Niger State – out of sight, out of mind

Bad roads and crumbling infrastructure everywhere!

Niger State – that unwieldy landmass that stands out on the political map of Nigeria.  It was already one of the biggest states in the country before Babangida yanked off a portion of old Kwara State and joined it to his home state.

It’s sad that the state now has pockets of ungoverned or bandit-governed communities where gun-toting outlaws tax people in return for protection – protection from the outlaws themselves. It also has Boko Haram. It’s probably the only state in the country with both bandits and Boko Haram terrorists.

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Bad roads and crumbling infrastructure everywhere! The state was already terribly neglected before the marauding bandits came on the scene. Now, hundreds of kids have been kidnapped from schools. More than half of the boarding schools in the state have been closed. Some have been completely shut down. Farming communities are being impoverished. Banks have deserted towns. Insecurity has virtually paralysed the state’s economy. The huge mass of the state is out of sight of most Nigerians except for the portion that juts between Kaduna State and the FCT, skewered so to say by the Kaduna-Abuja Highway.

But even the strategic road connecting Minna, the state capital, to the federal capital through Madalla and Suleja was incredibly bad for many years. I learnt it is better now. I want to believe it. It was riddled with a million potholes and at a point some patches were completely devoid of paving. I used to wonder how the numerous Niger bigwigs – including two former heads of state, former military governors, former ministers, senators, and other assemblymen – managed their frequent trips to Abuja.

In the old days, we would virtually slice through Niger State on our way to Ilorin and Offa. In those days, Abuja was still under construction. If we left Kano right after the dawn prayers, we would be in Ilorin in time for lunch. Come to think of it – there are only two states between Kano and Kwara; Kaduna and Niger. Those road trips allowed you to see much of the country as you travelled through Hausaland, Gbagyi and Nupe communities, sighting the ubiquitous Fulani on the way – the men herding cattle, the women selling fura da nono, threatening nobody – before finally entering Yorubaland. Only the old Kano-Lagos rail line offered more sights and sounds at the road trip.

These days, you can’t just wake up one morning and decide to pack your family into the car and drive down to Ilorin and Offa. Who born you?

But today, to be safe, or less vulnerable, you would have to take the unnecessarily longer route passing through four states to get to Kwara – Kaduna, Niger, and Kogi. And the journey would take the whole day, denying one the opportunity of buying the best kuli-kuli and dakkuwa in the world.

Over the years, the roads deteriorated, Abuja happened, insecurity set in and the route through Niger became haram. I can’t remember the last time I travelled on that road. I can only picture how terrible the Jebba-Ilorin part of the road was. I now only have faint recollections of the Niger Bridge at Jebba. And Kwanar Mutuwa (the Death Bend) – the sharp bend on a sloppy area that was the graveyard of man and vehicle when the Niger route was as busy as the Abuja-Lokoja route is today. Everyone who can afford it now flies from Kano or Abuja. Everybody now by-passes that large swathe of Nigerian territory. A friend of mine who used to religiously travel from Kano to Ilorin for Sallah along the Niger route now flies with his whole family, spending hundreds of thousands of naira.

The insecurity the Zamfara and Katsina states are equally as bad, but Niger State seems to have been completely forgotten and neglected.

Something needs to be done urgently about all these things – insecurity, decayed infrastructure, disrupted education of children, displaced communities, paralysed economic activities – before the state finally implodes. I’m being told that the governor is doing – as we say in Nigeria – his best. Perhaps he needs help. Massive help.

 

Dr Muhammad Shakir Balogun wrote from Abuja.