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Dear President

Obama:

Apologies for
crashing this unsolicited letter into your tight schedule. I am
directed by my conscience to write you urgently with regard to your
recently disclosed tax returns for the 2009 fiscal year. You and your
wife declared a joint annual income of USD 5.5 million out which Uncle
Sam sliced USD 1.8 million in taxes.

In essence the
President of the United States and his wife jointly made USD 3.2
million in 2009! The bulk of that money is from book sales and not from
your salary and perks of office.

Mr. President, this
is truly frustrating and embarrassing. You have only just hosted
Goodluck Jonathan, the Acting President of Nigeria. All those
ministers, governors, and ‘miscellaneous aides’ you saw grinning from
ear to ear behind him are known in Nigerian parlance as his
“entourage”. Some of those fellas could make your annual income in just
one ‘food for the boys’ contract in Abuja. A contract that will never
be executed even after full payment has been made upfront.

Some of them could
even spend your annual income on a Dubai vacation with a girlfriend –
usually an undergraduate sourced for them by aides. Your annual income,
Mr. President, is in the region of what an ordinary local government
chairman could claim to have spent on “stationery, entertainment, and
miscellaneous” in the first quarter of a given fiscal year in Nigeria.
If you ever visit Nigeria and spend 24 hours, Mr. President, Aso Rock
and the National Assembly could easily invent a supplementary budget
way beyond your annual income to host you.

I have given you
these background details so that the suggestion I am about to make
would not sound outrageous to you. Mr. President, you and Mrs. Obama
are wasting time in America. You are violating the message in this
Yoruba proverb – omo to pa owo wale ni iya e nki kaabo (a mother
reserves a special welcome only for the child who brings home sack
loads of money)”. In the spirit of this proverb, I suggest you resign
as President of the United States, an office that can only guarantee
you less than $5 million a year, and move to Nigeria urgently.

A man of your
stature should have no problem becoming a Nigerian citizen within 48
hours. If there are problems, authentic citizenship papers can be
arranged very quickly once you land in Lagos. Ask people about Oluwole.
It is election season in Nigeria and I think you should contest for
chairmanship of a local government area.

Mr. President, I am
suggesting local government chairmanship because it is the only safe
haven left to make dollars in millions in Nigeria. You are a man whose
modesty and simplicity are legendary. The money you would make at the
local government level would be way beyond what you and Mrs. Obama have
ever dreamt of, but you would still be able to maintain your sanity and
return to America with enough money to merit that special welcome by
Mrs. Obama’s mother.

To advise you to
run for political office at the state or federal level in Nigeria is to
expose you to pure madness. Unfortunately, the madness at those levels
is viral and contagious. As governor, rep, senator, minister, or Aso
Rock hang-around, we are talking of hundreds of millions, or even
billions of loot able dollars.

Mr. President, I am
not sure that your mental frame could take the idea of being suddenly
plunged into the category of the less than 5% of 150 million Nigerians
who could make five hundred million dollars in just one deal, have
difficulty spending it, and discuss it like chicken change in the
public sphere. That is what we are talking about once you venture
beyond the local government level that I am recommending. Mind you, a
great deal of the money you would make would be loads and loads of raw
cash – transported endlessly in what we call Ghana-must-go bags by your
aides. If you encounter a man called James Ibori, he will introduce you
to the art of ferrying raw cash daily from Nigeria to Dubai – all that
cash passing through Nigerian airports unchecked.

This is the sort of
vicious, symbolic violence Nigerians have to cope with everyday.
Violence is the knowledge that not a single Nigerian is able to
confidently declare that we have one, just one, elected official
anywhere in the country who isn’t stealing at the levels I have
described. Violence is the kind of figures that are in the newspapers
every day: billions and billions being looted in broad daylight by our
friends in Abuja and the state capitals. That is terrible knowledge
that erodes the sanity of every ordinary Nigerian bit by bit.

Mr. President, if
you know that you are going to be able to deal with the quantity of
cash available for loot as a governor, rep, senator or Aso Rock insider
without losing your mind, then by all means contest for office at those
levels. And please do not deceive yourself that you could go there and
be principled. The truth of the matter is that every elective office in
Nigeria is by nature rigged to turn you into an instant
multi-millionaire in dollars.

If you rebel
against the nature of your office, Mr. President, if you try to stay
above the muck and rot, you will become a clear and present danger to
all the Ali Babas around you. They will kill you. So, just go to
Nigeria, spend four years jejely as a local government chairman, and
return to America with the kind of money that will ensure that your two
daughters will never have to work.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Tatafo