Change, what is that?

“Is this the change we bargained for? Is this the change we were promised?  Do you call this a fulfillment of the campaign promises? Things are going from bad to worse. No electricity, no water, no fuel, no money and no salary. Let us accept it that Nigeria has entered one chance bus”. My friend […]

“Is this the change we bargained for? Is this the change we were promised?  Do you call this a fulfillment of the campaign promises? Things are going from bad to worse. No electricity, no water, no fuel, no money and no salary. Let us accept it that Nigeria has entered one chance bus”. My friend with whom I was riding in his car continued expressing his anger and displeasure.  I sat quietly as I listened to his tale of woes. He told me how in Benue State the state government is making a ridiculous law. It is a funny law which says anyone that uses electricity generating machine, (called ‘generator’ for short) will pay a tax. I asked him if it was a fine as a punishment for using a generator instead of PHCN. He informed me that it does not matter whether you are using the generator in your home, in the school, or hospital or hotel or business premises whenever there is power outage and there is always power outage. In explaining the rationale of such madness, the Director General of Benue State Internal Revenue Service (BIRS) said it is for the maintenance of the ozone layer. Which ozone layer? Is it the one covering the whole earth, or there is a specific one covering Benue State? He continued to complain and was becoming really bitter and angry. We got to the traffic light which turned red as we approached it, but he didn’t care nor did other drivers care. They all ran through the red light. I looked at him and told him that it was because of people like him that the ‘change’ agenda may never work. He looked at me and asked in amazement. “What did I do wrong? I am not a politician. I am only a secondary school teacher and how does the change agenda concern me? Am I in government or in the political party that promised us change?” I asked him if he realized that he ran through the red light at the junction when he was expected to stop.  “How does that affect the change agenda? How does that affect electricity and payment of salary? How does that affect fuel and rising cost of living?” I smiled and realized that my friend knows close to nothing about nation building.
What is change and what do Nigerians expect? I am getting to understand what we thought was the change agenda that the government of President Mohammodu Buhari is expected to operate. We expected the coming of APC/Buhari government to herald immediately the end of epileptic electricity power supply. It was to end the fuel crisis and queues for fuel. It was to put an immediate end to delay in payment of salaries and allowances of workers. There was not to be any case of raise in taxation or introduction of new ones, not to talk of the ridiculous one of taxing the use of generating sets. It was like we believed that Buhari and his cabinet had attended another course in ‘governance by miracles’ in a powerful spiritual environment that has transformed them from being Nigerian politicians to political angels and administrative wonderworkers. What were we looking for?
I am not a politician and do not really believe promises of Nigerian politicians at electioneering campaigns. This is made more difficult because more than half of the people who populate the government in power today were die hard proponents of the government that just lost power. We only hoped that with some few persons of integrity with President Buhari, they would chart a new course for Nigeria and her citizens. I listened to Mr. Ahmed Gulak, a former political adviser to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and also an officer of the People’s Democratic Party during his morning interview on Thursday 21st April, 2016 on Channels Television. He said among other things that apart from President Buhari, Tinubu and some few others, everyone in APC today came from PDP. He singled out the governor of Benue, the same one my friend said is making a law to tax the use of generators in order to raise money to repair the depleting ozone layer. He said that the governor of Benue State was a PDP minister in President Jonathan’s government. He only resigned to contest election. He lost the primary election because of the imposition of candidates and impunity in PDP. He left PDP and joined APC and within days was made the APC governorship candidate in Benue State. Today he is an APC governor, pretending to drive the change agenda. He ended by saying “that governor has PDP blood in him”.  Hmmmmm. No wonder!
When we had a change of government last year, I had thought that we Nigerians understood the mess we were in and that we were going to do what the Japanese did after the Second World War. We were going to close our doors, change our attitude to work, re-assess our tastes and desires, have a re-think and rebuild our nation. I thought that we were going to do national orientation, stop violence against each other and change our attitude to work. Some of us thought that change was going to involve all Nigerians because every Nigerian has some negative and terrible attitudes to change from and something new to change to. I never thought that the change we were expecting would take a theater kind of performance where those in the government are the actors while the rest of us are spectators. That was why my friend who was complaining about poor governance style and lack of amenities never saw anything wrong with him running through the red light at the traffic. I thought at this critical moment in the development history of Nigeria, we shall not be in a theater of politics where the gladiators are PDP and APC, where the supporters of each group would cheer or jeer depending on which political party you belong. I thought that was President Buhari meant when he made that epic declaration on the day of his inauguration, “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody”. 
The change that Nigerians should bargain for should not just be presence of bread and butter, petrol and kerosene, electricity and job. The Nigerian structure is completely myopic. When General Yakubu Gowon was quoted to have said in the early 70s as Head of State that the problem of Nigeria was not money but how to spend it, when Chief Jerome Udoji committee recommended the huge payment of cash to all workers in Nigeria, we had bread and butter. But at that time, more than 85% of Nigerians had no access to electricity, water supply or tarred roads. Even at that time with all the money we were getting from oil and other exports, they didn’t think of how to extend development and light to the rural areas. In 2015, Nigeria was already in the intensive care unit by the time elections were held. What we were seeing were just window dressing so that the situation would appear okay to allow elections to hold. The former Minister of Finance and Coordinator Minister of the Economy, Dr. Okonjo Iweala confessed recently at the public lecture in George Washington University in Washington DC that Nigeria could not save anything from our oil boom between 2008-2015, because of lack of political will. We had the opportunity to do so but we never did. The three tiers of government wanted the money so that it could be embezzled like others have been completely siphoned. The money was not saved for the rainy day and was not deployed to the critical sectors of our economy and life, so where is that money? They should have gone into massive construction of roads, like the East – West road in the South-South region. By May 2015, Nigeria was not generating more than 3000 megawatts of electricity after over $20 billion had been put into it. But I am not here to lay blames on anybody or person but to redirect our attention to the fact that we have a nation to build.
In summary, the very set of people who ruled Nigeria for those number of years that made leadership in Nigeria seem like an all night armed robbery, are the ones Ahmed Gulak said are now in APC government and that they are strategizing to come back in 2019. Well, ordinary Nigerians will form ‘political vigilante’ to guard our nation. We shall not allow this to continue ad infinitum. The ‘change’ Nigeria needs is a total overhaul and not cosmetic application of a political bleaching cream that only changes the colors of the political party flag and symbols and not the character of the leader.
Rev. Fr. Ojaje Idoko, Director of Pastoral Affairs Department, Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria