MFCT and the leadership challenge

We have governors who ruin their states for four or eight years only to become everlasting senators trading on nothing but political patronage to secure their loot. It is the tragedy of a nation whose citizenry are celebrated across the globe but whose nation crawls at 50 and shows off in spite of it all. […]

We have governors who ruin their states for four or eight years only to become everlasting senators trading on nothing but political patronage to secure their loot. It is the tragedy of a nation whose citizenry are celebrated across the globe but whose nation crawls at 50 and shows off in spite of it all.

I have watched with keen interest, the emergence of Bala Mohammed as the Minister of the FCT. For a man whose actions impact negatively or positively on residents of the FCT as well as all those likely to come into contact with Nigeria for the first time, this is one unelected office that should be taken seriously like the mayor of major capital cities. Give it to Mohammed, whom we are told is eyeing the governorship seat of his home state, he did impress us as listeners by promising and acting on the car wreckers installed by his politically deaf and dumb predecessor, Adamu Aliero. It is not difficult to see how that happened. Aliero, an ex-governor, rode on the back of his senate seat but turned round to treat his erstwhile colleagues with impunity and even arrogant contempt. To us members of his public, he treated us with utter disrespect and disdain.
But Mohammed has no interest in redeeming the image of Abuja as a jammed city made so by the indiscipline of commercial vehicle drivers and the official recklessness of government drivers who tear through the worst jam with their ubiquitous and disdainful siren and armed escorts.

Mohammed’s pet project is the no-prostitution campaign by which prostitution is rated a higher evil than kidnapping and armed robbery which is fast turning our federal capital into one of the worst jungle capitals of Africa. On the scale of preference of any resident of the federal capital, I do not see how clearing the streets of prostitutes ranks as high as providing water to drink and use or filling the potholes which has made the few satellite towns a driving nightmare. Sociologists would agree that when you highlight otherwise harmless problems, you drive them underground and make a few millionaires of deviants who live by running against the law.

Appeals that the Minister should not shut down the nation’s capital every month-end in the name of sanitation have hit deaf ears. This hangover barrack mentality is a crude way of insulting otherwise conscientious citizenry of an act that is second to nature – cleanliness. The environmental sanitation exercise or curfew which shuts down Africa’s most populous nation, sends negative signals to the outside world – about the sanity (health and mental) of a citizenry and a government eager to showcase its maturity at 50. No capital of any country I know shuts down for four cumulative hours once every month in order to clean up. Most astounding is the fact that cleaning over, the debris is then piled up and left in a heap days later to be scattered by scavengers or washed into drainages by rain. If cleanliness is what we want to highlight, we should reinforce the public health department of the environmental sanitation agency and they’ll do their job.

But Senator Mohammed’s next project (if he lives to actualize it) is to run car dealers into the forest and no doubt, leave the main entrance into the city to be overgrown with weeds and a waiting abode for waiting criminals. These dealers have been sent away from the city centre by Nasir el-Rufai and we as citizens are yet to complain that they have become a nuisance in the areas they are presently located. Public service is about what the public thinks its priority, on a scale of one to ten, this would not feature on the demand of most residents of the FCT.

The minister ought to know that this city is in urgent need of repair. Traffic is gridlocked; the minister should give us a blueprint for solving that problem. Water is as scarce in the city centre as it is in villages, expansion work on the Lower Usuma Dam project was supposed to tackle that six months into Obasanjo’s exit, but it is being delayed without explanation. Security should be a serious issue in any state capital and a priority for any discerning minister. Schools in the FCT are on the list of mass failure, what is our minister doing to remedy that? In spite of the so-called private estate development, low and middle income accommodation is a serious problem. The few available houses are beyond the reach of minimum wage earners. These would appear to be serious issues that should engage our minister, not chasing prostitutes and running car dealers out of business.