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If you suddenly had
all the money you wanted to spend on anything you liked, would you take
it in your stride, calmly fulfilling all your material desires in a
businesslike manner or would the prospect drive you into a tizzy of
panic and indecision?

You might think
that this is a problem any one would give their eyeteeth to have, but
think carefully about it. Few human beings can handle the pressure of
spending responsibly and reasoning clearly when the sums involved
defeat the very powers of their own imaginations to count or to
conceive.

Of course we read
more stories about people coming into sudden wealth ending up even
poorer than they were before because they made such rash and
irresponsible decisions. They had no concept of the money running out
and went on a spending spree; there was so much they forgot to count
and so on and so forth. Since the boring stories about those who
buckled down and planned before they spent don’t make the same kind of
headlines, one might be forgiven for believing that they are truly in
the minority.

Faced with the
prospect of a material solution to all your problems what would be your
first priority, knowing that there is no end to wanting, (because even
if you did not know you will certainly find that out, since even the
very rich find the need to keep making more money)?

Do you think your
first task would be answering to your immediate needs? That sounds
obvious enough, but when the money at your disposal means that
absolutely everything you might want can be instantly available, the
concept of immediate starts getting really blurry. Everything is
possible, so where do you start?

Okay so you want a
state of the art, custom built, silent, clean,
environmentally-everything generator to make you completely independent
of PHCN’s foibles. You also want to be immune to any hiccups that might
occur on a so-called road map to power, the blueprint of which you have
not even bothered to peruse closely. In fact you might just consider
making the road map redundant and solving the issue of 150 million
neighbouring stone age generators disturbing your peace.

Mind you, you would
be really certifiable if you considered that act of philanthropy
because the wahala would be mind boggling, one that even your
gazillions would not be able to solve given that the country you would
be seeking to help, admittedly in a round about way, is called Nigeria.

Consider the red
tape: importation, registration and explaining why you want to be a
Samaritan to befuddled officials! Imagine fighting off politicians
determined to dabaru your game, whatever that is, since to them, it is
so patently counterintuitive for anyone desirous of wielding power,
political not electrical, to want to create anything even mildly
democratic as providing the greatest number with anything as basic as
light or water. The epitome of power in their minds is holding one
particular political office, to what end, no one has ever really been
able to fathom given the problems of development that still plague
Nigeria.

Given that then…
you would probably not even have the time to begin to reflect on what
you might do with your money before your street would be closed off by
hundreds of immediate family members, extended family members and their
friends and close and extended family members, with the friends of
those friends’ extended family members.

Different
townspeople groups, domestic staff, drivers, security guards and their
close and extended family members would flank all of these groups. I
don’t know why anybody needs ‘friends’ on Facebook in Nigeria. We have
absolutely no issues with social networking, if anything we define it
for the rest of the world, virally and otherwise, even without Internet
connectivity and generous broadband availability. On our shores your
brother is your only keeper. Your president? Don’t count on it.

At this point it
can truly be said that your problem would have bought itself a hat and
a walking stick. You would certainly have to set your house in order,
develop administrative capacity, sort out priorities, rules of
engagement, certification and accountability and get your self some
money managers to invest and keep resources going to settle that
endless chaos outside your front door. In all you would have an
effective cabinet to provide responsible governance of your gazillions.

A final word of advice, all hypothetical of course: don’t call
yourself a politician; don’t even think of running for president. That
one is a completely different ball game, with everything to do with
taking and bamboozling and nothing to do with service and creating.