INEFFECTIVE HEADS

INEFFECTIVE HEADS

Something is wrong, where a man supposedly elected, paid to steer the affairs of the state, yet cannot create employment for the people who employed him as promised, when seeking the job with a purported blueprint to solve the unemployment problem, in hand. Housed in a massive mansion by the state, but cannot initiate a workable housing program to house the people who gave him a comfortable home.

Round the clock, national resource fuels his abode and mobility, even as imported fuel he fails to make available for the people to buy at fuel lines.

Then one wonders, why steal the stool if performance is not part of the steering lexicon, yet he knows enough to place hurdles in the way of audit of his stewardship.

Surely and steadily, this ineffectiveness is making it strenuous for the sleeping masses to slumber in peace. Believe he does his predecessors that, “that the people are toothless”.

Watch the weather, a wise counsel, the storm on the face of the wall is unlike the former time. Right now, frustration lives on the skin of the restive people. Fifty flirty rooms’ mansion, one of your forerunners got away with. However, the bird that read this storm says, you would be lucky to live in a hamlet, within this shore, should the gathered break gauge in your term of office.

Be wise, make jobs, make durable roads, build enlightenment schools, build functional hospitals, refine the bestowed crude oil within our borders, and provide healthy portable water. Right the wrongs, as the patience of the people is drying up.

IN DARK SHADES

Something is wrong when third-world nations' rulers and ministers travel to working countries in dark shades, so that they do not see the good roads, twenty-four-hour electricity, pipe-borne waters that are taken for granted, functional hospitals that they run to, at the slightest itching on their dry, unfeeling skins. 

Otherwise, tell me, what sane mind goes out to spend converted weak currency into a strong economy? To access the kind of facility they are being paid to provide for themselves and the people. 

They proudly come back home to the woes, with their dark shades left behind at the desk of a functional airport. At least nature is good at dishing the right meal, as power failure, a popular slogan in our enviable environment, often welcomes them at the port of return.

Anyway, they expect the darkness, hence the reason they possess a pair of electrical generating engines. So that on alternate nights and days, they would have power in their mansions.

NATIONAL HONORS

Something is wrong in a situation where more than fifty-five of our political office holder and their collaborator in both the private and public offices are holders of national honor, and yet not one of our critical national sectors is out of comatose. The situation makes mind wonder, where is the location of the performances that yield the merit, which are widely publicized, in announcement and congratulatory messages, in the national dailies.

World bodies and organizations should put their head together and give my nation an international award for a meritorious dysfunctional state. Otherwise, we should recall all the awards, from the member of the Order of the Niger to the Grand Commander of the Niger, from the inception of the awards to the most recent.

Because we all agree that this nation is a failed state.

ENDEMIC CORRUPTION

Something is wrong with a nation in which no stratum of its fabric is free of corruption. A state in which corrupt characteristics have become a way of life. Let us take the petrol chain as an example, where the owners of tankers would have to pay a bribe before receiving an allocation of fuel. Yet they will still have to part with another set of bribes to get to and pass the loading queue. At the point of sale, the pump gets adjusted by the proprietor to make excess profit; still, the pump point attendant will collect a percentage of the content to serve the motorist, and if you are not diligent enough, the attendant will still short-change you by delivering less than your money paid for into the vehicle.

In a government hospital, one has to pay to get attention and a bed space. In the establishments and ministries, one must part with hard-earned currency to avoid a case of missing file or unwarranted delay. One of the reasons the online, say registration, activities of governmental bodies do not function as designed is that some of the operators of the system put in the way various hindrances so that the processes would have to pass through them physically, and deliver some currency into their mucky pockets.

Every stratum stink of it, even the well-paid worker in the oil sector manipulate and pads contractual figures to amass unmerited returns.  

Something is certainly wrong in a state where the populace, from the Commander-In-Chief to the Messenger-In-Service, is not content with their take-home pay, even when the package ought to get them home and beyond.

A nation where no one seeks the answer of a man who became a governor with no personal building of his in town but left office with purported one hundred and seventy-nine choice houses in his name after four four-year terms in office deserves a surgical operation. 

An urgent ponder on what went amiss with the principle of a ‘good name is better than gold’ of the recent past must be undertaken. Before this pandemic, it became the official color of our nation's state flag.

CONSUMING THE RESERVE

Something is wrong with a policymaker who extracts black gold, sells it out to a foreign country, only to turn around and buy the refined product of the same crude oil hitherto sold out.

If elementary arithmetic were right, the initiator returns the buyer’s money plus profit, as well as empowers its workforce, while at home, unemployment bites the populace to high heaven. 

This same prudent policy miller, flare gas, a byproduct of crude oil exploration, for upward of forty-five years, continually intentionally shifted the goal post of ending the flaring.

It took a foreign dignitary, on a courtesy visit, a minute to point this out as a colossal national waste of acquirable reserve.

These self-proclaimed wise men and women who make policy on our behalf would rather leave a huge reserve of bitumen beneath our soil, and spend billions in hard currency to do roads that fail annually.

The functionaries, who make these policies, know the trap they set, the population calls it, re-budgeting to launder more funds.

Consequently, consuming the reserve, which ought to safeguard the future of future generations, even as there is nothing of meaning on the ground, neither the purported roads nor other infrastructure to gladden the eyes and mind of the living generation.

This brings to mind the drainpipes called steel rolling mills, railroad networking, power holding company, Nigeria telecommunications PLC, aluminum smelting, a national fertilizer company, etc., to mention but a few.

Specialists in the art of policymaking that drag the nation backward, while other nations with comparative natural resources/manpower or less are leaping beyond bounds.