On the commemoration of his/her state's independence, one Nigerian writer has a radical idea for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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48th Independence: Open letter to Mr. Bill Gates
Dafe Onojovwo
Published: Wednesday, 1 Oct 2008

I write this letter to you, Mr. Gates, to coincide with the 48th independence anniversary of my country, Nigeria. For my compatriots, it should be an occasion for joy: for the celebration of the proud achievements of nearly five decades of sovereign statehood.

Instead, gloom and shame have enveloped the nation. For unbroken years, at least since 1985, Nigeria’s National Day has been one of mourning – for perennial blackouts owing to the decay and collapse of the public power supply system; for the destroyed education system, which now churns out half-baked graduates, predominantly unemployable (according to our Central Bank governor). The people mourn for total lack of potable water in whole sections of cities and, in many instances, in whole regions (e.g. the oil-and-gas-rich Niger Delta). They mourn also, especially on their independence day, for the broken down public health-care system; for widespread insecurity – when statistics of Police personnel routinely lost to robbers’ bullets in shoot-outs with criminals are blood-curdling; they mourn for one of the world’s highest infant and maternal mortality rates; for science and technology universities that have never supplied the theoretical or practical genius to drive the country’s technological development.

Frightening unemployment figures, at all levels, and the primitive public transport infrastructure, crippling economic productivity and causing billions of wasted man hours daily, partially complete the picture of despair staring at Nigerians as they are forced to pass through the motions of another independence day.

The despair is giving way, rapidly, to desperation; for no free citizens can endure much longer the harrowing miseries that are now their daily lot. Action is thus urgently needed to ameliorate the acuteness of the trauma, and so push back the danger.

So bad is the situation that hordes of our citizens, especially the youths, daily besiege foreign embassies with all manner of documents, in humiliating search of visas to escape the hell in which they are forced to spend their lives. Thousands of such Nigerians are now trapped in asylum camps in countries across the globe, awaiting inevitable deportation back home; while millions more live fugitive lives as illegal immigrants in every imaginable country – living ghosts forever one step away from arrest and repatriation. Most tragic of all are the hundreds of convicted Nigerians on death row in countless countries. Bad governance at home has literally forced these future human assets of the country into their untimely, harrowing death.

You may ask, Mr. Gates, why the situation is so hopeless: what force is capable of holding back so relentlessly the progress of over 140 million – the world’s largest single concentration of native Africans? Simply: a brutish ruling class is resolved to choke the nation with its iron fists of maniacal greed and shocking cruelty. Its membership is incredibly diverse: first class intellectuals; murderers from the criminal world (hired to assassinate political opponents); certificate forgers; zealous religious clerics; voodoo priests; cash-and-carry judicial officers; private army commanders for political intimidation and poll rigging; a partisan Police hierarchy that abets election fraud; and the official electoral umpire itself – a nauseating referee that throws off its officiating uniform and, shamelessly, while the people watch, dons the jersey of one of the opponents.

So entrenched is this ruling class, so widespread its tentacles across regions, ethnic groups, religions and social strata, and so habituated to its ravenous rascality, that it no longer seems feasible that it will change its ways. Worse, the political class is resolved that no one with decent values, or a passion to serve the nation selflessly, ever smells a chance of receiving the people’s mandate – regardless of the actual votes cast in elections.

The public treasury is their private oyster, which they extract and consume rapaciously with impunity. As one of my compatriots once put it to me, Nigeria’s rulers are like brigands who have audaciously locked out the lawful owners of a residence, now forced to watch from the windows with amazement and helplessness as the hoodlums plunder their goods.

The solution? Nigerians have outgrown, thank God, their long temptation in the past to call in the military to drum some sense into the reckless politicians. The rulers in khaki proved definitively, in 30 years of trampling over the land in their jackboots, that their appetite for plundering the treasury was worse than the politicians’. Besides, they made no pretence, unlike the civilian rulers, about respecting citizens’ fundamental human rights.

Joining politics to change the system from within – another option tried in the past, e.g. by Chief Gani Fawehinmi, Reverend Chris Okotie and Professor Pat Utomi – is suicidal. You will end up a financial wreck, and, in addition, be so outrageously rigged out by the masters of the dubious craft as to doubt the genuineness of your popularity with the people. As for seeking judicial redress for the electoral robbery, cases drag on for years, legal counsel specialised in this lucrative practice are expensive, and some judges have been known to sell their judicial wigs for the right price.

Since this ruling class has seized the treasury as its own private estate, and to dislodge its members by violence will cause disastrous ripple effects (within the country and across its borders), this is why my appeal to you has become necessary. After thinking through the problem, a solution has occurred to me, which I hereby use this medium to present to you: let the citizens take their destinies in their own hands by embarking on practical action to rebuild and rescue their country.

I know there are thousands of Nigerians today who are passionate about how to create an opportunity to rebuild the country and pull it up from its knees. Since the opportunity to do so within the formal political system is now closed by the all-powerful parasites who relish power but detest service to the people, what ordinary Nigerians need to change their fate is empowerment – especially effective training in the principles and practice of selfless service, and funds (as seed money) to execute pilot projects across the land, whose success should shame the present parasites. Even if they choose to continue to loot the public treasury to their hearts’ content, let them, till they are gorged through their mouths, nostrils and ears.

In other words, the solution to the Nigerian horrible governance, I propose, is for a self-sufficient, parallel rehabilitative and transformational system to be built up and steadily entrenched outside of the now decadent formal institutions. This parallel structure, I propose, should build roads and drains, schools, hospitals, public water works, develop a community policing system, modernise commuter transportation, supply power, reactivate the factories, produce refined fuel, create jobs – in short, take over the actual functions of government, but leave the thieving officials to remain in office and continue, as they have claimed as their right, to draw generous emoluments for no service rendered in return. In time, the self-humiliation of such a disgraceful existence will penetrate their deadened souls, and they will be forced to copy the example of the selfless volunteers.

Will you be interested, Mr. Gates, in partnering with sincere Nigerians in such an urgent and noble project? I believe you will. I thank you, sir

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