Tag: Nigeria

All Nigerians are united in wanting the physical development of their country. They want better roads without potholes, efficient electricity supply and distribution, running water, good schools, financially endowed universities and tertiary institutions, functioning hospitals, clean environment, regular and punctual transportation system, clean potable water and all the services that make a country great.

When we travel out of our country, as our elite does often, we are amazed at how other systems run and their citizens take the efficient operation as normal. We envy them and wonder why we cannot have the same system in our resource-endowed country. When some of us settle in these countries, we go along with their system and do what everyone does to keep the system going. We pay our taxes and if we don’t pay, we are quietly reminded and if we don’t get the hint, we are summoned to appear before the tax board or court and if we are recalcitrant we are sent to the slammer to learn a hard lesson. If instead of doing the right thing we try to bribe our way through, we are arrested for offence punishable by law and there is no pleading about not knowing that giving bribes is an offence or that we are related to the president, minister, governor or chairman of our local government area. If we are caught messing around urinating outside toilets or in toilets in the pubs or restaurants that are available on request to those pressed by nature, we are arrested for constituting public nuisance or if we plead insanity we are sent for psychiatric examination. In other words, there is punishment for social deviancy.

This of course does not mean everyone complies with rules, regulations and the laws. It is a philosophical question which Plato the Greek philosopher answered in his book THE LAWS. He had argued that the existence of laws in any state is a manifestation of an imperfect state and that if a state was ruled perfectly, there would have been no room for laws!

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Now let us come back to the situation in our country Nigeria. It seems laws in our country exist to be avoided or broken because they are considered an inconvenience.  Our penal code needs to be thoroughly enforced. Punishment needs to be sure and certain. We need to introduce administrative justice to deal with minor infractions of the law instead of wasting time going to court when minor offences have been committed. This is what happens in the francophone countries. When a driver, for instance, commits a driving offence, the police can arrest and impose a financial punishment payable immediately or forfeiture of the vehicle until payment is effected.  But in our country, driving correctly on the right side of the road is avoided if there is nobody to arrest the offender. Digging across the road to lay pipes is routine. Selling stuff on the highway is foolishly considered a fundamental human right! Throwing effluents across the road when it is raining is regarded as urban smartness.

I live some miles away from Lagos and it is usual to find traders along the highway wrapping their human wastes and excreta in paper and placing them on the concrete median on newly constructed highway. The aluminium hedges on the bridges are regularly yanked off by thieves to fabricate them into long spoons for cooking and for sale! Our people do not pay taxes and sometimes the tax collectors are not in their offices when there are people willing to pay taxes. Tax collectors sometimes collude with those who want to pay taxes to pay less for a cut. Nigerians except those on salaries who pay PAYE (pay as you earn) do not pay taxes. That is why huge conurbations like Ibadan, Lagos, Kano, Ogbomoso, Kaduna, Aba, Port Harcourt, Enugu and Maiduguri generate little or no internal revenue and have to wait for revenue from national revenue before they can service their urban needs. It seems our people do not recognise the link between development and revenue mobilisation.

People do not do the jobs they are paid for but complain that nothing works while they neglect to do their own little bit to make the collective life of all of us better. People cheat at examinations and deny those who have genuinely done better, places of admission. Parents use their prestigious positions to deny the children of those less privileged admissions into colleges paid for from public purse. What is most frightening is that people cheat to get into so-called prestigious colleges, cheat to pass public examinations and enter universities through cheating and get into public services through manipulating the system or outrightly buying positions and promotions in the public services.

Yet I remember that in this country, we all went through the system and came through public examination and interviews and were offered choice places and having to let go offers and telling our interviewers that we did not want the jobs offered because we had decided to go for further studies on the scholarship of foreign countries or even on the scholarship of one arm of our government or the other all on merit! When Chinua Achebe said there was a country, yes there was and he was damn right!

What do we have now in year 2023? We borrowed money to construct railways and the rail lines are routinely stolen or those issuing tickets print their own tickets in replacement of the railways corporation’s ticket resulting in vastly underperforming revenue generation with no money available to pay foreign loans used to pay for the railway construction. The minister of aviation in a previous administration took foreign loans to build an aviation company in the name of our country but instead of buying new planes simply borrowed one or two planes from a sister country which is much poorer than our country, paints the borrowed planes in our national colours, and takes over public media to launch the borrowed planes as the nucleus of our national airline. When he was found out, he simply went into the shadows saying his patriotic efforts were misunderstood and nothing happened!

There are a few things we can do as citizen-police without turning on each other in murderous rage. In Germany, the concept of citizen-policing is permissible. If one sees a person committing an offence, one can stop such a person by advising him or her that he or she is committing an offence. If the person does not stop, one can call the police. The people can be mobilized in a protest against open looting of a nation’s resources such as the case of the minister fooling around with the people’s money pretending to be establishing an airline. People cutting bridge railings or railways can be embarrassed and stopped in their actions. The commonest misbehaviour is that of trading on expressway or digging highways can be stopped by public action. It may not stop the bad manners but if citizens take their responsibility seriously, it will definitely have an impact. We should also take possession of our physical infrastructure and development by paying taxes and correcting those damaging public property. The current generation may be irredeemably lost in the struggle for citizens’ civic responsibility but we should revise our curriculum in our schools particularly primary and secondary schools to inculcate civic responsibility into our pedagogy so that in future our children’s children do not have to put up with our wretched life and experience. If we husband our resources, protect our institutions and ensure the mobilisation of our resources and their deployment in the improvement of the lives of our people instead of for the benefit of a few, our lot and that of those coming after us will be vastly improved.