IT would be uncharitable to say that Nigeria has made no progress since independence. That would be wishing away all the massive expansions to our highways, airports and seaports; plus the fact that at independence, we had only a single university but we now have a multiplicity of universities and other tertiary institutions. We also built a befitting National Capital, which is now far removed from the susceptibility of enemy attacks from the sea, air and land.
At the micro level, this friend of ours narrates, with nostalgia, how he almost slept at the Oba Ovonramwen Square (Ring Road) one night. He relocated from Benin City soon after Comrade Adams Oshiomhole became the Governor of Edo State.
He returned about a year later. It was at night. The driver dropped him at the Square. With the Little London he met, he was dazzled. With the illumination, water fountain and the rest, he kept moving round the Square and didn’t know where to exit to Akpakpava Street. Call it temporary insanity or what you will. Thank God, it was on a night that the phone networks were not equally crazy. Friends embarked on a rescue mission and went there to pick him up. Similar developments can be located in virtually all the States in the country. But that’s about where the credit ends.
What else do we have to show for these past 55 years? Fifty-five years of looting of our patrimony by unpatriotic elements masquerading as leaders? Fifty-five years of robbery, fiscal irresponsibility, gross unemployment, injustice, unmitigated corruption, indiscipline, nepotism, ethnic bigotry, killing fields in the name of bad roads, religious intolerance, a near morbid inclination by a privileged few for unrestrained squander-mania, which has produced individuals richer than the Federal Government? Fifty-five years of trade in human anguish, the kidnap business? Or is it fifty-five years of paying for light and getting darkness?
Evidently, technology drives the world. The greatest problem we have is lack of technology and the concomitant lack of industrialisation. Lack of power is a serious impediment to growing Nigeria’s economy. The industries we once had have all closed shops and moved to neighbouring countries.
There is widespread poverty in the land. We do not even have a single finished product that is globally acclaimed, to the extent that we must import our tooth-picks and disposable drinking cups.
Yes, we may parade a thousand research institutes, universities and polytechnics. It is another thing entirely for us to properly equip them to proffer solutions to the country’s problems. While universities and research institutes elsewhere are researching into space, ours are researching into pure-water. They must produce enough pure-water to be able to meet their wage bill before proceeding on their next strike.
Our population is matter of conjecture. At 55, we are unable to count ourselves. Our plans are based on most unreliable estimates. Every 10 years, we have the population census war. Ever since it was known that revenue sharing and all forms of resource allocation are based on population, all the States and Localities engage in cut-throat competition to outdo one another. Multiple registrations are the order of the day. In a few months time, the 2016 war will begin. Yet, the barrage of litigations from the 2006 exercise is gathering dust in the courts.
Nigeria cannot boast of potable water for its people. In the rural areas, the people still trek long distances in search of water in the dry season; while during the rains, they drink from the same ponds and shallow wells with the animals. In the urban areas, almost every house now has a borehole. We just hope this decking on which we live does not collapse someday.
Our electricity supply is still as epileptic and erratic as ever. While we are still struggling to swim a little above water, those we started the journey with, like India and Ghana, have gone far ahead. Even those that came after us, like Botswana and some Asian countries, have since overtaken us. At Independence in 1960, Nigeria was at par with South Africa and Iran on power generation. But today, each of those countries generates over 40,000 megawatts of electricity while Nigeria is still toddling at the level of far below 5,000 megawatts, which is barely adequate for one State.
Again, it is not that we are spending less than those countries but our propensity for corruption makes the essential difference. That explains why we must spend twice as much as they do to produce less than 12% of what they produce!
Indeed, the sorry list is endless. Once self-sufficient in food and one of Africa’s largest exporters of groundnut, cocoa, cotton, palm oil, timber and rubber, Nigeria is today a major food importer.
It gets incrementally worse. Apart from the constitutional requirements of age and educational qualification, one must now be a boxer to seek election into our Assemblies.
In the past, resort to exchange of punches and throwing of chairs came rather sparingly – in the First Republic once in the House of Representatives and once in the Western Region House of Assembly – but now it is a daily occurrence, to the extent that it came on the inauguration day in both Chambers of the eighth National Assembly. That was supposed to be the happiest day in the Assembly!
It is now 113 days post-inauguration of the eighth National Assembly. Effectively, the Assembly has not sat for more than 20 days but members have drawn hundreds of billions of Naira in bogus, most undeserved allowances.
Some of the beneficiaries from these allowances will go home because the election petitions tribunals are still working, no thanks to a tardy judiciary.
Meanwhile, our President remains ever accountable to the outside world as the home-front is kept stoically in the dark. Nigerians desirous of being current on the country’s important policy thrusts may simply relocate.
Is anyone still searching for the sources of Nigeria’s backwardness? And need we congratulate this toddler at 55?
VANGUARD
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