By Abraham Ogbodo
It is not wise to discuss something else until further notice. There is a national emergency. Somebody has said that Nigeria is a country of a particular concern. It is Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America that said so. The man tried to explain ‘a particular concern’ to mean the unabating killing of Christian Nigerians. I thank Donald Trump for showing particular concern to issues that particularly concern Nigerians. He sounded as if Nigeria does not have enough people to show concern about issues that concern the country.
I have not come here today to discuss issues that concern Donald Trump and America. I have come to raise my own particular concern. Before that, I do like to thank Donald Trump for showing concern. Since he showed his concern, leaders in Nigeria have been, a kind of, up and doing, showing concern. Activities have picked in the military. Men and material are being deployed and redeployed. The Presidency is talking of appointing ambassadors, and one of particular concern, to be deployed to Washington to engage the arising concerns over there.
Even if it is for the optics, concerns are being shown everywhere. It is a very good development. Before now, nothing, outside taxation, was of particular concern to the Tinubu government. It is not as if I am a fan of Donald Trump. In fact, I didn’t want him to become President again in the US. Thank goodness, God did not grant my wish. Who would have been mad enough in the whole wide world to shake off the official lethargy in Aso Rock and trigger this flurry of concerns by PBAT about life and living in Nigeria? I can now understand why people say that disappointments could be blessings in disguise in the long run.
Thank you very much Donald Trump. But for you, we might not have realized what is of ‘particular concern’ and what is of ‘general concern’ about Nigeria. Yes, killing of Christians is of concern. However, that is not the only killing that is of concern. The killing in Nigeria is across religions, regions and ethnicity. Perhaps, your concern would have been better received if it had been expressed over the killing of innocent people and not Christians alone in Nigeria. It is good to express your humanity regarding the turmoil in Nigeria. What is not good is the threat to impose war to cause more killings and therefore more concerns, chief of which, is the concern of IDPs that can overwhelm the entire West African sub-region.
That said, I want to add that there are a lot more concerns in Nigeria that do not concern Donald Trump. How does it concern Trump, for instance, that a population of 200 million runs on 5000 megawatts of electricity? How is it the concern of Trump that the courts and not votes decide winners of elections in Nigeria? How does it concern the US and her President that the Nigerian government and university teachers cannot agree on a formula to save higher education in Nigeria? If Trump ever expresses concern here, it should be to thank us for spending billions in dollars to train our children and wards in schools in America because schools here cannot give the right training.
Maybe Trump does not know that, once upon a time, the Saudi crown and heads of state from the Commonwealth, came to a health facility in Nigeria called the University College Hospital (UCH) for their medicals. He would not also know that less than five decades ago, the naira was stronger than the dollar. That Nigeria rejected university degrees from India as not good enough to guarantee job placements in her systems. The same India is today competing limelight with the US in technology and global affairs. But things have changed for the worst which is why Trump is talking anyhow to us. He even called Nigeria a “disgraced country.” It is not his fault. It is the legs that shortened the goat to a small animal. Let’s not pretend. The concerns are very real. Monies voted for health have consistently failed to translate to good healthcare such that President Tinubu does not have the confidence to check his blood pressure in a Nigerian hospital. He goes to France to do it.
Today, public electricity is a vanishing phenomenon in Nigeria. Electricity has suddenly become bigger than its essence. It is no longer as simple as it was presented by Thomas Edison. It is a science that has proved difficult to master. For so long, Nigeria has been struggling to understand the simple art of concentrating electricity into a grid that will flow ceaselessly to power homes and business. It has not worked. The grid system is fast yielding to embedded systems and private initiatives. As it is, the generation next may be forced to think that solar panels and generators or some other ad hoc arrangements are standard national approaches in electricity generation. There is a national grid that has never served its purpose once.
The country is shrinking in real terms on all fronts. It is not only humans that are dying. Businesses are dying also. These are the real issues of particular concern. It is not what Trump is saying. In other words, the concerns are more about us than they are about Trump and America. And they are for us alone to resolve. The killings by terrorists are not happening because we are helpless. They are happening because we are visionless. The capacity to see beyond our nose is lacking. Almost, always, issues around nation building are resolved for the convenience of the moment. We hardly resolve to build a heritage to support our tomorrow or posterity. For instance, winning elections is more important to us than building a culture of effective leadership recruitment. The nation is secondary in our considerations. And so, while huge investments have been made to establish elaborate institutions for nation building, we have deliberately forgotten to invent a nation to build. Everyone works for him or herself. Self-serving is paramount, exposing the faultlines that have continued to plague the Nigerian State.
The same military that stood tall and firm with ECOMOG to stabilize the West African sub-region when it mattered most, is now standing challenged like a weather-beaten chicken before ill-trained and poorly equipped bandits. It throws up concerns that have everything to do with us and nothing to do with the American President. It is either decades of heavy defence budgets, in terms of building dependable capacity and capabilities for the military have not added up, or the will to act appropriately to combine men and machine to combat the prevalent evil, has been subverted. Either way, the concern is for us to fix and not an external factor.
What it all says is that there comes a day of reckoning some day. Each time a budget created to fix a factor in the development metrics is stolen by politicians, the nation is diminished. It is a triumph for an individual or individuals but an unmitigated defeat for the collective. Aggregated, it would be discovered that civilian and military leaders must have stolen, over the years, the military capacity to defeat the Boko Haram terrorists. Just the same way that the country’s capacity to provide good healthcare, good education and good road networks must have been stolen by politicians. Persons elected and appointed to protect the common heritage are themselves the plunderers. It yields to an impossible system where negativity defines strength.
Going forward, I seek a different classification for official malfeasance in Nigeria. Just saying that a public officer has stolen big money is not making good sense anymore. Since they now steal in billions, it will be quite easy to do the quantification in real terms. If for instance, a Senate President steals N500 billion, the way to add impact is to attach the equivalent of that amount in the development of social or physical infrastructure. With the most generous estimates, N500 billion can build and equip five teaching hospitals. And so, instead of just saying that N500 billion is missing from the national treasury, it should be reported that five teaching hospitals have been stolen by a Senate President. It can can be put differently; like saying that a Work Minister has stolen 500 kilometres of dual-carriage highway or a Housing Minister has stolen a community. This kind of substitution of figures for real value tells a better story.
Back to the Trump challenge. I am asking for the discussions around the statement of the American President to be properly streamlined. The concerns in Nigeria including the one expressed in Washington are real. It is just that they are not the kind of concerns that call for the intervention of America in the manner their President is presenting it. If Trump who desires strongly the Nobel Prize for peace wants to back off from that mission for war, there is a better way to do war in Nigeria. He wants freedom and life for helpless Nigerians. I guess that is the desire of President Tinubu too. Both men are united in their desires. Trump can therefore send his planes and men to strengthen Tinubu’s tactical capabilities to defeat evil in Nigeria. The genocide is not on Christians alone. It is on all of us. More persons are dying slowly from hunger and frustration than they are dying from the bullets of bandits.
