Infrastructure

1999-2015 PDP Years May Be The Worst Of Our Lives

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Adeola Aderounmu

The problems facing Nigeria are huge. They are also many.

The solutions are not easy to define because for over 50 years the country has been neglected as successive governments looted and stole just the way they liked.

Both military and civilian administrations in Nigeria neglected the people and plundered the country like emperors and tropical gangsters.

There is no federal government in Nigeria that has successfully planned for the future or made long-term plans to ensure national growth and development.

In 2011 Nigerians followed their minds while neglecting the power of deep cerebral thinking as they voted massively for Mr. Jonathan. The votes-Nigerians claimed-was not for the PDP.

Unless something is done in the days ahead the next 4 years may add to the previous 12 as the worst years that Nigerians alive have ever seen.

Security is at its lowest ebb since the end of the civil war. Terrorism is fully established and Boko Haram can take Borno, Kaduna and even Niger States if it so desired.

Food has never been so expensive in the history of Nigeria. The prices are increasing daily and the purchasing power of the Naira remains low as its value continues to tumble.

The worst express roads and highways in the world are still in Nigeria. One Minister cried at Benin-Ore road but she could not repair 0.1km of the stretch. One former Minister of Works and Housing is from Benin and his cerebrum could not connect to his nerves to get the simple messages: repair, build, restore, maintain.

The chronicle of Nigeria as a failed country is also very evident in the education sector, health department and area of infrastructure.

Lack of housing schemes and absence of water for majority of the population joined with the high cost of food in making Nigeria a country inhabited by more than 90m impoverished citizens. This, though hardly spoken about widely, is probably the worst man-made tragedy of our time.

With the near complete absence of state-supplied electricity Nigeria is among the worst places on earth inhabited by humans. We near Somalia, so precariously!

In addition to a President, Nigeria has Ministers, (including the unnecessary, wasteful and redundant Ministers of States), Lawmakers, Governors, Commissioners and even Councilors. For all the PDP dominated years, very little has been done to touch the people’s lives.

Nigeria has been left in the hands of Special Advisers, Special Assistants, Expert Facebookers and PR Consultants. Nigeria probably runs the most expensive government in the world and nothing is in the pipeline to change the status quo. Looting continua..! It is also not a joke that a governor in Nigeria appointed a special assistant for Lagos Matter and another special assistant for Lagos Affairs.

The ordinary citizens and people of Nigeria are suffering like mad as billions of Naira are wasted daily on side attractions including one useless talk of tenure elongation.

A 3-month genuine anticorruption program to arrest and prosecute all corrupt people in and out of government will avail more than the senseless debate about tenure elongation. Such a genuine adventure will settle for all time the question of accountability and probity. It will make elections less adventurous.

But all the governments in Nigeria including the government of Jonathan have been dominated by corrupt people many of whom have been recycled. This cycle of idiocy makes it impossible to fight corruption but relatively easier to distract with irrelevant issues like duration of looting tenures.

But in any case the government of Jonathan has promised to do wonders. It promised a lot during the election campaigns in 2010 and early 2011.

The office of the Nigerian president is too powerful. It’s like what the Yorubas called Kabiyesi (no one can question you?). The Nigerian presidency offers room for both laziness and lackadaisical attitude.

At this stage of post-election 2011 what should Mr. Jonathan be doing?

His schedule should be taking him round all the Federal Ministries in Nigeria and probably all the states of the Federation for the fulfillments of electoral promises.

In the Ministry of Transport he should be commissioning several kilometers and stretches of federal roads and rail lines all around Nigeria. It is very important that such projects are everlasting projects with regular maintenance included in the contracts.

In the Ministry of Education he should be restoring all the Federal schools including the Federal Universities. The competition will be to ensure that all Government Universities are more efficient than Private Universities that have been established with looted funds or collections from congregations.

In the Ministry of Water Resources Jonathan should be using his knowledge of science to work together with the Minister he has appointed. Millions of Nigerians are living without access to pipe-borne water. Water-borne diseases and malaria are giant killers of Nigerian children and adults too.

I remember that in Yar Adua’s village women fetched dirty water from deep wells and they sold the water. They are still probably doing that while Sambo is likely drinking imported water.

There are quite a number of natural sources of water in Nigeria and the south coast is lineated by the Atlantic Ocean. Clean and affordable water should flow in every home in Nigeria and 4 years is good enough to accomplish that.

In Ogoniland gradual poisoning of the population commenced since 1959 or so through polluted water and soil and when the full effects will become manifested, extremely poor Nigerians from the extremely rich oil fields of the Niger-Delta will face one of the worst human-induced health crises the world has seen.

Jonathan is asking the UN to help rid his region (Niger-Delta Ogoniland) of the devastation of oil spillage. A report stated that it will take about 3 decades to clear the mess. It has taken more than 5 decades to create it.

Why ask the UN? What about our EIA specialists in Nigeria? They should be on the next flight to Abuja and then the next one to Ogoniland to start working. Sincerity of purpose is the keyword. UN will not clean Nigeria. Nigerians will cleanup Nigeria when people like Jonathan start putting square pegs in square holes rather than buying 3 presidential jets for one person in a nation where poverty wage is negotiated.

What has Jonathan thought about concerning providing houses and flats for Nigerians? What is the function of the Federal Ministry of Housing? When was the last time that the Federal Government of Nigeria embarked on aggressive and rapid housing programs?

What is wrong with the Federal Government working together with private construction companies and well established banks to ensure that decent flats and apartments become affordable and accessible by 2014 or 2015 as Jonathan’s parting gifts to Nigerians?

The number of Nigerian politicians and public figures dying in foreign hospitals is increasing. This is a disgrace I am so ashame. The Babangidas and the Yar Aduas of this world know better by now that health is wealth and that having quick access to quality health services is very important. But they were so daft and myopic not to make such services available to themselves at home in Nigeria.

One hopes that the sad omen will not hit the Jonathans. It is now time to do something once and for all about our health institutions from the community levels to the highest spot. Our University Hospitals must also be revived immediately. We can’t wait for the next state-sponsored treatment abroad before we open this discussion again.

All the things that take Nigerians abroad for treatment including the twisted ankle of Mr. Atiku should be highlighted and corrected in the next 24 calendar months at most. Even the children with holes in the heart should have corrective surgeries in Nigeria and not in India. How long shall we express inferior intelligence by the things we do wrong? Just how long?

I can go on with what Mr. Jonathan should be doing. It is not the least that he must work together with the Minister of Youth, Labour and Productivity to ensure that the problems of employment and national productivity are tackled and solved. It will be recklessness not to re-introduced government-organised farm settlement schemes across Nigeria under the control of states or regions. Cocoa, groundnut, oil-palm and cassava must hit the export again.

The Minister of Natural resources under Jonathan must have his or her hands full with the type of promises that Jonathan made. Has anything progressive been done in the last 2-3 months in the coal and steel industry for example?

Most of the things above will not work in the absence of electricity. Kaduna State Governor Patrick Yakowa said that power will be constant by 2015. We have heard that before. Mr. Jonathan must make electric power supply a priority and ensure that we light up Nigeria by the end of his first year in office. If this means destroying the generator importers cartel, so be it!

Mr. Jonathan has a moral obligation to keep permanent tabs on all the ministries under his rank. Nigeria must move away from the textbook-forms of administration where Ministers read out their plans every 4 years from what they have read in books or on Google and do nothing after the recitations.

Mr. Jonathan took a record time to appoint his cabinet. After wasting our time he cannot place people into positions and let them do what they like. What Nigerian politicians like is to do nothing. They love to steal and loot.

We cannot afford that carelessness any more. Mr. Jonathan should not oversee another 4 years of wanton looting and he must not orchestrate one. He must put his house and office in order.

Mr. Jonathan should get out of the comfort of Aso Rock. He can’t spend 4 years meeting people and holding endless discussions. When is he going to hit the roads? Four years is such a long time in human existence. Some people’s lives were changed in 4 seconds, some in 4 minutes.

Nigerians said they voted for Mr. Jonathan and not for the PDP. I’m still laughing. It is left for Mr. Jonathan to prove Nigerians right or wrong. 1999-2007 was a complete waste of our lives. We became a GSM society. And so what? The world has since moved on. Our debts were cancelled. Where does that leave us now? Abacha’s loots were partially recovered. But the Nigerian bookkeepers under Obasanjo stated that the money was spent on projects executed a few years before the loots were recovered. The chief bookkeeper is back. A country of abracadabra..!

Even if Mr. Jonathan is a new magician he will never achieve half of the lies he promised during his nationwide campaigns. Those are elections jives and they are full of deceits and thoughtless moments. The greatest legacy Jonathan can leave behind as his single tenure runs a countdown is to ensure that as much as possible is done out of his debts of promises.

He must get somewhere commendable in the race and targets he set for himself. The task before and after The Jonathan Era are huge. Nigeria definitely needs a transformation borne out of honesty and patriotism.

I cannot end this essay without stating my support for regional governments. Instead of tenure elongation what we should be seeking on the long-term are constitutional changes tied to eradication of corruption, devolution of power, regional productivity, growth and development.

Nigeria: From Regional Government to Terrorist Country

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By Adeola Aderounmu

Nigerians were shocked when on December 25 2009 a young man by the name Abdul-Muttalab attempted to bomb an America-bound plane which he boarded from Amsterdam.

I was one of the several bloggers who screamed “Nigerians are not terrorists”! History and current events have proven otherwise.

Nigeria is now a front liner among the terrorist countries of the world.

In one of the most cowardly expressions I’ve read this year, Mr. Jonathan said that no nation is free from terrorism. Indeed, true because Norway just got hit. But what has Mr. Jonathan done since the war started in Maiduguri and now brought to his doorsteps in Abuja?

The Nigerian Police headquarter in Abuja the capital of Nigeria was attacked on Thursday 16th June 2011 by suicide bombers. They succeeded in detonating massive loads of bombs inside the parking area of the Nigerian Police Force in Asokoro Abuja.

Those who are responsible for these series of successful terror attacks inside Nigeria have exposed the complete lack of intelligence of the Nigerian Government.

No one has been arrested since the first letter bomb of 1986 which was masterminded by Babangida and his security aides. In recent years the use of bombs in Northern Nigeria has escalated with neither arrest nor conclusive investigations. In Northern Nigeria bombs are more common than groundnuts.

The weaknesses of the Nigerian Defense mechanisms have constantly reminded us that Nigeria can be annexed at any time by serious external aggressions.

The present state of insecurity of the country called Nigeria may be an introduction into the final chapter of Nigeria as a unified anomaly.

The Inspector General of Police boasted that we are in the last days of Boko-Haram. Rather than be intimidated the group came out strongly to blast the headquarters of the Nigerian Police and to simply tell Afiz Ringim to shut the f— up!

But how did Nigeria become a terrorist country?

Students of political science should be doing extended researches on the rise of terrorism in Nigeria. Through such comprehensive studies we can get the full report on how terrorism has become a part of our existence in Nigeria.

Nigeria right from onset is a political error and an occurrence facilitated by the selfish (and probably stupid) thinking of the colonial masters. How can people and ethnic groups that have nothing in common be formed into one country? Intelligence was deducted when such economic and political decisions were formulated.

The stupidity of the creation of Nigeria would have been probably neutralized by a purposeful leadership. But what Nigeria got since 1960 has been a series of government dominated by tribalism, nepotism and massive corruption. Summarily government in Nigeria is like total madness in high places.

In the process civil war was fought from 1967-1970. Violent crimes and armed robberies rose remarkably after the civil war.

After 50 years of near total neglect and non-governance, unemployment increased in Nigeria and the standard of living dropped sharply. Austerity measures were introduced in the early 1980s and Structural Adjustment Program in the mid-80s under one of Nigeria’s most notorious dictators, Ibrahim Babangida became Stomach Adjustments program as hunger crept into the lives of millions of Nigerians. we have not recovered.

The governments of Nigeria neglected the well-being and welfare of the people. Politicians stole money and as I write stealing remains the main reason why people go into politics in Nigeria.

Religious riots became common. Many internal borders became disputable and ethnic rife mixed with religious tensions.

Many decisions including the location of state capitals for newly created unviable states were based on political gains rather than social justice. Many Nigerian politicians are too ignorant of the meaning of social justice.
They promoted ethnic politics and even religious politics.

Education was relegated and today public education is almost non-existent. Several politicians stole public funds and started private schools. Many sent their children abroad as they stole blindly.

In short Nigeria became a country where the government runs its own thing on one hand and the citizens run theirs on the other hand. The two became exclusively independent of the other especially as votes are useless and elections are predetermined. So in Nigeria, anything goes.

Many people made it in life out of extraordinary situations and amidst little hope. Many did not make it and will never experience good or quality life because the system is too disorganized and cruel to recognize the plights of the majority who are suffering.

In 2003 the central government collaborated with the River state government and gave weapons to the youth so that the PDP can win elections by force. This terrible carelessness gave more power to local groups who later became formidable as militants in the Niger Delta. Across Nigeria this became more common.

Rather than educating the youth and providing for the welfare of the states, the PDP government under Obasanjo gave them guns!

As the 2011 wrapped up, riots broke out in Northern Nigeria and many innocent people and youth corpers lost their lives. Boko Haram rose to unprecedented heights. The connections are too hard to ignore. The problems escalated because of the level of illiteracy in the North and the fact that religion and politics are perfect volatile mix in that region.

Boko Haram may be facilitating the last chapter of our common history.

When I started this essay a few weeks ago the activities of Boko Haram was daily and widespread. But as I conclude this July month of 2011 it seems that they have relaxed a bit.

Or maybe the security apparatus is starting to work properly.

Everything in life is a function of time.

Nigeria remains one country just to serve the corrupt and the cabal. For example we know that electricity may never improve in Nigeria because those who import and sell generators are government officials and politicians.
They will never wish for a better power supply.

It is the same for the education sector. Public education may never improve in Nigeria unless all the private schools own by politicians are taken away. They were established with stolen funds.

It is time for all Nigerians to have a stake in the future of the different nations within this ugly combination.

We should support a return Regional government similar to what we have in those days: Western Region, Eastern Region, Northern Region and Middle Belt. If necessary new regions like the Niger-Delta should be introduced.

It is time for each region to determine how it wants to run itself using its own economic, human and natural resources. It is time to take the power away from the center. Let us return it to the region where it will be possible to manage and even uproot corruption. It is absolutely useless to remain like this. What we have now is a product of corruption, made for the corrupt and to enslave more than 90m Nigerians who live in absolute poverty and penury.

There is no simple way to analyse Nigeria and the way forward will demand a lot of sacrifices. Surely the killings in the delta and in Maiduguri are not the type of sacrifices. They are too costly.

Nigeria: Before the Strike Over Poverty Wage

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Adeola Aderounmu

Warning strike actions will start across Nigeria on July 20 2011 over the non-implementation of the minimum wage of N18 000. I call this wage poverty wage anyway.

The state governments are saying that they cannot pay the amount as they don’t have that kind of economic resources.

Before the 2011 presidential elections even the NLC went to show support for the election of Jonathan. When Jonathan told them that he had approved N18 000 as their minimum poverty wage, they did not ask him how it will be implemented. They had a stupid meeting with Jonathan I would say. They were too myopic at that time.

The thing is: they can strike forever. The money that the state will use for the payment of the minimum wage is with Jonathan and the federal government.

More than 50% of Nigeria’s wealth is concentrated at the federal level, yet it was Jonathan who signed the minimum wage without initiating processes that will reduce the amount of money at the centre.

Jonathan and NLC are dreamers, I guess.

What is the federal government of Nigeria doing with more than 50% of Nigeria’s wealth?

I know.

Jonathan, his lazy ministers, his idle assistants and the jokers in the National Assembly and House of Representatives are sharing the money daily. These funny crooks who called themselves politicians are taking home more than 25% of the country’s wealth.

The rest of us, more than 160m can go to hell with the remaining 75% that is used to service re-current expenditures.
N18 000?

What can that buy? Still the state government cannot afford to pay it!

Can Jonathan and David Mark live on N18 000? Funny people.

I heard that Italy has a big debt. Do you know how much it is? 1.2 billion euros.

In Nigeria only Dimeji Bankole stole more than that as the speaker of the House of Assembly. This means that he can even pay off the debt of another country including Italy.

Nigerian politicians have no clues. They are interested in looting and they continue to succeed. The people praise them for their ill-gotten wealth and this encourage more and more people to go into politics just to steal.

The minimum wage should not be a problem. If states were formed based on their viability, then N18 000 should not be a problem. But states were created in Nigeria so that they could receive stipends from the oil sales. That is a tragedy on its own. A group of people sit idle all month, wait for money from the federal government and then share or loot the money as the case may be.

The local governments wait upon the state government for the same reason.

So in Nigeria’s politics, it is about money sharing.

They do nothing to promote the state of infrastructure or to develop the service and manufacturing industry. The economy is almost mono-economy surviving mainly on the sales of crude oil. We even import finished oil products. What a country..!

Nigeria needs to be restructured. More than ever before I want the re-emergence of regional governments where the regions would have more control over their resources and economic development.

All the powers concentrated at the centre should be decentralized and all the money going to the federal government that is not doing anything and that is also very far from the people should be taken away and given the regions.

But these things won’t work if corruption remains a way of life. Almost all Nigerian politicians are thieves. So it has been difficult to have both reforms and positive changes.

That makes the struggle for the minimum wage a minor struggle because the system is wrong and bad. It is very annoying actually.

NLC has not used its powers in the right way. It should actually be initiating a revolution that will sweep all these looters into jail or exile.

Nigeria and some countries in West Africa need their own revolutions.

Otherwise these looting, stealing, corruption, laziness in government and the diseases and poverty that continue to spread like wild fire will remain forever in West/ sub-Saharan Africa.

Good luck with your useless misinformed strike NLC. When you are ready, you will revolt once and for all.

The Curse of the Oil, Cost of Kerosene, Absence of Electricity and Greediness of Nigerian Rulers

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Adeola Aderounmu

Oil remains a curse to Nigeria, there are no doubts about that.

Norway has oil and is rated as one of the most developed countries in the world. Norway is a prosperous country. How did Norway and some other countries succeed with oil while Nigeria failed woefully? Before the unrest in Libya, Libyans were living a fairly good life!

On paper, Nigeria is a prosperous country but in reality the masses are suffering despite the oil wealth of Nigeria.

Nigerians including the poor masses living in the Niger Delta where Dr. Jonathan was born are rated among the poorest people in the world.

Northern Nigerians, especially the women are rated among the least educated people in the world.

What a tragedy!

Why is a blessed country like Nigeria home to some of the poorest people in the world?

This is because of poor management, bad rulership, and outright looting of the Nigerian treasury by greedy men and women who have pretended to be serving the country since 1960.

There is an ongoing trial in Nigeria where the immediate past speaker looted billions of naira.

Imagine what will happen to the European economy as a whole if 1 billion dollars is unaccounted for?

Has anyone imagine what will become of Greece or Spain if 1 billion dollars suddenly grew legs?

Even Sweden will suffer as a country if 1 billion dollars suddenly disappeared.

But in Nigeria, several trillion of dollars have disappeared since 1960 and the thieves and looters are free people, mostly.

Some have died and their children have inherited the stolen monies.

Then we complain that our economy is bad, that our living conditions are terrible and about all the anomalies that we put up with.

If all the looters living in Nigeria can return the monies that they have looted, Nigeria will pay off her debts in a matter of seconds and there will be plenty of money to resuscitate the rotten infrastructure and to build new ones.

There will be free education and possibilities to provide basic needs of life like food, water and electricity.
Nigeria does not deserve a debt pardon, aids or grants.

Nothing close to those is among our needs.

What we need is to join hands, surround all the looters and force them to cough out stolen loots.

Then we should start serving out serious consequences to those who are still looting or that will be looting in the future.

When all these have been done, we must not forget to re-diversify our economy. We must go back to agriculture. The groundnuts from the north and the cocoa from the west can feed the world again.

We have pretended to be working on our natural deposits but we have deceived ourselves for too long in that aspect.
We should seek genuine efforts to do real work and sustain and spread the prosperity of Nigeria.

THE COST OF KEROSENE

Assuming that all is well with Nigeria, we should have moved away from using kerosene as the source of cooking in our kitchens.

There are over 90m Nigerians living in poverty, so kerosene remains the number one source of energy for cooking. In reality this is still a dangerous way to cook food as explosions are common due to counterfeit kerosene products and poor kitchen habits relating to safety and precautions.

If all was well in Nigeria, a product like kerosene should be provided free of charge for families that still prefer this out-dated method of cooking using of kerosene stove.

But instead a keg of kerosene, usually about 4 liters went up to about N1 500 in the scarcity that we have seen in recent days.

In the absence of scarcity this product cost about N500. That is a lot of money for poor people.

ABSENCE OF ELECTRICITY

I have written several times about the sad state of electricity in Nigeria. Electricity supplies in several places are close to zero percent!

Businesses are grinding to a permanent halt in many places because of the lack of electricity.

In the computer village in Lagos, it has become so bad that small scale businessmen and women are on generators 24-7.

Do they have a choice?

These people are crying inside. They are tired, worn out and living with hope of a better day.

WHAT NOW?

The choices of good men in Nigeria are too limited. It’s as if politics especially at the top has been forever left to men of questionable characters, ex-rogues and gangsters.

Nigerians really hoped on Goodluck Jonathan but some of us did not. I respect the right of Jonathan concerning his aspirations but it is sad that Nigerians did not see that Jonathan is a PDP representative and that the PDP has no good plans for Nigeria.

The evidence since 1999 are there for all of us to see but Nigerians decided to differentiate Jonathan from the PDP.

The consequences are here with us.

The counter arguments are going to be rife. Nigerians will forget that the morning shows the day and that the hopes that they have in Jonathan are the same that they had in Obasanjo in 1999. Today, 12 years into the reign of the PDP, the standard of living has dropped sharply, and the percentage of unemployed Nigerians have increased. More people have dropped below the poverty level. Only a very negligible percentage of Nigerians have joined the (rich) middle class.

There is no hate over our arguments, time will tell. But I can add that 4 years from now the arguments will take known dimensions-a man cannot fix Nigeria in 4 years!

Nigerians will come to realize someday that with a PDP government and the current Nigerian mentality of service provision and lack of true patriotism, we may end up even worse in 2015.

Only time will tell.

In the meantime, there are reasons to step up anticorruption activities. There are urgent needs to invoke national debates on the way forward or backward for the various segments or nations within Nigeria. There is a need to discuss true federalism and what each region wants to contribute or take away from the national treasury.

The present structure is suicidal. There is a serious need to discuss wealth creation and distribution. With the threats of secession, growing terrorism, civil unrest and religious intolerance there has never been greater need than now to discuss about the entity called Nigeria.

Delay is dangerous!