Femi Akomolafe: The Audacity of Grand Looting

Why pay failed public servants to retire in Luxury?

Chinua Achebe: “Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches.”

Permit me to ask a question that may sound rude to the ears of those marinated in the soporific comfort of their air-conditioned government offices: What exactly do African civil servants, ministers, parliamentarians, and presidents think they did to deserve pensions, gratuities, and ex-gratia packages?

No, this is not a rhetorical question. It is an honest-to-goodness interrogation born from frustration, rage, and profound disbelief that we continue to pay those who ruined our lives and our societies.

For more than seven decades, most African countries have danced away from the arms of the colonial master into the embrace of self-governance. What have these so-called servants of the people achieved except to loot the public treasury, mismanage state institutions, and run their nations into the proverbial ditch, so much so that no pamphlet of poverty and starvation will be complete without the picture of an African?

Yet, at the end of their disgraceful and unmeritorious tenure, instead of being led away in shackles for crimes against the state, the reprobates are decorated with national honors and medals, celebrated as “statesmen,” and showered with obscene pension packages that would make Arab monarchs blush.

Greed does not even begin to describe the tragedy. It should bother us that this grand theft—yes, theft—is what it is, even if the reprobate misrulers legalized it. It is a crime against us.

Let us begin with a simple observation: Africa is not working. That is not just an opinion. It is an empirical fact backed by the crumbling infrastructure, the empty state coffers, the army of jobless youths roaming the streets, sometimes with lynching intentions, and the smell of hopelessness that chokes the continent like a second skin.

In 2025, after all the UN “development decades,” all the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals, all the IMF and World Bank initiatives, after all the summits, conferences, and visits from Western NGOs and Chinese investors, the average African child still drinks from a muddy stream, studies under a tree, and hopes not to fall sick – because hospitals are cemeteries with walls.

And who is responsible for this catastrophe? Martians? Albino crocodiles? No, sir. It is the same so-called public officials and their political masters who, after destroying our lives, gave themselves hefty compensation for their “service.”

The very idea of compensating the rogues is insulting…

Rented mouthpieces with their vuvuzelas tell us that ministers and MPs deserve “ex gratia” payments. Based on what logic? The word itself – ex gratia—implies a gift. A token. A gesture of gratitude.

Gratitude for what, exactly? For what should citizens be grateful to these corrupt and shameless elite of Africa?

…

Consider the managers of now-defunct state companies: Nigerian Airways, Ghana Airways, Zambia Airways, and Uganda Railways. How many of these institutions were run into the ground by corrupt, visionless, and incompetent civil servants?

The people who supervised their demise now collect pensions as though they built something of enduring value.

And we tolerate it!

©️Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ – (Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, and Social Commentator.)

My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!

I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.

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