Babangida Declares His Era The Golden Age Of Corruption, Nigerians Ask Which Museum Is Curating This

Former military president Ibrahim Babangida has stirred national debate by declaring that today's corruption proves his own era were, comparatively, saints, a statement so bold it required its own security detail. Nigerians, a people with institutional memory long enough to make elephants blush, have responded with the specific brand of national side-eye reserved exclusively for men who once ran the treasury like a personal Piggy Bank App, beta version, no PIN required.

The claim invites an obvious question: sainthood, by whose calendar? Babangida's era is not remembered in most Nigerian households for restraint; it is remembered for a certain missing $12 billion in oil windfall that several panels, probes, and commissions have spent three decades collectively failing to fully account for, a mystery so enduring it now qualifies as folklore, whispered to children the way other cultures whisper ghost stories. If that is sainthood, Nigerians would very much like to know what canonization requires, because current standards appear to be dramatically more forgiving than previously advertised.

To be fair to the General, comparison is a powerful rhetorical tool, and it is technically true that corruption has evolved, todays's practitioners have cryptocurrency, offshore shell companies, and diaspora properties bought in a cousin's name, tools his generation simply didn't have access to. By that narrow technical measure, perhaps he has a point, the way a man who once stole a bicycle can technically claim moral high ground over a man who stole a car, provided nobody mentions that both items were, in fact, stolen.

Political analysts note this is peak Nigerian elder-statesman genre, the retrospective rebrand, delivered decades after the fact, once enough time has passed that "history" and "convenient memory" have become functionally interchangeable. Every generation of leadership eventually discovers it was secretly principled all along, usually right around the time a younger generation begins asking uncomfortable questions with receipts.

At press time, the missing billions remained missing, sainthood remained self-declared, and Nigerians remained, as ever, the only ones actually keeping records.