The suffering in the land is approaching Armagedonian dimensions, yet legislators are distributing newly minted posh SUVs for their personal use. Governors are enjoying their jumbo retirement packages. Many of them are double dipping by collecting second salaries as ministers and senators.
The way official vehicle acquisition is done in societies that value transparency, probity and prudence is to purchase fleet of vehicles into a pool from which officials including legislators could request service. We all know what happens during change of government, officials almost always cart away official vehicles and government properties. Ours is an insane asylum where decency, decorum and normality have been turned upside down.
The insensitivity of Nigerians in position of authority is repugnant, disgusting and appalling. Yes, the Nigerian citizenry has docilely kept mute anesthesized by religion that preaches “suffer-suffer for world enjoy for heaven”.
Yet behold the day of judgement and reckoning not in heaven but on the streets and neighbourhoods of Nigeria is at hand unless our politicians take quick action to pull the brake before our country descends into a state of anarchy pushed there by unbearable suffering and depravation.
Now that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has his full mandate, he and his team had better go to work to turn the ship of state away from the iceberg it is heading towards.
Financial palliative, and the few grains of rice per family will not do the job. Major structural realignment is needed. First on the dock is to reduce the crippling cost of governance.
The insanity of retired governors collecting their pension while collecting salaries as ministers and senators needs to be put a stop to, even if only to send the signal that this government feels the pain of the longsuffering citizens. The insane jumbo emolument package for our legislators needs major review.
Our civil service is beyond bloated. It needs massive purge. Yes, it will cause short term pain, but government can ameliorate that pain with severance package. Go to any ministry in Abuja, it is like a day in Jankara market with civil servants milling around with no offices and contributing absolutely nothing to governance other than as leeches sucking the life out of our commonwealth.
We need a pruner to cut down the size of the civil service at all level, to improve efficiency while reducing cost. Too many civil servants create clogs and corruption-ridden bureaucratic inertia to slow down the delivery of services so people are forced to pay bribe to get their constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizenship like driver license and international passports.
Just like the banks and the private sector are moving toward digitalization of service, government needs to move in the same direction. Many of the services that are currently been stalled in human created bureaucratic lock-jam could be automated. Nigerians are now conversant with online banking. They can adapt to online access to government services.
Our recurrent expenditure heavy budgeting is crippling our ability to make the necessary infrastructure investment to move our economy into the 21st century
In order to stimulate industrial production in our country, the ministry of power should be absorbed under the presidency and declared as a national emergency and priority. The president must set as his top priority to achieve uninterrupted power supply by the end of his first term.
If he achieves just that one feat, he would be leaving a legacy for which Nigerians will be eternally grateful. Our foreign exchange crisis, the devaluation of our currency and the pauperization of Nigerians are all tied to the de-industrialization of Nigeria related to its epileptic power supply and our economy becoming import dependent.
With a population of 200 plus millions our economy could self sustain based on internal demand for locally manufactured good. Hence, the health of our economy, our currency valuation and our insatiable appetite for foreign currencies are all tied to our poor power generation and distribution: Fix that and our economy will take off like a super-charged rocket:
The notion that Nigeria can go back to the immediate post-independence regional constitution of the 1960s is a pipe dream. There is too much over-romanticism of the glorious 1960s which lasted only six years before the military struck. What was our population at that time?
How many secondary schools and universities did we have as a country? What percent of our citizens were admitted to the few secondary and tertiary institutions even in the southwest where free education was a policy?
What was our national GDP in 1966? This urban myth of Nigeria, especially the West, as a rich global economy at par with South Korea has gone on way too far for too long. It’s about time we debunked it.
As children, many of us lined up outside the few homes who owned televisions. Only the smartest of the smartest gained admission into the very few secondary schools that existed in the West.
After primary school, many of my classmates could not proceed to secondary school because they couldn’t gain admission under the stringent admission policies including entrance exams and interviews. Many parents had to buy ‘tolotolo’ (turkey) to secure admission for their children.
The ginny of state creation is out of the box and can never be put back. Oyo and Osun state could not jointly manage Ladoke Akintola University. So, this notion that we could collapse the existing 36 states into their old regional structures is a fallacy, and an unattainable pie in the sky.
Yes, Chief Awolowo remains the best president Nigeria never had. President Tinubu has a once in a lifetime opportunity to change that narrative. But this notion of the old western region was a harmonious Eldorado of sub-ethnic equity in the distribution of government benefits and industrial parks is another mythology we have perpetuated for too long.
The Ijeshas and the Ekitis whose cocoa and the Edos whose oil palm bankrolled the region’s economy did not benefit from the region’s industrial policy. None of the major Oodua Investment benefits accrued to the Ijeshas and Ekiti.
When people talk about return to regionalization, they need to ask the Efiks, the Ibibios and the South-South how much they benefited under the old Igbo dominated Eastern region. We need to stop deluding ourselves with the over-romanticism of regionalisation.
What the country needs to do is to give states and local government fiscal autonomy. Governors must take their sticky thieving finger off the local government allocations. The citizens must hold government officials, especially the local government where the impact of government should best the felt, accountable for the judicious use of our money.
Yes, it is our money of which they are just mere custodians we elected to serve our interests. We must clean up our applauding electoral system to give the citizens full power to elect their leaders. When politicians are able to manipulate the electoral process via rigging or by bribing the judiciary to install them via elections petition, they take away the citizens leverage to hold those in power accountable for good governance.
The Tinubu presidency has already started implementing some sort of structural autonomy via executive action by allowing states autonomy to develop their power infrastructure. But that is grossly inadequate and unsustainable. We need to codify such fiscal and political restructuring via legislative constitutional mechanisms.
There are many other steps that needed to be taken, but these are some quick wins the Tinubu presidency can take immediate action on right now that will make substantial difference in the life of the citizens. Time is fast running out. The ship is taking in water and swift action is needed to salvage the ship of state from sinking to the abyss.
