Money as weapon of mass destruction -By Tola Adeniyi

The Holy Writ says money is the root of all of evils, and Geoffrey Chaucer made a celebration of that aphorism in his Canterbury Tales. I think money is much more than being the root of all evils. Money in present day world, particularly in Nigeria is a weapon of mass destruc­tion.

All weapons of mass destruction are pur­chased with money; which means that the bloody and blood-thirsty marauders in Bor­no, Yobe and Adamawa would be rendered powerless and be of no effect whatsoever if the source or sources of funds going to them are blocked.

On the other hand, and in agreement with Holy books, the search for money, the craze for money, and the insatiable greed for money could provide grounds for all evils, including but not limited to stealing, fraud, corruption, plundering, prostitution, money laundering, satanic rituals and even murder.

All institutions built for the purpose of brain washing, mind control, spread of false doctrines and mind-bugling propaganda were all funded with money. Most homes have been ruined by money or its lack. Ev­ery argument ends up with profit or mate­rial gain thereof. It is all about money. In fact when we were growing up at my home town Ago-Iwoye, one of our seniors went by the alias All for Money! My beloved country is about to be de­stroyed by the power of money.

Recently, a political party, to wit, the Peoples Demo­cratic Party, summoned its party faithful, loyalists and well wishers and got them to cough up a whopping sum of over 21 bil­lion naira! And this is coming in a country where the federal Government has had dif­ficulty paying its workers monthly mini­mum wage of 18 thousand Naira, a sum hardly sufficient to buy 12 MTN recharge cards!

In my earlier article titled Nigeria: The Death of Opposition, I opined that with the humongous amount of reckless money in the bulging pockets of those who sit on Ni­geria’s treasury there may not be hope for any opposition staying alive in the country. Such opposition parties can easily have life snuffed out of them by the sheer weight of money tied to the fat buttocks of the gov­ernment in power. In a country where electoral laws pay little attention to the limit of spending for election campaigns, and in a society where poverty is as thick as baobab tree, the man with plenty of cash can easily buy his way in any competition.

The Yoruba race famed for their wisdom and witticisms have confirmed in an axiom that lack of money turns one to a frightened chicken while plenty of it in your pocket makes one as super confident and defiant as a lion.

The man with money can amass hun­dreds of thousands of thugs that would frighten away voters at voting booths. The man with plenty of careless money can pile up arms and ammunitions to strengthen his uncountable thugs. A man with plenty sto­len wealth can bribe millions of hungry and angry desperate poverty stricken voters. A man with plenty of cash can bribe all secu­rity agents including the police, the army, the SSS and several other law enforcement outfits and compel them to do his bidding or turn a blind eye on his iniquities and lawlessness.

A man with too much money can even manufacture uniforms for hundreds of thousands of fake law enforcement person­nel and let them loose on the populace.

The same man with more money than common sense and obviously lacking in­tegrity knows that if he contests any posi­tion and loses, he will buy his way through bribe-able tribunals.

One can go on counting the havoc mon­ey can unleash on any society. And this is not limited to Nigeria alone. But by Jove, what will a political party be doing with 21 billion Naira for campaign purposes? What will a party that once got its followers to cough up about 56 billion Naira in a previ­ous similar extortionist campaign, do with all the money being amassed? Are we pre­paring for war?

We must begin to see where money may be turned to a weapon of mass destruction a la Nigerian experience. Money is about to be used for massive dissemination of truth, untruth, lies, half truth, massive dis­information all aimed at destroying the sensibilities of Nigerian masses.

It is to prevent this kind of scenario that more advanced democracies put a ceiling on how much a political party or an indi­vidual political aspirant is allowed to raise for funding their/his campaigns.

It is a gross abuse of political process that a governorship candidate A will have access to say 2 million Naira while gov­ernorship aspirant B will have access to 200million Naira. This obviously sets out stage for uneven platform for a take off.

The recent show of monetary muscle is at best a calculated attempt to frighten op­position and to bamboozle it to surrender to superior war chest.

It is unfortunate that a people who have sat on the nation’s treasury for about 15 years would be so insensitive to the public mood and display in such an ugly version the opulence of their greed, the accumu­lation of their ill-gotten wealth, and the shamelessness of their act.

Nigerians have been so deprived, op­pressed and impoverished that rubbing in­sult on their collective injury is tantamount to saying “To hell with all of you!”

Money, raw cash, has become Nigeria’s weapon of mass destruction. But that does not mean it is the end of all battles. The Ro­man Empire of old did possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, but got weighted down by its own excesses and got consumed by the same recklessness.

Nigeria is not in the mood for a silly, stupid, senseless show of ill-gotten wealth. Nigerians are hungry. What they need is a show of hope, a message of rescue, an as­surance of release from their imposed cap­tivity. Money, you are useless if concentrated only in few hands!