[COMMENTARY] Celebrity Thieves: How Nigeria Learned To Worship The Hands That Robbed It
To understand the depth of our present decay, you must remember the height of our past. We were not always like this. This country once placed honour above wealth.
In the Western Region of the early 1960s, Chief Obafemi Awolowo ran what was arguably the most accountable government in our history. It was not a rich government. It was a disciplined government. Every penny of the marketing board revenue was debated and tracked. Free education was not a miracle of charity, it was a product of planning and sacrifice. In that era, a public officer caught diverting one pound did not need to be jailed by a court. The public verdict of shame ended him. Shame was a heavier chain than any prison wall.
In the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, wielded near absolute power, yet he cultivated a reputation for personal austerity. The story that endures in the North is not of palaces he built, but of how he lived simply and died with little personal property to his name. To be called Mai Gaskiya, the honest one, meant more than any political appointment. Leadership was seen as trust, Amanah, not an enterprise.
In the Eastern villages, our communal justice was ruthless and moral. If a man suddenly built a house his income could not explain, the kindred would not celebrate with him, they would summon him. The age grade would ask him to explain his wealth. If he had taken from the communal purse, he would not be crowned with a title, he would be stripped of dignity. The proverb was clear, Ezi Afa Ka Ego, a good name is worth more than gold. And people lived by it. That was the Nigeria that existed before the oil seduced us. A poor but principled people who understood that unexplained wealth was not a blessing, it was a question mark.
Three things broke us.
The first was oil. From 1973, money began to flow without labour. The government no longer needed to tax the people to survive, so the people no longer felt entitled to question the government. Wealth became detached from work. Suddenly, the fastest way to be rich was not to farm, teach or trade, but to be close to the tap.
The second was the gun. Decades of military rule destroyed the civic reflex that makes citizens challenge power. Soldiers taught us that power flows from the barrel, not from the people. Decrees replaced due process. The commander replaced the community. Accountability died because those who asked questions were detained.
The third was poverty itself. When the state abandoned its duties, people became desperate. Schools collapsed. Hospitals became mere buildings. Jobs vanished. In that desperation, any man who could throw money, no matter its source, became a saviour. We stopped asking where he got the money. We only asked if he would share it.
By 1999, when democracy returned, the new social contract was sealed. The office would steal, the people would clap, as long as some crumbs fell. And so the Celebrity Thief was born.
The method is now a science taught across all 36 states.
A man is given five hundred million naira to equip a general hospital. He keeps four hundred million for himself. He uses fifty million to buy bags of rice, wrappers and second-hand motorcycles. He rents a hall, invites musicians, and shares the items with cameras rolling. The crowd sings his praises. He is declared generous, grassroots, a man of the people.
The remaining fifty million he uses to paint the old hospital and buy two beds. We still thank him for trying. We have lost the ability to do simple reasoning. That rice he shared is not generosity, it is a refund of our stolen future at a ridiculous discount. The borehole he commissioned will stop working in six months, but the waterworks he refused to build would have served our children for thirty years.
This is why we cannot challenge them. The crumbs have compromised us. Our cousin got a temporary job from him. Our street got a transformer from him. Our mother got fifty thousand naira from his foundation. How can we bite the hand that feeds us, even if that hand is the same hand that emptied our storehouse?
We call this loyalty. Political scientists have a better name for it. It is clientelism, a sophisticated form of slavery where the slave defends his master for the right to eat leftovers. This celebration of theft is not harmless. It is suicide.
First, it is killing work ethic. What message are we sending when a local government chairman who has never managed a shop in his life is richer than a professor who taught for thirty years? We are telling every young Nigerian that honesty is a slow route to humiliation, while theft is a fast track to reverence. That is why yahoo yahoo is now called hustle. That is why ballot box snatching is now called politics. We created the curriculum.
Second, we are institutionalizing poverty. The Celebrity Thief does not build systems, he donates palliatives. Palliatives do not create development, they create dependency. While he is praised for giving us fish for a day, he has stolen the river that would have fed us for a lifetime.
Third, and most dangerous, we have lost our moral outrage. A nation that cannot be angry cannot be free. In other climes, a scandal ends a career. In Nigeria, a scandal is the beginning of a martyrdom narrative. The thief becomes a victim of political witch-hunt, and we, the victims of his theft, become his most vocal defenders on radio and social media.
How We Reclaim Ourselves
The law alone cannot fix what culture has broken. The EFCC can arrest a man, but only society can deny him honour. We must bring back social sanctions. Let the thief keep his stolen billions, but let us take away our reverence. Do not give him the microphone at your conference. Do not give him the chieftaincy title. Do not name your church harvest after him. Let him know that in your gathering, wealth without honour is worthless.
We must redefine what we call success. A big car is not success if it was bought with money meant for children's vaccines. We must teach our children to ask questions, not just to clap.
And we must redefine loyalty. True loyalty to your kinsman is not covering his theft. True loyalty is telling him that he is disgracing your name and demanding that he return what belongs to all. Our grandparents were not richer than us, but they were prouder than us. They had no crude oil, but they had a conscience. They protected their names more than they protected their pockets.
The Celebrity Thief did not just steal our money. He stole our memory. He made us forget who we were. The rice will finish. The wrapper will fade. The okada will break down. But the hospital that was never built will still be missing when our daughter goes into labour. The school that was never equipped will still be empty when our son should be learning.
Until we stop kneeling to greet our robbers and standing to abuse our honest poor, we will remain a nation of beggars arguing over crumbs at the feet of men who stole the feast.
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