By Busuyi Mekusi

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Talents and natural gifts, both human and material, are meant to enhance human worth and existence. Humanity, nonetheless, get entangled in very many atrocious webs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has posited that even though “man is born free but everywhere is in chains”. This is more so as Georg Hegel has volunteered that “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”. It is for the foregoing postulations that this piece would interrogate what it conceptualises as the ‘Escobarisation’ of Nigeria talents.
Talents predispose the necessity for profitability. This informed the biblical allusion of Jesus Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30, which typifies two profitable servants who positively appropriated the allocations made to them by their master, and the third one who represents wasted investment through his act of hiding his one talent in the ground. It is important to note that the rich master returned to reward the two faithful servants and heavily sanctioned the wasteful servant. While one gets burdensomely worried about the wastefulness of Nigerians nay humanity, the servant who buried his allocation is representative of Nigerians attitudes and behaviours of selfishly appropriating commonwealth and burying them away while the legitimate owners wallow in abject poverty and lack of access to very basic amenities. This act of perishable acquisition reminds one of the atrocious killer bile that wants the dog dead, but is oblivious that the death of the dog means its own demise as well.
Pablo Escobar is a dangerous signification of so many Nigerians. He was the infamous Colombia drug lord who traded heavily in the US coast in the 1980s. He was said to be making a staggering of £45 million every day. After spending lavishly and with more daily almost uncontrollable earnings, he opted to bury billions of his incredible fortunes (made up of hard currencies and gold) across the country before he was killed in a shoot out with soldiers in December 1993. Before his death, and apart from the money he was said to have in his Swiss accounts, which were not known to anyone just like the buried fortunes across Colombia, Escobar was estimated to have buried gold and wads of cash from $50 billion drug fortune in secret locations. Swiss accounts are like the holes used by squirrels to keep their stolen palm nuts. Yet, whiteness would define corruption as pigmented with blackness! Escobar’s treachery was so unique that, like a systematic evil person he was, he killed the men he used to dig the undergrounds used to stash his valuables, in order to prevent any leak. A Nigeria ‘evil genius’ was also rumoured to have applied the same model in the process of building his palatial hilly mansion. News of missing Nigerians is rife still, due largely to ritual killings, abductions, and so on.
Escobar was similarly reputed to be a ‘poisonous philanthropist’ who built a new neighbourhood, Barrio Escobar, from scratch in the city of Medellin, with 1,000 houses for families who had lived in a slum called The Garbage Dump. This is unlike Nigeria where local/swamp/slum dwellers are evicted from their ancestral lands and displaced to the fringes of new cities built from the relics of the past. Escobar’s Greek Gifts to the inhabitants of his contrived city nonetheless turned them to his willing supporters and vanguards, who were poised to protect him from arrest and cover up his criminal activities, at all costs.
Escobar turned the entire neighbourhood of his newly-built city to havens for drugs and illegal arms. Just like Escobar, so many Nigerians lay claim to philanthropic posturing whereas their gratuitous dispositions are a product of the advantages they denied Nigerians, but with which they corruptly enrich themselves. Of very worrisome noting are politicians who claim to give dividends of democracy to the electorates when they should have simply purged themselves of their excess remuneration, to ensure social amenities are provided for the people. Political baiting is a standard practice in this clime!
The Nigeria economy is informally queer, and would not respond to so many known economic models and theories. The recent spates of arrests of drug peddlers, increased payments of ransoms to kidnappers and bandits, etc., are suggestive of the various sources of huge internal and external flows that are not countenanced in the economic indices and parameters used to calibrate Nigeria economy. Just as if learning from children stories and the metaphor of burying valuables in the desert is a Nigeria trademark, there have been different stories of how proceeds of corruption and illicit businesses get hid in outlandish places, as they cannot be taken to formalised environments like banks and stock industries.
Illustrative of the fate that befell most of Escobar’s buried fortunes, decayed foreign currencies were allegedly unearthed in the house of a dead custom officer’s house during renovation work in Kano recently. The recovered wastes were foreign currencies including U.S. dollars, British pounds sterling, among others, wrapped in polythene bags. Apparently, lack of information about the buried treasure, outside the perpetrator, made the recovery of the fortunes impossible, before they receded to mere wastes, which were induced by the angry ‘mother earth’ and her other constituents.
With Nigeria weak naira, most privileged Nigerians have joined in the dollarisation of the economy, thereby making the recovery of the economy difficult. The shrinking of the avenues for foreign exchange earnings has been negatively complemented by the informal hoarding of hard currencies that should have helped strengthen the struggling economy and the weak naira. This is more so as the wealth of Nigeria, in foreign currencies, stolen by some are either stashed in secret accounts overseas or buried in graves on the soil of the country, etc. The unending repatriations of the ‘Abacha Loots’ and the ‘goldmines’ of the former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, are clear examples of how Nigeria talents get buried the Escobar way. While the petro-dollar is not very forthcoming as a result of unhealthy global oil trade, worsened by the COVID-19 lockdowns, ravenous mining of Nigeria natural resources is ongoing in Zamfara, Osun, and other states.
Increasingly, Nigerian youths and their talents remain untapped for national socio-economic and political rebirth. These talents, used in other unexpected areas, and to better other climes, are needed for economic engineering that would reverse the present precariousness in the nations’ socio-economic and political life. Nigerian youths in school are distracted by Escobar’s fortunes – illicit wealth from drug peddling, internet frauds, ritual killings, new-found trade of kidnapping, corruption, etc. Stolen monies are kept in secret ‘tombs’ instead of it being invested in the economy. No doubt, the grave is always a holder of great talents and potentials, with many sent there prematurely in Nigeria by reason of avoidable deaths on bad roads, through poor health facilities, by reason of quackery, sheer impunity by security agents, and mindlessness of leaders who eat fat and allow their followers to starve. Workers are dying in installments due to amputated salary payment! Unlike Escobar, Nigeria looters build expensive uninhabited estates, but continue with the enslavement of the lowly, just like him.
With Nigerian Escobars unflinching resolve to continue to tarnish the image of Nigeria globally, the general attitude of well-meaning Nigerians, both at home and the diaspora, should be that all Nigerian Escobars must ‘die’ now. These include the Escobars plaguing youths for political capital; the Escobars keeping children and youths for ransom; the Escobars killing citizens crudely in the name of invasion for arrest while leaving bandits and ‘Ambassador’ Gumi to have a field day; the Escobars that lampooned elected governors who rose to the defense of their people for ganging up against PMB, etc. As our dear country continue to throttle in the journey to decency and development, Nigeria talents need to be recovered, very fast, from the sepulchers of wicked Escobars!