By Igwe Onyeche Wofurum
(Humble Lion)
Almighty father, giver of all good gifts, may you please stop the flow of crude oil in our country Nigeria so that we can regain our senses and begin the true process of nation building. I make this passionate call because what you intended for us as a blessing has became one big curse on our land. The flow of crude oil has destroyed in Nigeria all noble virtues like prudence, fairness, love, peace, joy patience, faithfulness and self-control.
Oil has enthroned negative values like wastefulness, inequity, injustice, selfishness, greed, and perpetual struggle among the elite for power and for control of petrol-dollar. Lord, you did not only give us oil but you, in your infinite wisdom, also bestowed on us other mineral resources and vast stretches of fertile agricultural lands. As if that blessings are not enough, you also gave us the spirit of wisdom and knowledge.
Many of our intellectuals are among the best in their fields anywhere in the world today but because of oil brings easy wealth, it has destroyed the faculty for creative and proper management of even that wealth and not to talk of the husbandry of other resources you have given to us.
Frugality is no longer a part of our life. Our leaders behave like drunken sailors. They spend public money as if money had gone out of fashion. A public job that is done for one million dollars in other lands is given out for one billion dollars here. Oil has destroyed our sense of proportion. It is as if those in power has no sense of reasoning any more. Oil has increased the greed of our elite and destroyed modesty in our land. Because of this careless flow of easy money, our elites are never satisfied with one car, one house and one wife. As if they are in unannounced competition for who is the most immodest and most obscene, they steal, loot and plunder to have innumerable cars, uncountable houses and numerous wives and concubines.
Oil has enthroned laziness in our land. No one now is ready to apply his intellect in order to reap honest gain. Everyone waits for oil money. Everyone waits for what is called “allocation” from the federation account. There are some chairmen of local government councils today who do not know from where the money they gets as “allocation” is derived. Since they did not sweat for this money, is it surprising that they misuse it? Crude oil tends to destroy other forms of economic life support in Africa. Nigeria is a saddest example. Oil has killed fishing in several parts of the riverine areas. Because of massive importation of food, what is left of our agriculture will soon go too. And because of oil, no one today is paying sufficient attention to the exploitation of our solid minerals. Lord, have I mentioned the fact that because of crude oil, a civil war in which over one million of your children were killed, was waged? Yes Lord, we have now been made to understand that the 1967 Nigeria Civil War was fought not to keep Nigeria one as the propagandists claimed, but for the control of crude oil.
Why the Hausas, Igbos and the Yorubas wages a war to control a resources that you have put in somebody else’s backyard, is hard to understand. But that is the nature of crude oil. It seems to dull a people’s sense of fairness, justice and rightness. Lord, from revelations, it is not fair to conclude that the Southerner’s cry of marginalization today is really a cry about the fact that they have been schemed out of the dividing table where the oil wealth is shared. Lord, because of oil, there is a deadly love for power in our country.
Competition of public office is often fierce, bloody and extremely violent. All manners of strategies are employed to win elections. Some enter into covenant with the devil to secure a public office so that they can amass oil wealth illegally.
When Nigeria was depending on agriculture for survival, we did not witness this kind of envy. Because of oil, there is a lot of envy in Nigeria. There was a fair degree of healthy competition. This level of corruption was low. There was planning and proper husbandry of available resources. Our bureaucracies were not so full of idle man and woman who spend time gossiping and hiding files so that they can extort money.
Almighty father, it is clear that what you intended for us as a blessing has become a terrible curse. Why not, therefore, withdraw it until we become mature for the gift. You said, Lord that you hear the prayers of your righteous ones; that you listen to their heartfelt cries; that you meet the desires of those who call upon your holy name. I, your son Onyeche Wofurum Igwe, love the command for hard work, honest gain, modesty, self-control, prudence, etc which you commanded us to live our lives so that we can enjoy the good of the land. I hate the wickedness and unrighteousness which crude oil has brought on our land.
May you dry up the flow of the black carbon which has dazed and dulled our senses. Many do not even know that you are the source of that gift. When you strike, Lord, we will then remember that you exist.
Igwe Onyeche Wofurum, Humble Lion, a Journalist, Social Critic and Human Rights Crusader, writes from Port Harcourt.
