Nigeria’s not broke; it’s political elites that are “broque” – Farooq Kperogi

Nigeria’s not broke; it’s political elites that are “broque” – Farooq Kperogi

Minister of Budget and National Economic Planning Abubakar Atiku Bagudu said last week Thursday that Nigeria is so stone-broke, so impotently bankrupt it’s barely surviving. “There is no money anywhere in the country,” he said. “The government is just managing to pay salaries.” Oh really? Is the government also “managing” to fund the loud, in-your-face, insensitive hedonism of people in power?

Being “broke” is a boringly familiar refrain of APC governments. Type “Nigeria is broke” on Google, and you’ll find matches for it from at least 2016. Maybe PDP governments also made similar claims in the past, but my admittedly perfunctory Google search didn’t throw up any results. It doesn’t matter, though, because there are no political parties in Nigeria. There are only elites who are in power and elites who are out of power.

Lamentations about being “broke” while engaging in callously conspicuous consumption reminds me of a social media meme that trended a while ago in the United States. It’s called “not broke but broque.” “Broke,” we all know, is the informal term for being strapped for cash. “Broque,” on the other hand, is a playful lexical and semantic contortion of “broke.”

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Also called “bougie broke,” broque means being heedlessly lavish and showy in expenditures while claiming to be cash-strapped. In other words, it’s reckless profligacy and financial irresponsibility amid privation. Applied to Nigeria, it’s the exponential rise in multiple subsidies for fat cats in and out of government amid an ostensible financial crunch.

It recalls my favorite Mahatma Ghandhi aphorism: “There is enough for everybody’s need and not for everybody’s greed.” Nigeria isn’t “broke” because of the need of everyday citizens; it’s “broke” because of the greed of the political elites. There is enough for everyone’s needs but there isn’t—and there won’t ever be— enough for the endlessly insatiable greed of the political elites and their underlings.

When government officials say Nigeria is “broke,” they often only mean that the finances of the nation have dwindled down to the point that meeting basic, age-old governmental obligations like paying starvation wages to workers is threatening to cause them to give up an inch of the extortionate indulgences they habitually luxuriate in.

If paying the miserly N30,000 a month to the federal minimum wage worker might lead to a little dip in the funds that finance the epicurean pleasures of people in government and their cronies, then Nigeria is “broke.”

Nigeria’s not broke; it’s political elites that are “broque” – Farooq Kperogi