Entrepreneurship is the process of identifying and profitably exploiting opportunities. It starts with entrepreneurial alertness. Criminal entrepreneurship in the WAC( War against Coro)is thus the ability to identify and optimize opportunities for criminal enrichment in the management of the pandemic. This is quite different from profiting or even profiteering. This Coro-related criminal entrepreneurship is neither limited to Nigeria nor is it a new thing. After all, during the Biafran war, several people made money out of the miseries of our people. Before we move into the main item on the agenda, here are some updates.
It is gladdening that
Lagos has flattened the curve and I pray that this is sustained. I am also glad
that Nigeria recorded just 79 new cases
on 13/9/20, though it is an irony that on that day, the world recorded
the highest single-day rise in new cases. The
PTF also reports that despite increased capacity, States no longer conduct
tests of file reports on the tests as only 13 states summitted their figures on 13/9/20. Plateau State, has
also, surprisingly taken the ‘silver medal’ in Nigeria, and even upstaged Lagos
in the largest number of new cases on Friday,11/9/20. And then, Prof Tomori,
Chairman of National Technical Committee on Coro, warned us to be careful with
NCDC figures. What do we make of this? There is also worrisome development;
That Nigeria has the second highest cost of Coro-testing in Africa ($131) after
Morocco($136), when it is $86 for Ghana, $30 for Egypt and $0 for Madagascar,
Sudan and Cameroun ( that is FREE!!!).
Is this a part of the criminal entrepreneurship or its less distasteful cousin, profiteering? There is even a beer-parlour talk (even though I am not a beer-parlour patron) that the thing is supplied free to us. ( I hope there is no N5m fine attached to beer-parlour news.). India has now crossed the 5m mark while France has closed 81 schools and 2100 classes since school resumption on 1/9/20,because of the resurgence of Coro.
When LASU announced
its resumption, I asked no one in particular( on 3/9/20), ‘with which
lecturers’? . Well, the come came to become on Monday, 14/9/20, when the ‘akshon’.-charged
lecturers and other staff locked out the VC from the campus. My school, OOU has
advised all stakeholders not to show face until there is an official
announcement while Babcock University has asked its students to undergo
compulsory Coro test at the obviously subsidized fee of N25000. Three weeks ago
( 27/8) I announced the availability of a $1.5m face mask being produced by an
Israeli Company, Yvel. Well since then, due to my compassionate nature, I have
been looking for some affordable brands and here they are. There are now a facemask for a giveaway price of $1k by
Louis Vuitton (which has a chameleonic capacity to get lighter or darker
depending on the environment) and another golden one for $5000 customised for Shankar Kurhade, in
Pune, India. There is another hand-made,
local content brand for less than $.01.Muo & Muo unlimited is the authorized
distributor for these affordable facemasks and still out of my kindness, they
will be priced in Naira.
Face masks:$1.5m(diamond) $1000( Viutton) and.. $.001( serviatte)
Finally, the
Non-Communicable Disease Alliance has announced that Hypertension, Cancer and
HIV et al kill about 600,000 Nigerians annually. So? Why have we diverted all
attention and resources to Coro, which has mercifully killed only 1093 as at 14/9/20, while ignoring the major
killers, including malaria, diabetes and birth-related deaths? It appears that we have, borrowing an analogy from Peter
Obi, locked up our shop to run after shop-rats. Have we totally abandoned all
health issues so as to fight Coro, the latest Sherriff in town?? If so, is it
the right thing and what are the immediate and long-run consequences?
Nigerian healthcare, B4, during and
post-coro
Well, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation in its ‘2020
Goalkeepers Report’ has also raised alarm that
Coro, in its 25 weeks of rampage
has reversed the gains recorded in the health sector by 25 years. This
is because governments have diverted all resources to Coro while people have
stopped going to hospitals to avoid being infected while hospitals also do not
have the time for non-Coro patients! The
Senate has also warned against concentrating all resources and attention on
Coro at the expense of the economy, saying we should not allow coro to
kill our economy. We need to have a strategic rethink. Now, on
coro-related criminal entrepreneurship
Coro-related criminal
entrepreneurship, is pervasive and diverse; it is deep and wide; it is in cash
and kind; it is big and small and it is routine and extraordinary. In a report
published in May this year under the creative commons license, Onwujekwe et all
warned that our Coro-response was being undermined by corruption.
The paper identified the top 49 corrupt practices in the
Nigerian health system, including
absenteeism, procurement-related corruption, under-the-counter payments,
health financing-related corruption, and employment-related corruption. This is
the foundation for the criminal entrepreneurship. In June, Niger State House of
Assembly ‘kicked’ after the Chairman of the State Covid-19 taskforce who is
also the secretary to the Government reported that it had spent N795m on the
WAC. They accused the taskforce of lack of transparency and failure to ‘carry
them along’. The Lagos House of Assembly asked the Governor to inform it
of how the donations for Coro support
was managed, reminding him that the funds were not budgeted for. In Abuja, Senator Ndume, accused
the FG Coro Relief Committee headed by
the emerging super minister, Sadiya Farouq, of fraud, and lacks of credibility .
The NASS leadership also queried the
humongous amount spent on the Social Investment Programme, which they
believed, were not properly accounted for. The Socio-Economic
Rights and Accountability Project has
also filed a lawsuit against the DG of
NCDC and Minister of Health over the
management of coro-funds The ICPC and the Office
of the Accountant General, have started investigation and auditing of the
spending of Covid funds by MDAs. These are just underground rumblings and
developments, pointing to the fact that 1+1 may not equal to 2 in
the economics and finances of WAC. But these only related to financial
transactions and as we will soon see, there are several non-financial aspects
of the coro related criminal entrepreneurship.
One of the major
challenges in the WAC in Anambra was( still is?) the avalanche of fake
taskforce members in town, who harassed and extorted unsuspecting members of
the public. In the same Anambra state,
Task-Force officials were ‘caught in the act’, of fining a girl in kind (sexually molestation)
for flouting the Face-mask protocol,
inside the task-force vehicle.
Caught in the act!
I am not sure whether they are the genuine or
fake task force members but one thing is sure; they had learnt from Inspector
Peter Iba from the Sakpenwa Police Division, River State,
who raped a lady all night long at gunpoint, for face-mask violation. The
policeman has proved his innocence; that there was no resistance as it was between willing buyer and seller,
and that he settled her with N4000! In far away Kenya, a prison
warden threw caution to the wind and raped a quarantined female Coro patient. Still
on security personnel and criminal entrepreneurship, James Mbam, of the Nigeria Security and
Civil Defence Corps, was caught smuggling two people into Ebonyi (surely for a
fee!) during the period of interstate lockdown. There were
also verifiable reports of extortion bazaar along our highways, during the
interstate lockdown in which security
personnel fleeced desperate travelers, who could buy their way from Lagos to
Abuja for N16500. The Nigerian customs also impounded a Covid-19 vehicle used
for smuggling frozen chicken from Bene Republic. The vehicle was arrested at
Ijebuode
In Ekwulobia,
Anambra State, Reverend Emeka Ezike and
two others were accused of cornering
Protest against diversion of
palliatives
the communal share
of palliatives, which led to a public
protest by the people while in Niger state, some palliatives found their way into the open
market in the Limawa community while others were discovered in a
warehouse in Minna. In Kano, a bench
warrant had to be issued for the arrest
of Kabiru Ado-Panshekara, the Chairman of Kumbotso LGA, following his refusal
to appear in court in a case of diversion of palliatives. It was also revealed that the leadership crises
in APC-Igbo caucus was due to the alleged diversion of Palliatives by Joe
Igbokwe.
Beyond
abuse of power by those who hold power on our behalf and
diversion of palliatives across the land, people
exploited the sanitizer scarcity by flooding the market with fake
products, especially at Abuja, where 63% of the products were confirmed fake or
unregistered. Some
top Abuja Pharmacists were also charged
to court over pricing deceit with
respect to sanitisers and related products. In the same Abuja,
Charles George, a fake doctor was arrested for treating Coro patients in his
one-room apartment. In Congo, two doctors were been arrested over fake Coro diagnosis
while in Bangladesh, Mohammed Shaheed, a hospital owner
was arrested over fake coronavirus test results.
Shaheed.. the fake result merchant
Out of the 10,500 tests conducted by the hospital 4,200 were
genuine and 6300 were fake" I don’t know whether this is similar to viral
response from an unknown lab to an
oversea-bound client ‘If you come to us,N60,000, if we come to you,
N75000; if we don’t come to us and we don’t come to you, N40000. What
does the last option mean?
We now move to more serious matters in criminal entrepreneurship.
In South Africa, corruption has become ‘amplified’,
with a ‘frightening’ misuse of coro funds is frightening. The auditor general
reports that PPEs are bought at400%of
the recommended price. In the same South
Africa, 7 men had the audacity to storm the OR Tambo Airport in a failed
attempt to steal PPEs Moving to high
profile cases, The Bolivian Minister of health
bought 179 ventilators at the $27,683 apiece while it actually goes for a
maximum of $12,000 each, inflating the
price by at least $15000( a total of $2,685,000). In Zimbabwe, the Minister of Health Obadiah Moyo was arrested over a $60m coro fraud, which
included the procurement of facemasks at $28 (N13,000) apiece. Two Nigerians, Adesanya and Abass,
have been arrested for € 2,380000 Coro
Scam while a small boy, David Hines,
29, of Miami, scammed the Government of $4m in Coronavirus Relief Funds,
and used $318,000 to buy Lamborghini while Andrew Marnell of Los
Angeles, fraudulently obtained $9 million in coronavirus relief funds and gambled
some of it away in Las Vegas.
Adesanya & Abass: ; Hines Lamborghini Moyo,$60m fraud
In an insider-dealing corporate governance infraction, some executives made billions of Dollars when the shares of Vaxrat, a small South San Francisco company,soared after it announced that the US government had selected its vaccine under its Operation Warp Speed, the flagship federal initiative to quickly develop drugs to combat COVID-19. This also happened in other firms that announced the progress of their vaccine programmes and governments support
In another high-wire global
case, UK, US and Canada accused Russia
of coro-vaccine theft by exploiting
software flaws to access to vulnerable
computer systems and steal relevant files. In what has been called the covid-bonanza in UK, over 177 contracts worth over £1bn ( for tests, food
parcels, PPEs and operations room management)
have been awarded under the fast-tract rules to private companies without going through the transparent bidding
processes. Similarly,A study
conducted by Dataphite in Nigeria has revealed that N534m worth of Coro
emergency contracts (including N18m for liquid
soap, N40m for customized facemasks and N48m for sanitisers by Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps,),were
awarded to 19 unknown contractors and
others which did not meet the procurement protocols.
So,
subjected ourselves to self-imprisonment; some of us are busy saying prayers against
Coro while others are making billions in hard currencies from the same coro. In
this criminal entrepreneurship, the opportunities which people identified and
exploited depended on their status ( like policemen) interests( sexual gratification and diversion
of palliatives), level of covetiousness( N60m in Congo) and deployed the
outcome on their fancies( gambling and Lambrogoni). My question is when shall
we investigate and arrest our own ministers and officials for coro fraud, as
they did in Bolivia, Zimbabwe and Congo? When? Meanwhile, let the criminal
entrepreneurs continue enterpreneuring’; one day, monkey go go
market, e no go return!
-Ik Muo, PhD. Department of Business Administration, OOU, Ago-Iwoye.08033026635
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