Tag: monuments

As I compose this, I am praying silently that some residents of Ado-Ekiti whose houses were demolished with bulldozers rolled out by the Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose, on Monday would have found places to lay their heads in this season of ceaseless rains. Reports from the scene of demolition indicated that the exercise was personally supervised by Governor Fayose, who batted no eyelid as aged occupants of the buildings wept uncontrollably. Only two supernatural incidents—rain and nightfall—could temporarily halt the destructive rage of the roaring machines to give the affected residents of Okesa and Fajuyi areas of the town a few hours to move their belongings before the monster machines resumed their inglorious mission.

Governor Fayose would not be deterred by the wailings of aged men and women who pleaded for more time to secure alternative accommodation before their homes were turned into rubble for the sake of a one-kilometre flyover the governor was hell bent on building in the area. Scores of distraught owners and occupants of the buildings marked for demolition had a few days earlier staged a public demonstration against the plan by the Fayose administration to pull down their structures in furtherance of the flyover project. Acting under the aegis of Okesa Landlords Association, the protesters marched from their neighbourhoods through Secretariat Road to the Ekiti State House of Assembly.

Spokesman of the house owners, Dada Adesanya, had told the lawmakers that the three-day notice the state government issued to them was too short, adding that the owners and occupants of the houses were gripped with fear of where to relocate after their buildings were demolished.

He said: “Most of the owners of the buildings are old people who have no money to build new houses. A notice of three days is too short for them to relocate. Apart from this, the agreement we had with the government was 15 metres to the road before they now came up with 30 metres, which we find too shocking and sudden. Most of the occupants of the affected structures are aged people who have lived in the ancient buildings for more than eight years and cannot afford to build another house owing to financial constraints.”

For reasons impelled more by politics than necessity, the construction of flyovers is seen in this part of the world as a critical element of governance whether it is necessary or not. Because of its physical and easily observable nature, governors are all too eager to go into its construction so they can advertise it as a major achievement and not necessarily because of heavy vehicular traffic. The construction of flyovers in cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt is understood because of the heavy vehicular traffic such cities. In the aforementioned cities, construction of flyovers are not mere political gimmicks. They are mostly done to get rid of traffic snarls that leave people stranded and paralyse business activities.

But there are no such threats in Ado-Ekiti, at least for now, to warrant the construction of a flyover, particularly when the move is certain to compound the woes of a people to whom the state government has not been able to fulfill a responsibility as basic as the monthly wages of workers. Any honest analyst will admit that there are more vehicles in Lagos, for instance, than there are people in Ado-Ekiti.

It is amazing how grossly the governor is at loss with realities in his choice of priority projects for a state with a predominant population of civil servants whose salaries and emoluments have not been paid for months. The flyover brouhaha is coming months after similar protests by farmers whose lands were forcibly acquired by the state government for an airport project. Why, for crying out loud, would Ekiti make an airport a priority project with existing airports in Ibadan and Lagos? Of what commercial value will an airport in Ado-Ekiti be to airlines, considering that very few passengers are likely to be secured on that route?

A major problem with governance in Nigeria is that our rapacious leaders commit the little resources they spare for the public to physical structures even when there are more compelling needs for non-physical ones, just because they think it is the easiest way to give the public the impression that they are working. Thus they will rather commit resources to roads and bridges because they are very easily seen than commit same to drugs for hospitals or laboratory equipment for schools because such expenditures would not easily advertise their governments as performing ones.

I found an example of this in Katsina State in 2007 when the media house I once worked with deployed me to the state to monitor the governorship election that ushered in the immediate past governor, Ibrahim Shema. A visitor to Katsina, the state capital, could not have been more impressed with the pristine conditions of the township roads. The nylon-tarred roads that crisscrossed the city made driving a delight. But I later noticed the desperation with which people were raking water from gutters around the city and I became curious. Upon enquiry, I discovered that the gutters were the people’s main source of the water they needed for domestic use. While water was the most critical need of the majority of the city’s inhabitants, the government chose to spend all the money on roads because it was sure that roads would make better advertisement than boreholes.

In Ekiti where hunger is on the loose because the government cannot pay its civil servants or honour its obligations to contractors, the situation is no less appalling. The story is told of how famished indigenes of the state are stealing pots of amala their neighbours keep on fire, but the governor thinks the critical needs of the people are airport and flyovers. Pity.