•Nigerian youths holding national flag at a rally
Stolen money returned again and again. This time just last week it is $52.88m linked to assets seized from Diezani Alison-Madueke, a former petroleum resources minister. At every turn to fight corruption, we are thwarted. Time was when the clarion cry was ‘Let’s have women in power in both public and private. They will not be so corrupt.’ Well, we all remember Oceanic Bank and its female leadership. We all remember the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs with its successive female leadership. Then we were told we need a younger leadership which would be less greedy and less corrupt. We have had several governors who could be classified as much younger than their predecessors. Sadly, several of them have been summoned to EFCC and some are in court facing corruption questions some of them around payment of school fees years in advance for their children. So, not surprisingly, it seems the corruption bug does not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender or age or ethnicity and religion and language spoken. Anyone and everyone placed in authority, or in any employment at every level from gateman to General Manager, can decide to become corrupt or remain honest.
Let us not make any excuses about institutional corruption. An institution is a building and cannot be corrupt. It is the humans in the institution that create the corruption. Corruption is a personal decision which becomes the cause of the a debilitating disease resulting in deprivation of money, material, opportunity and can worsen actual physical disease through theft of money required for food, treatment, surgery, medicines. Corruption makes school books expensive and scarce, school equipment inadequate and a student under educated and not fit to pass the examination.
$52.88m is a lot of money especially with our rubbish exchange rate of N1,600+ to the dollar. But it is just the tip of the iceberg of funds MIA-Missing in Action across every sphere of governance and a lot of the private sector.
We always seem to leave it too late before ‘discovering’ massive fraud after the harm has been done. Pre-emptive monitoring with resultant reduction of corruption if not total prevention should be the lessons taught and learnt. So how many more episodes are we going to witness before the lessons are learnt and put into practice?
Corruption takes many forms especially when it comes to the population count. We must GET THE NEXT POPULATION COUNT RIGHT. Judging from 30 million election turnout and National Identity Number, NIN and other statistics and the over 60 million ghost potential voters who had cards allocated but did not turn up to use their cards and the fact that censuses have always been corruptly manipulated for political and economic advantage, many believe the overall census figure may be inflated by 30% or more. Now 30% of the touted numbers is 140-160million. Let us be generous and agree on a current population in the region of approximately 160m. We are planning a census. Will it be as secretive, corrupt and contentious as previous censuses some of which were marred? Remember the former Nigerian Population Commission (NPC) chairman who wanted to reveal all only to be unceremoniously dismissed, fortunately with his life.
But is a multibillion census on a nationally empty stomach a wise decision expenditure at this time? What will make it any more accurate than past censuses mired in miscounting, inflated and deflated and politically manipulated numbers?
Surely, our government does not want to count people who will become corpses through hunger and security mishaps before the census figures are even published. Indeed, the census count workers may be ridiculed or even attacked by irate citizens going through the extreme hardship being faced by almost the entire population at present.
So, we should first save Nigeria from food famine and insecurity and the high cost of living and kick the census exercise football 2-3 years down the road to a more stable time.
There are serious lessons Nigeria must learn and teach from the massive climate change upheavals going on worldwide-heatwaves, floods, fires, drought, and earthquakes. We are in a dangerously hot period in Nigeria and have had market fires, sadly, a usual occurrence now. Massive fires in different parts of the world have been on the rise in recent years, the worst currently ongoing in Los Angeles. Our prayers and thoughts are with the victims and the homeless. We are told that overhead electricity cables, destabilised by wild winds were prone to spark and set fire to the dry grass following a long drought.
Our electricity suppliers must be trained on protocols instructing them to immediately switch off the relevant sections of the national grid at the first signs of high winds or when a fire alert is received. The electricity authorities need to pay much more attention to weather reports and should be in the state security loop to quickly take counter measures should he face a similar fire hazard seen in LA. The winds have often fanned ignited dry grass smoke across the expressways of Nigeria and fires are common along many roadsides in the dry season, some deliberate some spontaneous. Instead of overhead electricity cables, underground cabling is now being recommended abroad. Will that happen here? Importantly, we must make more protocol guidelines and effort to discourage random unsupervised fires from now on. We must fight fires before they start.
Source : The Nation