Nigeria is in the business of Canonizing thieves and demonizing its Saints. by Kayode Adebayo
Abraham Madu
PLO Lumumba said Africans are in the business of canonizing thieves and demonizing saints, and he did not apologize for saying it.
He is a Kenyan lawyer who has spent decades watching the continent he loves make the same mistake with the same enthusiasm. He has stood in lecture halls from Accra to Harare and asked audiences why the man who steals public money and builds a mansion in the village is welcomed home with a feast, while the civil servant who refuses the bribe is called proud, difficult, or worse, a sellout to the other tribe. He has seen governors who emptied state coffers return to their ethnic homelands as heroes. He has seen whistleblowers exiled by their own people for embarrassing the clan.
The quote is brutal because it is internal. Lumumba is not blaming the British or the French for this one. He is looking at the voter who knows the candidate is a thief and votes for him anyway because he speaks the same mother tongue. He is looking at the community that protects the corrupt minister because his theft is their tribal victory. He is looking at the citizenry that tears down the honest judge who convicts one of their own, not because the conviction was wrong, but because the convicted was ours.
This is the machinery that keeps Africa poor long after the colonizers have lowered their flags. A European power can draw a border and leave. But only Africans can decide to keep filling those borders with ethnic arithmetic that makes corruption inevitable. When a contract goes to the incompetent cousin instead of the qualified stranger, that is not colonialism. That is choice. When a president steals billions and his ethnic base forms a human shield around his palace, that is not imperialism. That is loyalty misplaced so completely it has become self destruction.
Lumumba knows the history. He knows the Belgians cut off hands in the Congo and the British invented divide and rule from Cairo to Cape Town. He is not ignorant of that weight. But he also knows that the colonizers left the keys in the ignition half a century ago, and the car is still crashed in the same ditch because the drivers keep steering toward tribe instead of toward merit. The thief in the presidential palace did not get there by European magic. He got there because enough people decided his theft was their theft, his victory was their victory, and his crimes were less important than his ethnicity.
The saints Lumumba talks about are the ones who do not make headlines. The auditor who finds the missing millions and is transferred to a rural outpost. The journalist who prints the story and is called an enemy of the people. The civil servant who returns the envelope and loses the promotion to the man who took it. The young graduate who refuses to pay the bribe for a government job and watches the position go to the minister's nephew. These people are not celebrated. They are isolated. They are told they do not understand how things work. They are reminded that principles do not feed families, that integrity is a luxury, and that survival means keeping your head down while the thieves are carried on shoulders.
This is the tragedy. Not that Africa has thieves. Every continent has thieves. The tragedy is that Africa has made theft an ethnic team sport. The tragedy is that the corrupt politician does not need to rig every election. He only needs to convince one tribe that his crimes are their collective revenge against the others. Once that deal is struck, accountability dies. Not because the courts are weak, though they often are. Not because the press is captured, though it often is. Accountability dies because the people who should demand it are too busy cheering for their thief.
Lumumba's line is not a comfort. It is an accusation aimed at everyone who has ever excused a crime because the criminal was one of us. It is an accusation aimed at the parent who tells their child to get close to the corrupt uncle because he has money. It is an accusation aimed at the voter who knows the candidate is a known looter and still marks the ballot because at least he is our looter.
The colonizers built systems that extracted wealth. Africans inherited those systems and in many places added a tribal filter that made extraction even more efficient. The British could not have designed a better tool for permanent underdevelopment than a population that actively protects its own predators. It is the perfect prison. The warden is one of your own, and you defend him because the alternative is trusting someone from the next valley.
Lumumba has said this in halls full of students who will one day run ministries. He has said it to audiences who applauded and then went home to vote exactly as their fathers voted. The quote circulates on social media every few months because it refuses to stop being true. It is a mirror, and most people do not like what they see.
Africa does not need more saints. Africa needs to stop destroying the ones it already has. And it needs to stop building altars to the thieves who have eaten the future.
#HistoricalAfrica #PLOLumumba #AfricanAccountability #PanAfricanism #EthnicPolitics
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