WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
Last week, I began a series on the 2023 elections and the important lessons to be learnt from this rather unique electioneering outing by Nigerians – even though a number of supplementary elections remain to be conducted and have been scheduled appropriately. I wish I could continue with the series this week but I would be forced to take a detour to something I consider much more significant to our nation at this material time. I do hope I will return to proceed with the suspended series in the near future.
I am not unaware of the dismal events that characterised the aftermath of the elections; I am quite aware of the many dissatisfactions that have trailed and continue to trail the elections, and the decisions of many actors in the game to refuse to conduct themselves within the ambit of the laws that governs post-election litigations. I am equally not oblivious to the many stoking of hateful and incendiary messages and the many sustained attempts to set the nation up for another attack of the form of the ENDSARS by some of the politicians who lost elections and now seemed to be questioning the capacity of the courts to deliver just justice.
These conducts however are summed up as retrogressive paths that should not be taken and unbecoming of anyone who identifies as a compatriot. One cannot claim to believe or want to build a great nation where one is not willing to allow the system to work as that would be nothing but hypocrisy. These are people who had benefited from the judiciary independence in the past and also recently benefited when the appeal court handed out victory to the Osun state PDP governor after overruling the election tribunal. Praising that court judgement but maintaining the court cannot give you justice in yet another instance of hypocrisy. Just as I have submitted several times, it is not a case of the court being fair, but a case of the court being fair only when the outcome is favourable to them just as much as the election results.
This week, I have reason to move away from the elections to something I considered more important to the country and the incoming administration. This is our country and, in all ramification, we owe it to this land to develop it, both physically, economically, socially and culturally, to become a haven for citizens to express themselves with a sense of pride that this is our home. It is our responsibility; we would be the one to do it, take action, and we are not lacking in the capacity to do it if only we summed up the will to do what has to be done. Why expending our energies on irrelevancies and destructive conducts that would only take us back, as it has repeatedly done in the past; when we should be setting agendas that would catapult many of our systems to desirable levels. Elections are over and the time to move forward is now.
I read about the African Moors from North Africa that conquered and ruled Spain for 781 years. They passed through Morocco and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to enter the Iberian Peninsula in Spain. They built universities, made huge contributions to mathematics, medicine, chemistry, philosophy, astronomy, botany, masonry and history. The Spain of today owes its developments to the foundations laid by its Africa conqueror. That is the African spirit; conquering and building, and the America of today is continuously built by African men and women in differing professions. The same is said of virtually all developed economies in the world; the footsteps of our brothers and sisters are everywhere.
It is high time we woke up in Nigeria; the time to reenact the African spirit; it is time our government wake up to give to this country and its people the development that is worthy of the available resources of Nigeria and to build national systems that would truly reflect the giant of Africa status on the nation Nigeria. We cannot continue to be tagged a rich nation of poor people. We cannot continue to live in penury as citizens of a richly endowed nation. Setting the nation Nigeria straight and on the part of real development must be the priority and sole ambition of incoming administrations at all levels of governance in the country. It is enough; it is time, we can do it, and we must do it.
The decision to go this way was taken immediately after my last article. I had the opportunity to travel to Benin Republic, our small neighbouring country on an assignment and for the very first time. My experience in the country has made me sober till now. I have asked myself a million times the same question: what made us the giant of Africa? The journey took me to Porto Novo; my travel guard had warned me the region wasn’t the best when compared to Cotonou, the country’s largest city and its de facto administrative capital. Over my three days stay in the country, my encounters and discoveries were phenomenal enough to weigh me down to the point of wishing to see Nigeria meeting up to the standards the very small country holds so dear.
From the moment I entered the country, the first thing I noticed was the orderliness of activities and the cleanliness of the country; I saw clean streets, roads, and even marketplaces and mechanic workshops. I saw people who were literally self-organised without enforcing systems. Road users were maintaining orderliness without security personnel. Vehicles stopping only at designated points to pick passengers and fail to see incidents of unnecessary overtaking and over speeding. I kept asking questions; is this how it is? And I kept hearing the same answer, yes, of course.
The next thing I noticed within the first two hours of being in that country was an effective solution to all the work NAFDAC finds so difficult to do in Nigeria; for decades, it has appeared that the war against fake drugs and proliferation of the same has become an insurmountable nemesis of our country. I asked where I could get a roadside chemist to buy a simple pain relief medicine and the response was surprising; the country allows only designated pharmacies. You can only access drugs, at controlled and uniform prices after a doctor’s prescription and at only designated pharmacies. What a simple and effective way to do NAFDAC’s job, and yet coming from a nation so small that it could be called an appendage of Nigeria.
Then, the next shock of my life was that I wasn’t seeing the normal sight of generators on the streets. What happened? I was told I would not have to be bothered about power outages during my stay in the country. And truly and amazingly, I witnessed 72 hours of constant electricity. How can a country that depends on us for electricity manage to maintain regular supply to its population? Someone said it is because it is a small country and I totally disagree. Why can’t the states in Nigeria do that if it is all about size? Of course, there are a number of states in Nigeria that would be financially, economically and infrastructurally stronger than this small nation. Why can’t they do these? It is not about size; it is all about the government’s will to deliver good governance to their people. Perhaps, the recent Constitutional amendment assented to by president Buhari to allow states more power to carry out such infrastructural projects would usher in a new and better power supply and other deliverables by the states in the near future.
I saw a country that literally depends on the economy of my country doing so much better than my country. And it occurred to me that the wealth of a nation is far beyond its endowments, but stretched to the willingness of its leaders to effectively and efficiently utilise these endowments, distribute development across its systems for a population of citizens who are partners in development of their God-given nation. I heard severally from many quarters while in the country that currently they are floating and not doing well economically because Nigeria is facing much economic crisis, yet, this is a country where you don’t see pot-holes on their roads. This is a country that would not boast of the kind of infrastructure that Nigeria has. This is a country that wouldn’t boast of a tenth of the natural and human resources at our disposal, but yet would so effectively and efficiently manage the little at its disposal to give its people better life than we could mutter in the so called big brother Nigeria.
I have always submitted that the reason why Nigeria’s currency perform so poorly against that of the developed nations would be because we are over reliant on them, via unfavourable import-export ratio, but I saw now a nation that literarily depend on our country on too many fronts and yet have a stronger currency than us. While in Porto Novo, over 70 percent of items I used were imported from Nigeria. My breakfast of tea, bread and butter was 100 percent from Nigeria, inclusive of the bottled water I took. Yet, I exchanged ten thousand Nigeria naira for eight thousand five hundred Cephas. What is wrong with our system? Why are we always at a disadvantage in comparison to other nations? What have we failed to do within that hurt us outside? These and many more questions would the incoming administration have to answer on behalf of Nigeria.
It is certain we are backward as a people. Given the extent of our endowment, we are the typical classification of an underdeveloped nation; the most obvious example of a blessed but poor society. The next Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led APC government must get set to work out of the box to reposition this country on a new and strong pedestal of institutional development that cuts across all spheres of our national life as a nation and a people. It is an aberration to have to compare ourselves with minor nations when we can evolve to compete with greater nations of the world.
There is so much work that needs to be done. Our mindset to national life needs to be reinvigorated through a changed system that induces mass participation; that induces seamless discipline, patriotism and communal participation. A changed system that will do away with the chaos that currently characterises and defines our systems, take off corruption of the mind and others and turn every Nigerian to partners in the Nigerian project.
And this is an assignment that can only be spearheaded by a willing government. I do hope the incoming administration would give me aelief each time I remember my experiences while in that small but better-governed nation.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
