The state, we all agree is evil and tyrannical. Everyone therefore blames the state as represented by the centre for all our woes and crisis of nation-building, lack of vision, underdevelopment, insecurity, corruption, inability to feed ourselves and the collapse of the education and the health sectors. Even our elected governors that preside over 42% of the nation’s annual budget when not pretending to seek solutions to their states problem from the centre join us to rail wail and throw stone at the devil forgetting the devil is in us.
Unfortunately unlike the first and second republics marked with the giant strides in education, rural development, agriculture and infrastructural development secured through the versatility and brinkmanship of men of great vision such as Obafemi Awolowo, Samuel Akintola, Anthony Enahoro, Alfred Rewane as well as, Adekunle Ajasin, Bola Ige, Ambrose Ali, Bisi Onabanjo and Lateef Jakande, many of the fourth republic inheritors of power are regarded as unscrupulous, venal, egoistical with naked ambition, surviving only on intrigues.
Awolowo was in power for only seven years. He initiated the free education programme. The number of Western Region youths sent on scholarship to foreign universities during his second year in office was more than the total number of Nigerian youths that enjoyed scholarships under the colonial administration for three years. In the second republic, visionary southwest leaders established universities in Edo, Ondo, Ogun and Lagos. As a result of the efforts of these visionary leaders, the old Western Region was regarded as the most educated part of Africa before the birth of the fourth republic. Today the educational sector has virtually collapsed.
In a report titled Nigeria: WAEC Results as metaphor of collapsing education standards in Southwest, in The Guardian of September 14, 2017, Iyabo Lawal reported the dismal performance of the southwest in the last few years. According to the report, while Anambra, Imo, Edo and Rivers top the list for that year, the southwest states like Ekiti, Ogun, Osun and Oyo once synonymous with high education standards were at the 14th, 19th, 24th and 29th positions.
Anambra State according to the report earned the position because of the state’s investment in education. While the southwest governors who probably never bothered to study the educational revolution under the Obafemi Awolowo’s administration in the first republic or that of Lateef Jakande in Lagos State in the second republic, were neck-deep in the politics of take-over of schools from their initial owners , building of mega schools and self-induced crisis over uniformed uniform for all students, Governor Peter Obi, quietly “returned 1,040 primary schools to the missions that established them, awarded N6bn to the schools as grants, donated buses, laboratory equipment, transformers, generators, dispensary consumables, sports gears, computers and other tools to the schools.”
In 2015, Abia and Anambra took the first and second positions while Osun took the 29th position, Oyo the 26th; Ogun 19th; and Ondo 13th while Ekiti came 11th. In 2014, Anambra, topped the list with Abia coming second. “In terms of education, Nigeria’s Southwest states, the report concluded, “are fixated on the past, lost in the present and without vision for the future”.
In other departments, the southwest equally lives on its old glories. In the area of agriculture, the southwest also set the pace in the first republic. The region was self-sufficient in food production with farm settlements set up for products of primary schools that were prepared to work to raise money for their secondary school education. The region was popular for her Igbimo and Ofada rice. There were cattle ranches set up in about four locations in the region. Today, the same southwest under our new inheritors of power depends on the north for yam, pepper, tomato and about 8,000 cattle valued at about N1.6b consumed in Lagos daily. The N700m Ikun dairy farm set up by Adekunle Ajasin’s administration in the second republic after ex-Governor Oni’s initial efforts at rehabilitation was abandoned and allowed to rot away by his successors in office.
Since there is no vacuum in nature, other states have seized the initiative from the southwest. Governor Atiku Bagudu of Kebbi State started his rice production initiative with about N4b loan, an amount far less than the N5.4b Ayo Fayose spent on building 1.3km bridge over land in Ado Ekiti. The governor recently disclosed that three giant rice millers, Wocat Rice Processing Mill, Dangote Rice Processing Mill and Dadangari Rice Processing Mill are working at full capacity with the state earning about N150 billion from sale of rice last year alone. Currently about 200,000 farmers are cultivating about 400,000 hectares of land for rice production, many of them under the Central Bank of Nigeria Anchor Borrowers programme. There is also the World Bank $15million assisted ‘Nigeria for Women Project’ in three local government areas of the state. The state which according to the governor is also the highest producer of rice, onions and pepper in the country has also entered into partnership arrangement with an indigenous company for an ultra-modern world class sugar processing plant with a total cost of about $330million when completed
With its Ebonyi State’s current 72,000 hectares of rice production, Eboyi rice is already available in every supermarket in Lagos. The Zero Hunger Forum, headed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has also now pledged to assist Ebonyi to generate N48.4bn from rice production annually through offer of technical support.
Road infrastructure has virtually collapsed in the south west with Intra-state and inter-state roads, all in state of disrepair. Governor Fayemi has just announced the award of an N8.5b contract to reconstruct the collapsed Ado Ekiti Itawure Osun boundary road. Travelling from Ondo to Ekiti, Ekiti to Osun or Abeokuta to Lagos is a nightmare.
Yet, of the N3.97tn domestic debt owed by the six geopolitical zones of the country, the southwest according to a Punch newspaper’s last Tuesday August 20 report, credited to statistics from the Debt Management Office, accounts for N1.04tn. Unfortunately instead of investment on power generation, road infrastructure and light rail to link the southwest states, all our new inheritors of power in the southwest have to showcase are 1.3km bridge over land in Ekiti, abandoned stadia scattered around Osun towns, commissioned empty swamps in Ogun, mega secondary school buildings in Osun and mega massive hospital buildings in Ondo.
The new inheritors of power seem to have learnt nothing from their illustrious forbears. The southwest for instance has been in the forefront of the struggle for devolution of power and state policing .With President Buhari’s approval in principle provided states can fund state policing, one would have expect Fayemi and his southwest colleagues to seize the initiative. The zone seems to have lost that opportunity with the excuse of Governor Fayemi that state policing cannot take off until there is a consensus among the governors.
To many, such statement only underscores the dearth of vision among Southwest’s new inheritors of power. With good husbandry of their resources, many believe each of the southwest governors who collect between N300m and N600m monthly (N3.5b-N7b per annum) should have no problem funding state police.
