- A FAILED NATION
A
government is put in place to serve the people of a nation. The government is
expected to maintain law and order in a State. But unfortunately, the power
cartel in Nigeria, since the introduction of popular democracy served in the
opposite direction. What is in place as government is rather used to undermine
the nation and its people.
Cases
of non-availability of infrastructure, such as roads, water, and electricity, are
the norm in most states of the nation. Infrastructural failure serves as a
constant reminder that a government, as desired by the people, only live in the
recesses of their psyche.
Everywhere
are the cases of failed institutions such as electoral commissions, water
boards, electrical authorities, school systems, health facilities, banking
systems, communication commissions, etc.
The
failure of these facilities is onset in the inability of both the federal
government and state governments to sustain a functional educational system,
where public schools can provide adequate, sound, and competitive training to
their ever-bourgeoning school seekers. Rather, what is on the ground is a system that
makes it impossible for low-income earners to be able to send their wards to
school on account of a lack of school fees, plus bribes to pay their way through
the compromised registration system of the school authorities. On the other
hand, those who manage to find their way into any of the schools are given
half-baked education consequent of not enough classrooms and fewer than enough
number of ill-equipped teachers, this sorry state is the same from the
pre-primary to the tertiary institutions of learning.
The
same sorry story as illustrated for the education system is apparent in the
health institution as other major infrastructure of the state.
- A FAILED ELECTORAL SYSTEM
One
of the most dangerous aspects of this institutional failure is the peculiar cases of
non-functional electoral systems. This ought to be the base upon which the
people decide the caliber of people that are to be elected to serve the needs of
the nation and its people. What is rather in place are electoral commissions
that are not accountable to the people who are to make decisions in the
elections. The apparent lack of accountability of the electoral process is because the electoral bodies are in the hands of the ruling
political party or the highest bidder.
- THE LACK OF FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Lack
of financial accountability is a big setback in the development of democratic
governance in the nation. The people are aware that the nation is endowed with
abundant resources, but the dividends of it are forever as a mirage on a far-off road to them. Everywhere, telescoped in the vast land of our nation, are a few
among many easily able to corner the resources of the state to the
detriment of the nation. And this tendency makes corruption one of the biggest
problems of the advancement of representative government in the nation. As the
states are sapped by a handful of its citizens, who have no other source of
income than the state resources, which are supposed to be used to smoothly run
the engines of the state.
In
its fifth decade of independence, there are lots of Nigerians from its
government because the system perpetrated by the powers that be has not been
able to evolve a representative government that is accountable to its people,
both in terms of elections of the leaders and the recall of erring elected
officials.
- THE YOUTH MUST AGITATE AND DICTATE THE STATE OF AFFAIRS
The
salvation of the nation of Nigeria lies squarely on the shoulders of its youth,
who, to good fortune, are in the majority. They represent the group that should
agitate and dictate the state of affairs across its length and breadth. The
political bandits, who are at the moment enjoying the common wealth, cannot be
relied upon to release the nation from the shackles of underdevelopment. It’s
indeed an unfounded expectation to expect the beneficiary of a manipulated
system to wake up and put in place a policy that will unseat it from the very
corridor of power it cherishes so much. Plenty of dirty deals, they do to get to
power, so to expect the syndicates in power across Nigeria to willingly make
statecraft accountable to the people will be like expecting a constant bright
sunny day at midnight.
Changes
urgently needed, most start with insisting on the overhaul of the electoral
process. The youth of Nigeria must rise to the occasion to change the system of
governance that favors the selection, hand-picking, of office holders in the name
of elections by a privileged few through a compromised electoral process.
