealing done in Nigeria is on a very high scale and the poor masses have been at the receiving end.
The former Nigerian ambassador to Saudi Arabia further lamented that despite the human and material resources the country is blessed with, it is shameful that no sector can be said to be doing well.
“Not (just) this government, all of us have done nothing. If we have done something, Nigeria wouldn’t be the way it is today because we have the money and manpower but see what these small countries have turned to. They have become tourist sites to Nigerians. It’s shameful.
“It is in Nigeria that the education system is still going on strike. Then when are we going to develop? I am not going to occupy any seat in Nigeria even if they will give me for free. Whatever position one will offer.”
What is his motive?
