It’s amazing how, when things start happening in Naija, Oyibo or muzungu people borrow a leaf without attribution. Last week, winter came a few weeks too early for Martin Winterkorn the global head of the VW brand. Mr. Winterkorn kissed his plum job and six-figure pay goodbye, because of a technological chip inserted in VW that allows the vehicles to pass emission tests with flying colours while polluting the environment. EFCC investigations did not find Mr. Winterkorn guilty of knowing or even deliberately authorizing the insertion of this cheat chip, but as the guy who called the shots, he took the bullet for a scandal which global media have dubbed the diesel dupe saga.
I don’t think this case actually concerns any Naija or African person. You see, muzungus believe that if they did nothing about the environment we live in, we may quicken our march to Armageddon by heating up the planet with our whirling monsters – from cars to planes, boats to lawn mowers. So, they began to encourage manufacturers to make fewer pollutants. Anyone who has ever baked in a Lagos traffic gridlock knows what I am talking about – that heat that combines with the tropical sun to give you itchy eyes and breathing problems is a mortal combination of Tokunbo effusions mixed with the grime and the dirt. Under normal circumstances, 80% of those steaming in those go-slows would have been off the road as they were in their country of first use. But banning these things in Africa is tantamount to preventing prayer warriors from enjoying the answers to their petition to God to ride vehicles, even if it meant a caterpillar.
Neither Tokunbo nor assembled-in-Naija chassis are subjected to the kind of low-emission requirements imposed in muzunguland. The muzungu care for and constantly evaluate the effects of pollution on their citizens and the environment. In Naija and Africa, the environment is like Sai Baba’s election victory – it belongs to everybody and to nobody. Environmental impact assessment findings attribute unprecedented upsurge of cases of respiratory diseases such as asthma, bronchitis, and lung cancer to air pollution. Apart from the new age rules allowing Adam to marry Abraham and Eve to marry Evelyn, birth rates are diminishing in muzunguland. Muzungus have discovered that beautiful life is meant to be enjoyed to the exclusive distraction of whining tots. In Africa, we have overtaken the rabbits in our breeding habits and our governments see any pre-election population reduction as benign.
About half a million VW exports to the US are fitted with the cheat chip, a potential $18 billion fine in America alone. This secret came out under Mr. Winterkorn’s watch and he has been persecuted for it. Apparenty somebody from a rival ethnic group wants Mr. Winterkorn’s position. After all, he neither invented nor inserted the chip so members of his ethnic group should have started a #ProtectWinterkorn campaign.
Also last week, Sepp Blatter, the incorruptible man who runs the empire of corruption at FIFA was finally taken in by Swiss authorities. They want him to explain why he made late approval for contracts supposedly executed seven years earlier by another FIFA mogul, Michel Platini. Following protests by Blatter’s kinsmen to let him exercise his right to die in office, Platini was being groomed to replace him. In Naija, Blatter’s ‘sin’ is nothing compared to the confession of Diezani Allison-Madueke’s response to allegations of bias by the Indian High Commissioner to Naija on oil swap deals. Nobody queried her for confessing to paying questionable contracts to an Indian company. It is evident that some people are borrowing from Sai Baba’s persecution handbook on Bukola Saraki in going after Platini and Blatter. There is God o.
In America Presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton was coasting home to victory as the first female president in waiting until Bola Tinubu’s hawks in her party began to exhume emails from her personal server as Secretary of State. Hilary thought she had released all the mails from her personal server until last week when Tinubu’s group found the ones that escaped her memory – like Sai Baba’s Port Harcourt land – all in an effort to stop her from making history. Can you see global plagiarism without repercussion? At least they could have admitted that they are running things with Sai Baba’s persecution handbook.
I am disturbed that not Winterkorn, Blatter, Platini nor Clinton is prepared to use social or mainstream media to protest these gross acts of persecution of their kinsmen and woman. I may be setting up a persecution consultancy office in the Americas where anyone being persecuted by their political enemies can employ my services to make noise and stop them dead on track. In these days of slide of the Naira and fears of economic recession, this is one good way to earn a decent living and the needed foreign exchange.
This article was originally published on Daily Trust.