So our elected leaders have arrived their destinations having been voted in for another four years. It is the time for them to think deep about their four-year term as a report card and remember what it is like especially for those who lost. It is exhilarating to get in there I am sure, but the job is beyond the arrival at the position. This is when all those ideas you nursed when you were struggling to get the attention of the voters must now come to play. Did you have a manifesto? What did it say? How much of it are you planning to execute? Did you mean a lot of what you said or it was just election rhetoric? This is when you should look inwards and ask yourself what it will be like when you are done in four years. It looks very far away but trust me, four years goes like a flash. You must look back and see a legacy project. One that posterity will remember you for. It is almost like marketing. What are the gaps? What is the need assessment? What do your people need most? Remember, it is not really about you. It is not about your family. It is about the people – those who voted you in.
If you are a governor, this is when to see how to make your state stand out. For so long only city centres mattered. What are you doing for the other parts of the state beyond the capital? In collaboration with the local governments how can we change the landscape of the rural areas. How can we attract people to come and invest in there and provide jobs for our boys and girls wandering around in our hinterlands with nothing to do? How are we concerning ourselves with rural electrification to help the entrepreneurship spirit of our youths? How are we concerned with food preservation? As I travel through Nigeria’s hinterland, I see wasted fruits, mangoes and oranges because of lack of a preservation system. Will the private sector invest in your state? Will direct foreign investment come knocking? How about security?
I have watched with trepidation the comments by those we want to attract who say “Oh no, there are parts of Nigeria I cannot go to”. How are we making our country safe for citizens and non-citizens alike?
I have also kept a keen eye on social media and what I see is pretty devastating. Trolls’, abuse and more abuse. The worst case of ethnic jingoism, language unguarded and all manners of vitriol. I worry about those spewing forth nonsense, disunity and untruth. Everyone is holding their side, building a formidable army of fake reporters and fanning the embers of violence. No one is on the side of Nigeria and therein lies the tragedy. Someone who is not even familiar with Nigeria’s history, unschooled and un-researched will take to social media and say the most untrue things about places and peoples; it boggles the mind.
These days’ even those who know are dancing naked on Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. So, to what end is your post if people in one part of the country begin to kill innocent citizens on your account? When you repost an image of a beheading whose source you cannot ascertain, how do you recover from the consequences. When the violence erupts who are you going to tell sorry? As a board member of the Professor Ibrahim Gambari led Savannah Centre for democracy, development and diplomacy, we have long preached against hate speech with the slogan, “Hate speech is not free speech”. But the freedom and anonymity of the internet fuels the worst kind of hatred. People lie about how they love each other, love Nigeria but go on social media or hire others to go for them and then demolish those precepts. A nation that is growing daily in distrust needs to have an honest national conversation.
Today everyone is everyone’s brother’s keeper in pretence and politicians are not helping matters. Civil servants are supposed to be above board with the nation’s interest at heart but stories emanating even from the civil service is as scary as they come. Nepotism, favouritism, corruption and lack of knowledge in many instances makes us wonder how the few who are upright are coping. I have always wondered whose nest we are furthering whether as politicians or as civil servants when people who have no set skills are hired into a position to fulfil a political need or to prove that we are helping our families. Political thugs cannot be converted to civil servants with no knowledge of the job description. Your brother or sister cannot become a technical adviser just because they are related to you. The consequences are everywhere. People cannot write simple reports and cannot deliver proposals and cannot even respond to memos. In technical and professional fields, we are throwing up fake doctors and fake journalists. When we meet our contemporaries on the international circuit we cannot rise. With the brilliance with which we are endowed we ought to hire right each time. Faulty hiring leads to poor outputs and a nation on its knees. From State Commissioners to Ministers to Chief executives, our watchword should be competence. In other climes, that is the only language they understand. It is irrelevant to them if the person is your brother or first cousin, if he/she is a non-performer, the appointees would not have not done the nation any good. Proper checks must be carried out.
We need men and women at national and state levels and everywhere, who are brilliant at what they do, who understand Nigeria’s cultural ethos, who are disciplined and who hate corruption as all Nigerians ought to. Men and women who understand the urgency of national development and are committed to the nation. Men and women of excellent pedigree, empathy and integrity. We are hopeful.
Eugenia Abu
