Two days to Valentine’s Day. Be nice to everybody and not just your lover. Do things right. Stop taking bribes. Stop using your uniform or position to intimidate or deprive others and then say a deceitful ‘Happy Valentine’s Day to your poor wife or girlfriend when you have fraudulently deprived so many of happiness by abusing the trust of your position, your uniform and your connections? How many Nigerians would genuinely send a Happy Valentine’s Day card to anyone you have ever encountered in uniform?
Commiserations to Nigeria for being one of only eight countries not to be granted ‘an Indian visas on arrival’ in India, a privilege given by India to 180 other countries. Nigeria, your reputation is in tatters.
The long overdue change of Mbu, the questionable, biased Commissioner of Police (CP) offers Jonathan the chance to extricate himself from the quagmire of Rivers State which threated to drag him into the unpresidential mud. What Rivers State needs, and what all states deserve, is an unbiased police service protecting all life and all property and not interfering in the primacy of the political organs except where they break the law. In Oyo State we also had such huge problems and various supporting CPs and party strongmen. It took a natural death and a change of police and political leadership to usher in a welcome avalanche of ‘Ajimobi peace’. We pray this will be the lot of Rivers State. Nigeria does not deserve violence. Someone should study Oyo State and Ajimobi’s methodology and spread it around the country.
Across the country, why is that the ‘uniform in Nigeria’ continues to disgrace itself even as so many police and military lay down their lives fighting crime and terrorism and making orphans of their children, widows of their wives and paupers of their families?
What is it in Nigeria and indeed in most of Africa and even developed countries that mutates a uniform wearer into a monster terrorising the very people the uniform is to service? But we must face our own malignant demons and not bother with the uniform demons of other countries until we have to visit them when crossing the border. Nigeria and Nigeria’s NGOS and professional bodies and indeed every Nigerian must never remain mute about this ‘uniform terrorism’. We must stand against this deeply ingrained ‘Nigerian Uniform Terrorism’ which has unfortunately received the full support of the organisations that those uniforms are acting on behalf of. Where are the police and supervisors? Tell every Nigerian you know, old and young, sitting at windows above the road, sitting in shops, sitting in public and private transport or walking down the road that they can and must record anything and everything that involves officialdom. The mobile phone can be the ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction Of Corruption’ WMDC? We must record on mobile phone every encounter with every official from secretariat to road until a change, a movement against uniform corruption, comes over Nigeria. ‘Operation Record Uniform and Official Corruption’. The sooner we start on this course the better. Be assured that it will happen as frustration at the brazenness of uniformed corrupt practices on the streets, in traffic, on the highways and in government offices where the ‘uniform’ is a title from Director General down to the filing clerk and gateman and is embarrassing the children and the nation.
Nigeria must discuss, dissect and deal with the massive and apparently insurmountable corruption of the Nigerian uniform of any and every colour –black, grey, camouflage, yellow, white, maroon, light brown, navy blue, army green, airforce blue or whatever. Who smiles at a uniform? It is corruption to kill a citizen without cause, but the list of needless killings gets longer by the day. Road uniforms known for entrapping drivers and demanding needless items like fire-extinguishers and stupid unrealistic particulars. You may be the best and brightest professional in Nigeria dispensing life with each handshake and nod. But you are still subject to the myopia of governance, administration and the all-pervasive power of mediocrity and the Nigerian ‘Uniform’ police, FRSC, on your way home. Once a uniform is worn, even the uniform of political or government office –the agbada and babanriga and the civil servant, Tax consultant- its wearer mutates into a ‘legally illegally’ extortion monster, automatically and irreversibly.
Continuous voters registration is the norm, as a person becomes 18 years old that person goes and registered as a right and responsibility. Such a voters card can be used for transactions and ID purposes.
Surely ‘performance, planned and executed’, are supposedly key elements in the reason for the establishment and existence and desire of all politicians and political parties. If not they were fraudulently set up, fraudulently run and fraudulently in power. Unfortunately it seems that political parties are ‘strategizing’ to recover ‘lost’ states and ‘win’ more in the coming election perhaps ‘by any means necessary’. However some parties are strategizing even as they haemorrhage governors, senators, representatives, council chairmen and thousands of their personal faithful political cohorts.
Unfortunately the political parties always forget that the first rule of successful politics as judged by the people, the citizens, the voting majority is ‘performance’. PDP and other parties must commit to maximum developmental performance as a ‘political strategy’. They must also be willing to subject that performance to public, not publicity, critical scrutiny. They will lose all honest elections unless they resort to rigging and cheating.
