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Dotun Oyeniyi
 Author, Economist and Practicing Attorney
London, England

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The government is not and cannot be bothered about the poor performance of the police in ensuring adequate security. Why should they? Aso Rock is secure, Akinola Aguda House is secure, Apo legislative quarters are secure, the governors’ lodges are secure not to mention the fact that only those armed robbers that are out to dig their own graves will attempt to break into the IG´s office in spite of the colossal amount of cash usually kept there as discovered after Ehindero’s exit from office.

 

NIGERIA AT 48: A GOVERNMENT AT WAR WITH ITS OWN PEOPLE
 by Dotun Oyeniyi
 

Nigeria is 48 and as usual, governments at the Federal, State and Local levels have rolled out the drums. The heads of governments at different levels came out; their fresh, well nourished and mostly hefty bodies planted in immaculate dresses and their rotund cheeks sprouting forth a smile of derision to the wailing crowds of mostly hangers-on and beneficiaries of their administrations, sprinkled with innocent school children. These leaders are the current gladiators, the veritable commanders of the victorious troops in a protracted war against the people.

It is a war. Nigerian government is at war with its own people and there are two sad ironies in this war: the first is that it is the people who provide the government with the ammunition with which the former is being bombarded and secondly the casualties in this war are one sided. The dead, the wounded and the captives –the so called prisoners of war are all on the side of the vanquished masses, rarely did the government ever record any casualty.

Let us start with the dead, the dying and the wounded. A visit to the Nigerian hospitals across the country will show an alarming number of citizens dying daily from diseases that are curable in other lands with people’s governments. The best of our doctors have left the ‘war zone’ for greener pastures in Europe, America and even Saudi Arabia. Those that are still in service, remain, not so much for the love of ‘combat zone’, but because they are yet to secure those soul-saving visas to escape from a country that has almost become the equivalent of hell fire that all religions admonished us to save our souls from.

Those doctors that have defied the odd are working under very excruciating conditions due to chronic government’s underfunding of the health sector. A blatant, callous and pathetic refusal by the government to inject the much needed cash into these hospitals had turned them into ´mere consulting clinics´ or what one person referred to as ‘death centres’.

At the Lagos University Teaching Hospital where my mum died in December 2006, I sat at her bedside when one of the doctors came in to take a blood sample from another patient. It is the responsibility of the patient’s family to buy all sort of things needed to take care of the patients, from as minor as sanitary gloves, tissues, cotton wool and syringes to drugs and maybe even surgical knives. As the doctor entered and requested for a glove, a member of the patient family scurried out of the ward to buy one from a nearby chemist, there was no time to waste, the doctor left the bedside of the patient in anger because he had a dozen other patients to attend to. Another member of the patient’s family, a middle-aged lady, ran after the doctor and held him by the tip of his overall coat, knelt down and said: “e gba mi, my dad would die if you don’t take the blood sample today, we have been waiting for you for three days now, please don’t go.” The doctor’s attempt to avoid this arrest was abortive as the lady held him with all the energy she could garner. The solidarity in the hospital was spontaneous as all other families in the ward stood up to implore the doctor to wait for the glove. The doctor looked around the whole ward for a while; suddenly he stretched his left hand forward to grab a loaf of bread lying on the patient’s table. We were thrown into suspense as he unwrapped the plastic (nylon) bag that housed the bread. As if preparing for a tricky surgery, he placed the bread on the table, naked, and dipped his right palm into the plastic bag, with his left hand; he brought out a sellotape from his pocket and asked for assistance to secure the plastic bag around his wrist with the sellotape. In a flash, he has taken the blood sample.

In the 21st century Nigeria, a doctor is improvising with a plastic bag to take a blood sample for lack of gloves. It was like a scene from a Hollywood war movie depicting a battlefield’s emergency clinic. Who says we are not in a battlefield? And why should we expect the government to fund a hospital where the enemies are to be treated?

Tens of thousands are dying avoidable deaths on our roads yearly. The roads are so bad but the governments couldn’t be bothered because they can afford to buy jeeps whose gigantic wheels are the antidotes to those ubiquitous potholes. To drive a car on Nigerian roads, you do not need to be a qualified driver. Has anyone ever heard of someone being qualified before putting his car on the road in a war zone? All you need is N3,500, your passport photograph and your details. Give all these to an agent and a driving licence will be delivered to you within a week. You then have the licence to go out there and kill as many people as you wanted from the enemy camp.

During the elections, all hell is let loose to gain political power by all means. People from the enemy camp are commandeered into thugs and subsequently armed with sophisticated ammunitions to deal decisively with opposing thug groups. In the resulting senseless murder and maiming in the name of elections; the families of those in government are immuned from the rampaging guns of those thugs as they have been temporarily relocated to Europe and America to hibernate while the election violence were going on. After the elections, the suppliers of the electoral weapons, the politicians, do not ask for their returns. Those weapons end up in the hands of the armed robbers, to be used again in maiming and killing fellow citizens. In war parlance, this is called death by a friendly fire, as those armed robbers could only kill people from the same vanquished camp and not those in government.

The government is not and cannot be bothered about the poor performance of the police in ensuring adequate security. Why should they? Aso Rock is secure, Akinola Aguda House is secure, Apo legislative quarters are secure, the governors’ lodges are secure not to mention the fact that only those armed robbers that are out to dig their own graves will attempt to break into the IG´s office in spite of the colossal amount of cash usually kept there as discovered after Ehindero’s exit from office.
 

 

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