You can’t eat infrastructure!

Why are emergency services so wretched that accident victims die simply because help couldn’t reach them on time? Why are social services and pension schemes run so poorly that aged people die for no reason other than a lack of care? Why has the educational system been allowed to collapse to the extent that everyone […]

Why are emergency services so wretched that accident victims die simply because help couldn’t reach them on time? Why are social services and pension schemes run so poorly that aged people die for no reason other than a lack of care? Why has the educational system been allowed to collapse to the extent that everyone strives to educate their children overseas?  To explain all this as merely callousness and complacency on the part of our leaders is too simplistic. Although it’s true many of our leaders have minimal regard for their fellow human beings, especially the less privileged, callousness itself isn’t a principle. It is the manifests result of a misplaced philosophy. Recently at the ground breaking ceremony of the contract for expansion of the Outer Southern Expressway in the Federal Capital Territory, the vice president gave an insight into government’s misguided philosophy.
He said “the growth and development of any nation depends largely on the level of its infrastructural development. It is the cardinal objective of this administration to spiritedly pursue the provision of infrastructure across the country.” Herein lays the fundamental philosophical error of their ways. The government concentrates its efforts on “hard” infrastructure as opposed to “soft” infrastructure. The former is about physical structures while the latter concerns institutions which are required to maintain the economic, health, financial, educational, emergency services, law enforcement, social and cultural systems.  The truth is that the growth and development of any nation depends largely on the level of its human development (i.e. soft, not hard, infrastructure). It’s the age old argument of government preferring economic wealth of the state to the economic welfare of its citizens.
This difference was recently brought vividly to light in Benin City where Governor Oshiomhole has made undeniable strides in the provision of infrastructure which has increased the economic wealth of the state. Paradoxically his party the All Progressives Congress (APC) is witnessing its lowest ebb of fortunes and there is mass decamping to the opposition. This is because despite better infrastructure, the economic welfare of the citizens has reduced through increased taxation, inflation, and joblessness as a result of closure of government businesses. To drive the point home members of the opposition went about sticking plastic forks and spoons to the new traffic lights in Benin inviting the public to eat the lights if they could! In response to assertions that Oshiomhole has developed Edo State with good roads, the mantra everywhere is “na road we go chop?” In the same vein President Jonathan on his way to an infrastructure summit in Senegal said mistakenly that “the level of infrastructural development in the country has put smiles on the faces of Nigerians”. Definitely it has put smiles on the faces of the contractors who overcharge the nation for their sub-standard work, and probably it would also have put smiles on the faces of officials in the Presidency and Ministry of Works who traditionally benefit from the legendary largesse of federal government contractors. But to say that Nigerians are smiling simply isn’t true.
Take a look around on any given day and see how many people have laughing faces or show any signs of happiness. The only ones smiling now apart from political office holders are the mentally insane who stroll naked and unmolested on our streets. At the end of the day physical infrastructure doesn’t pay people’s electricity bills, doesn’t pay children’s school fees, doesn’t pay medical bills, and certainly doesn’t put food on the table. Unfortunately policies designed to alleviate poverty are non-existent  because government mistakenly believes that our greedy, corrupt, and inefficient “organized private sector” will cease exploiting or asset stripping the economy and reverse themselves to provide enough jobs to solve the unemployment problem.
 Our increasingly impoverished citizenship and potentially disastrous lack of employment opportunities requires that Government makes key investments in soft infrastructure. A major drawback with our concentration on developing hard infrastructure is that it isn’t poverty friendly. There is no point building new architectural masterpieces to be surrounded by beggars, or bridges for the homeless to sleep under, so our much touted infrastructural developments are designed to be enjoyed by the rich and are of little benefit to the poor struggling for survival. Handled correctly the matter of building infrastructure could have provided some solutions to the pressing socio-economic problems of the nation.
However, instead of insisting on local capacity building through use of indigenous firms and direct labour wherever possible, government prefers to use international money laundering companies who have been embroiled in corruption sagas all over the world. In truth hard infrastructure means little to the general public. When a private individual earns money honestly and builds a house, it’s something to be commended. When government money is used to construct over-inflated infrastructure it’s just no big deal. Only politicians think there is something to be commended in doing the job they were elected to do by spending government money.
Desperate for applause despite their shallowness of thought and character, inexplicable greed, and failure to re-engineer society or move the nation forward in any meaningful manner, government glamorizes their mediocrity and measure their success by simply awarding contracts! Good governance is about developing soft infrastructure, it’s about ensuring citizens’ rights and privileges, it’s about acting upon an obligation to subsidize the welfare of citizens in terms of education, employment, housing, health, and pensions.  Obsessed with “achievements” that can be seen by the naked eye there is a collective failure to grapple with the real and serious social and economic problems which threaten the very fabric of our nation.