Tag: corruption

Lagos and Ibadan have road sweepers and they do a good job though we pray they are paid at least minimum wage. The new improved Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is the cause for concern before it falls back into the weed-growing decay it was before the 15+year restructuring. An incorrupt, efficient, effective, continuing and supervised maintenance culture should prevent it lest it raises its ugly head again.

After this costly reconstruction, there must be a specific Lagos-Ibadan Expressway daily maintenance contract among the thousands, of compulsory, recurrent expenditure maintenance contracts of federal and state and local governments.  There are urgent things needed to repair the neglect, deliberate and misguided in Nigeria. Most of those things are not expensive, or even nuclear physics. They are the simple things that make countries great.

MAINTENANCE & SUPERVISION ARE THE EASIEST THINGS TO INSTITUTIONALISE AND THE FOUNDATION FOR MAKING COUNTRIES GREAT. Without realising it, we in Nigeria were adequately taught by our colonial masters the ‘METHODOLOGY, MONITORING AND VALUE OF MAINTENANCE & SUPERVISION’ but we see ‘maintenance and supervision money’ as stealable, corruption-compliant, budgetary allocations designed to be stolen. WE SHOULD TAKE FORWARD SOME GOOD FROM THE BAD OLD COLONIAL DAYS. The Nigerian Civil Service inherited the routine daily, monthly annually, up to the multi-year ‘Repairs and Painting’ maintenance advance appointments filing system that guaranteed maintenance strategies in the 60s long before computers.

For example, our three different government quarters when my father was a doctor in the 60s and 70s in Yaba, Lagos, were repaired and repainted and inspected by a supervisor every seven years without begging, prompting or bribing. After Nigeria took power, they began to skip the maintenance and supervision date and eventually stopped maintenance visits but the budgetary allocations continued. Corruption and its cost and consequence. 

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The secret of the success of good governance countries is obvious. Visit their airports, schools, hospitals, government and private offices and especially toilets. They carry out continuous daily maintenance and supervision which are a cost-effective way of managing and spreading resources and making structures last longer. They enunciate the generally practiced good habit of maintenance and supervision. The political class apparently needs to be reminded about the ‘good old POTHOLE FREE days’ of the very basic but highly effective Public Works Department. The PWD khaki shorts army of men with a tripod of sticks with a red flag and wheelbarrow of tar in a boiling kettle patrolled and filled potholes before those same potholes became car wreckers and killers. Now we let the potholes grow for years, destroying all traffic, before an overpriced and under-executed road poorly supervised contract is awarded. 

With serious National Orientation Agency, NOA help, we must authorise and teach, our millions of children and youth in our primary, secondary and all tertiary institutions as well as politicians and managers of public spaces like markets, garages and stadia, the value, importance and necessity of ‘Maintenance & Supervision’ in the new school curriculum, just implemented for the year 2025/2026, in tertiary course material and as moral responsibility of politics and polices.  We must practice what we teach.

No country seeking development or claiming good government can allow its primary flagship highway to succumb to dirt and time-accumulated debris. Imagine corn or bush growing on the cement? Has any supervisor reported this? Our Lagos-Ibadan Expressway requires that the cumulative 240km of double road lanes be cleared along all water drainage holes. The contractors who applied for and were awarded the contracts need to be called to order and made to become responsible to make Nigerians proud when plying the expressway.  These contractors, who are Missing In Action (MIA) in the ‘Maintenance and Supervision War’ in Nigeria,  must be made to know there is a new sheriff in town heading federal roads who cares for maintenance and insists on responsible maintenance contract execution  and reporting countrywide. They must be closely supervised with daily and weekly reports sent to the directors of highways authorities for censor and action.

It is easy to clear the roads of dirt and grass. Only irresponsibility allows grass to grow on roads made of tar or cement. Many years ago, this column suggested a way of increasing employment and improving incomes around the country by dividing such roads into five or 10km segments for local communities to recruit local cleaners through contracts given at the local traditional and administration level. Meanwhile the zonal and national directors of works at LGA, state and federal levels must reverse past failures. Erring contractors can easily be identified by their unkempt roads or are they protected so much that  Nigeria is condemned to dirty unmaintained roads.

 At last Nigeria is planning to make solar panels. We have wasted our sun, just as we wasted our opportunity to produce petrol and lost to corruption the income from the over 50 silent petroleum products Nigeria never benefited from when refining was done abroad. Who got that ‘petroleum by products’ money over the last 40 years? Over many years due to corruption, poor maintenance and inefficiency in the petroleum sector, this has cost trillions and even lives.

In 2025 approaching 2027, Nigerians need a ‘2026 Maximum ‘No Corruption’ Service’ from their political, contract, civil service, banking leaders who have traditionally selfishly and criminally placed personal family and political party funding greed above the desperate child, citizen and country needs.

Let 2026 be the ‘2026- NO CORRUPTION YEAR’!     

We want an end to tanker crashes and explosions and loss of lives. The National Orientation Agency animated ‘anti-scooping petrol’ campaign must get to every Nigerian needy citizen. The high climate change temperatures may cause tyres to burst and also increase the pressure in the tanks making them potential bombs. Good, qualified responsible driving and quality maintenance of the hugely expensive vehicles, and good roads, not for increased and dangerous speeding, but for a smooth drive, are essential. 

Following the closure of USAID etc., developing countries must quickly grow up and become self-sufficient through higher standards of political and private sector financially accountable and conclusive anti-corruption investigations to find funds to fill the huge financial hole created by disasters like the earthquakes in Bangkok, Thailand and Mandalay, Myanmar, with over 1,600 deaths. These demonstrate life’s fragility and are tragic for the millions affected.

In Nigeria, we claim to be relatively natural disaster free. Nigeria has witnessed worldwide, stories of devastation and misery caused by droughts, floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and now another earthquake. Please add the huge cost of man-made conflicts and wars. However, we have our own problems costing us more than the cost of the above-mentioned natural and manmade disasters.

We are all aware of the sad and distressing half century of oil pollution. We do have floods. There is also the plight of our IDP-Internally Displaced Persons even though many have helped ameliorate their suffering. Thanks, but more is needed to empower them to return to former social respectability and economic empowerment in their ancestral homes. This can only be done with successful, effective and permanent elimination, not mere interstate relocation, of terrorism and the widespread herder-caused conflicts with local farmers causing such high tensions resulting apparently in the killing of herders said to be in transit. The armed forces have been empowered but they need more support in equipment, drone coverage and personnel, in welfare, medical care of the wounded and family support. Hopefully all pension arrears have been met by recent presidential directive. PENSION PAYMENTS SHOULD START THE MONTH AFTER RETIREMENT, NOT 6-12 MONTHS. DELAYS ACCUMULATE AND BALLOON PENSION DEBT.

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Even without many natural disasters, our Nigerian governments  and Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, have still not all lived up to the fiscal responsibility and financial fundamentals for governance repeatedly sworn to when taking office. Why are politicians boastfully blind to the responsibility for payment of legally-binding outflows for pensions, salaries and running cost like utilities? When did they stop being a sworn and sacred duty and monthly, first line deduction, responsibility of accepting to serve or lead, depending on the mind-set of the political climate. It was a disgraceful abandonment of responsibility for governments and MDAs in the past to have failed to pay pensions resulting in a mountain of debt to armed forces and other pensioners. Yet the past leaders have escaped without censure or even explanation. Nigeria is just recovering from the shocking exposure of officials refusing for years to pay electricity charges for years, plunging many government arms including military formations and teaching hospitals into darkness precipitating misery and mortality-CITIZENS DYING IN DARKNESS IN A COUNTRY WHERE BANKS DECLARE TRILLION NAIRA PROFITS?????

Most Nigerian doctors have operated with torches on pregnant women or performed abdominal surgery for gunshot wounds. Hospitals require electricity 24/7 to run theatre, laboratory and blood banks and darkness is synonymous with death and demonstrates impotence to help save life – thus failing the very reason the hospital was provided. The serial failure, over years, of hospital management or the supervising ministry to pay past electricity bills immediately, month end, or as-and-when-due is a crime against Nigeria’s patients and the medical personnel condemned, without medical tools, to care for sick citizenry from conception to the cemetery. Modern warfare requires 24/7 electricity to power combat equipment and installations.

Nigeria is reeling over the dismissive attitude to payment of land use dues in Abuja as revealed in the recent past. Government and private sector impunity seems to know no bounds.

Of course, we, the non-politically connected, pre-pay through A,B,C,D extortionary electricity bands. Remember we produce a microscopic 5-7000 Mw of power for 160+million, not 200m+, when other counties have more than 60,000Mw for a 60+million population elsewhere in Africa. China adds power to its grid at the rate of 30,000MW/year.  Nigeria cannot afford to continue to carry the huge corruption burden or the huge price tag of Salaries and Perks of political office.  The destruction of a building, costing millions in state citizens’ money, just to prevent legislators from sitting, is an unacceptable price to pay in steps to solve political problems. Converting it temporarily to an orphanage would have been a wiser move, but probably illegal. The excesses of political office and the unlimited budgets are counterproductive considering our poverty level. POLITICIANS – PUT A POVERTY PHOTOGRAPH ON YOUR WALL.

The struggling Nigerian citizen demands a reduced cost of governance with such savings applied directly to poverty alleviation strategies especially improved and widespread education facilities and electricity access- keys to development and self-empowerment jobs. Politics and the private sector must deliver more fiscal discipline with wider population impact and not just Forbes Africa Rich List winners and trillion naira bank profits while we have fiscal losers like 18million Out-of-School youth denied quality education-a birth-right required for future empowerment.