Who can forget today is June 12 when democracy was so callously killed at a huge cost to normal Nigerians who are yet to recover. Governments should stop calling for public/private sector partnerships before they themselves do anything good. Government should stop haemorrhaging so much wealth needlessly in corruption and deal with the poverty issues. Only then will the private sector come on board through CSR projects. Governments should not shirk their leadership role in this anti-poverty area.
A slum is a slum and almost impossible to escape. Everyone in the slum needs water, toilets, security, education and a job just like those in the government reservation area or a mansion near the governor’s lodge. A poorly equipped school is a poorly equipped school. Poor people do not ruin banks. Rich people do with schemes and rich people’s unpaid loans. Bankers are rich men and women. Therefore they have no real right to talk about poverty alleviation especially since it is their policies which perpetuate that poverty in the land. How many poor Nigerians are victims of shylock lenders because the bank interest rates are too high and the bank loan is unavailable to the poor? Greed-eaten landlords demanding two or three years exorbitant rent for shabby gutter-close face-me-I-face-you or better put face-me-I-disgrace-you holes glorified with the name ‘rooms’ must accept their own responsibility in perpetuating poverty in the ‘failed state affair’. Lagos State has banned the taking of more than one year rent, but is that working? Landlords are just as guilty as bankers. In Ibadan, government has given notice that toilets are essential in all houses.
Everyone needs a small loan at one time or another, even CBN governors. It is now realised that even a funeral or wedding can be turned into a business venture with projected profits after a short term investment in flashy IVs and infrastructure like wakings, wedding parties, canopies, luncheon and well-placed N500,000 obituary adverts in newspapers and on the NTA nine o’clock news to bring the waking and wedding worms, www, out of the woodwork. The sympathy helicopters and jets, often paid for by government and therefore people’s taxes, scuttle from and to Abuja swarm like fat flies and mosquitoes darkening the sky and filled with the great, the good, the bad and the ugly to be seen with lesser mortals regardless of whether or not they knew the deceased or the wedding couple.
When a loved one falls sick, name the bank which will give a troubled wife or husband tiding-over money for surgery, medicines, or school fees? Most banks worldwide would, but Nigerian banks would not, so what is the use of putting your salary there year after year for your working life. No trust or shared responsibility!
Can the new Police Service Commission actually do anything? Remember the fate of the last Police Trust Fund meant to upgrade the police and with the likes of past IGP Tafa, of N19b fame, still giving advice to the current IGP, what hope have we in heaven of getting a police to be proud of? A sum of N5-10billion should be set aside now as we are at an intermediate stage between war and peace. The police need a higher visibility with more mobility and patrols. N1billion will buy 100-500 vehicles@N2-5m each. In most cities small cars costing N2m will suffice for corner parking and increased presence. The larger jeeps@N5-7m are for centralised police station back-up, convoys and interstate roads. Therefore if we allocate N5b to different sized vehicles costing N2-5m, we will triple the available vehicles on the country. Motorcycle patrols, in pairs are also valuable for around the police station and neighbourhood patrols. Instead of crushing okadas, perhaps it would be more useful to recruit the machines to this job although they are usually two stroke pollution generating engines. Each equipped police patrol motorcycle probably costs about N500,000. How many police stations are there in Nigeria? 5000? The annual maintenance budget is what? Investment in data bases, criminals fingerprint, photographic, occupational etc must to be pursued quickly as must a network of forensic laboratories. In these days of unemployment and entrepreneurship and Sure-P employing 5,000/ state or LGA, it should be obvious that white collar computer jobs for photographic and fingerprint and personal records and DNA data base entry are needed. In addition hackers and other computer wiz kids, retired yahoo yahoo 419ers, digital still and video photographers, basic scientists, biochemists, food technologists, microbiologists, ballistic experts, forensic anatomists etc are all needed to make up a formidable forensic armament against corruption, fraud, crime and political devilry. Even accountants and banking experts are required to unravel the intricacies of bank fraud. You cannot employ such people on a silly salary scale. They should be treated as if on secondment from the private sector equivalent elsewhere to avoid being frustrated by police interested parties to any investigation.
One cannot escape the conclusion that powerful forces have consistently paralysed good police work and police workers by deliberately refusing to properly elevate the forensic laboratory to international standards even though money was allocated annually in the budget. Someone should tell us how much that money is in total. Is it N1b in some Past IGP pockets? We can all see investigative forensic policing and crime detection on television, so we know our deficit. The 1930-style police station requires to be upgraded in design and content.
