Showing posts with label Thinks GEJ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thinks GEJ. Show all posts

Monday, 25 March 2013

Joel Brinkley: Nigeria's squandered opportunity; Thinks GEJ should be impeached.


Just outside President Goodluck Jonathan's office sat 17 ambulances, just in case he or one of his aides fell ill. They were seldom if ever used.

No actual health-care facility nationwide had as many, and in fact a few still have none at all. But as soon as a Nigerian newspaper took a photo of the ambulances and published a story about them, they suddenly disappeared -- probably to an underground garage.

Jonathan is president of Nigeria, which should be among the world's most prosperous nations. After all, it produces an estimated 2.4 million barrels of oil each and every day. With oil now selling at $93.61 a barrel, that's $224 million in income daily. And yet many hospitals can't afford to buy an ambulance. The reason, in my view: Nigeria is the most corrupt nation on earth.

Sure, Transparency International lists almost three dozen states as more corrupt -- Chad, Haiti, Laos, Yemen, Cambodia and the like. But are any of those nations as wealthy as Nigeria -- taking in $81 billion annually, just from the sale of oil? No, not even one of them. So Nigeria steals and squanders more money than any other nation, making it the world's most corrupt, by that measure.