cashing up irrelevance

i've got tons of work lined up for me this morning so i'm gonna do this real quick.

yesterday, i heard severally that the olubadan of ibadan (their king) was quipping about how he was being owed over 1 billion naira as... wait for it, salary for one and a half years! i had to hurriedly do the math. 1 billion divided by 18 months = 55 million naira a month. thats over ten years of my annual salary some dude is earning in one month.

don't get me wrong. i love kings. i love royalty. i'm all for giving one guy way too much respect than he's worth just because we gave his grandfather the same respect (which the man probably deserved in his time for waging a tribal war etcetera) and although i just checked my calendar and we're in 2009, way beyond the era of tribal wars and conquests wherein kings were relevant, i begrudge him not. what i do not understand is: why on earth are we paying anyone, king or not, 55 million naira a month just to sit on some old chair and have a fancy palace? no disrespect, but what economic value does the olubadan of ibadan add to the country? what kind of society permits that kind of illogical arrangement at a time when ordinary teachers cannot be paid, doctors are earning next to nothing and all of those who add value to this country are starving? those who wake up at 5 am to struggle for bus to work and pay taxes through their noses, cannot boast of a tenth of that as their ANNUAL salary.

the olubadan is a first class chief by my estimation. which means that if he is by law entitled to 55 million naira per month, then what do the obong of calabar, the oni of ife, the oba of lagos and the obi of onitsha combined, get annually?!! i shudder to even think of it.

its therefore no wonder that the battles for chieftaincy and kingship are often merciless and brutal. i often wondered why people didn't just walk away when they were denied the throne...i always thought it was a noble fight for their lineage and royal inheritance but this all whittles down whatever respect i had for the institution. no wonder that there is no proper opposition to any government in this country. i won't be surprised if this money is to ensure order in their domains, like they are sheperding wild animals that need constant harnesses. even the abacha one million man march was spearheaded by these very royal fathers at the time. and we still oblige them in this day and age. shame.

if i was the olubadan, i would have made this claim in a whisper and not plastered it on the pages of the newspapers, thereby insulting the sensibilities of the average nigerian. but anyways, nigerians have seen it all so nothing shocks us anymore. we just read it and flip to the next page cos we have bigger things to worry about. bigger things that are in fact caused by this very sort of financial recklessness that is avoidable. it really is a crying shame.

okay peeps, so while the olubadan fights for his insanely outrageous entitlements, let me try and focus on the work i have at hand (if i can only stop the "55 million naira" from ringing over and over in my head).

see you later.