The Yorubas Hate Igbos But Are Sly Over It-----Prof. A.B.C Nworah
An 80 year Old Professor of Gynecology in Awka, Anambra State has written a letter to Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria's President-Elect, telling him to beware of Yorubas and never allow them to use their hatred of Igbos to deny Igbos their rightly positions.
In the letter made available to News48hrs.blogspot.com, Prof. Dr. A.B.C Nworah talked about other issues.
Read the full copy below.
General Mohammed Buhari
President-Elect of Nigeria
Abuja.
Your Excellency
First, kindly accept my congratulations for your success. Surely you have had enough of it from the nation, and must naturally have been fed up with it.
Let me start with saying that I am not looking for anything from you. I am already 80. In fact my children celebrated it for me making all the arrangements outside my knowledge, government’s officials, politicians, commissioners, state radio and television teams as well as the crème of our society, not to pre-inform me. I was simply led to the scene like a Boko Haram captive, only to face a thunderous time, “Happy birthday to you” on my entering the over-filled hotel hall. Thank God, I did not faint. At this my age, and health status (the unfortunate late reward of sedentary life), and having somehow briefly been in politics and in government, I have to think seriously about anything from anywhere.
However, permit me to draw your attention to the jumbo pays and allowances of our legislators as a whole, but particularly our federal legislators. It is scandalous in a nation where the vast majority live in abject penury, and where mass unemployment has become the closest companion of the entire society.
Your Excellency, it must be noted that at N1million yearly salary of some senior civil servants, it will take each of them 30 years to earn what a federal legislator earns in one month, and the senior civil servant runs his domestic and social responsibilities including up his or her children without committing suicide. Why do our legislators need 30-times that amount each month? Are they not buying from the same market and running the same responsibilities? All we see from them are private helicopters, private jets, most expensive cars and most expensive houses at Abuja, London, New York, and all sorts of flamboyant life styles.
Kindly go through the attached notes so that you can see my elaborate views on them, including my letter to Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. I know you would have problems with most of your legislators who would like the status quo to remain, but you just have to stand firm as the nation would massively be behind you. Our legislators just have to think over satisfying their scheme greed, and thereby fatally bleeding the nation. It is actually not totally of their making own but that of the Revenue Allocation Commission & the frightened ill-orientated government. They must be told in clear terms that the nation cannot afford it any more.
On the issue of oil region militancy, please handle it with an open mind, just as your late brother, Yar’dua, did. The boys really have a case, and it would be best to bring all the warring factions to a round table and try to reconcile them, leaving no group, no matter how small or feeble, uninvited.
Again do not over-trust your officials on financial issues, as well as the various commissions working there or having worked there, ranging from the time of kuku to the present date. As we can deduce from various information media, there are often lots of sealed massive abuses. Do not sign the oil region budget just introduced. It is for a share-out.
On contracts and their staffing, make it always mixed, i.e. each set-up would have about 50% or so as indigenes, and about 50% to other Nigerians, spanning across the various states. The same applies in the setting up of commissions so as to avert nepotisms and parochialisms, which have been the order of the past, and which often led to shielded mismanagement of funds.
Again, I must draw your attention to the proverbial plight of Igbos. The Yorubas simply hate the Igbos but are sly over it. They are their perennial competitors. Please bear this in mind before they start advising on the fate of one Igbo man or the other. I schooled with them at King’s College Lagos, and worked for sometime in the West before hopping across overseas for studies. I am therefore not guessing. The present Lagos episode is a revealing example.
Your Excellency, you have equally spent some time overseas. I am sure you have never seen cows and goats parading the streets. We can learn from them how they manage the situation.
On Security, Funds, you have seen how used and abused they are. The Northern experience, where every governor kept his funds tight to himself for the next election or for future business enterprises whilst his state is burning, should be an eye opener to everyone of us. Everyone was only looking up to the center for funds. The situation is not different in the South where most governors also hold their money tight for the same purposes and for chieftaincy titles. My question remains: why are these monies not accountable, and why can’t the balance be returned to the coffers, state or federal, even if some fast governors will easily strike deals with their legislators when and where the watching eyes of anti-crime commissions are also compromised?
Finally, Your Excellency, check the amount of money squandered in ‘feeding’ and in ‘entertainment’ of guests annually. They usually run in mounting billions.
I know that most of these accountability and transparency drives would be an uphill task for you considering the people it would affect, but you just have to try. You really have no choice if this nation must survive, as these are the fundamental issues destroying the nation, and not whether one executive, or the other, state and national, awards contracts for one project or the other, which they of course eagerly do because of the contract inflations, or the prospects of re-awarding them. You just have to re-orientate the thinking and the values of this country to understand that this world is no substitute for heaven, and we must all leave it, leaving everything we have behind, enroute to heaven or to hell eternally.
Whenever you have a controversial bill, either from you or from the legislators, discuss it first with the party executives drawn together from each state so that the legislators, where you will really have the problems, would know where the party, and, by extension, the citizens stand, and it would not be “that stringent Buhari”. The cost of assembling the party executives together either at Abuja or everywhere else you may choose, is worth it.
Your Excellency, as ideas, sane and weird, occur to me, I would always write you.
Thanks.
Yours in the struggle for
transparency and fair play,
Prof. A.B.C Nworah
[email protected]
08064420708