Follow Us on Google
A participated in different forums towards the end of the year, where I had the rare privilege and opportunity to speak on the current state of our country. One point I harped on very strongly was on lack of organization and thinking and deep reasoning preceding governance and general policy conception and implementation. There is this culture of reactiveness.
Our leaders at all levels just sit in the office fully occupied, doing routine job designation tasks, clapping for themselves for jobs well done. There is this attitude of waiting for things to happen and even get worse before the officials would scamper and begin to search for solutions. The accepted approach rests on “Ad-hoc” patterns. This is even when some of the issues are easily predictable if thinking and reasoning were applied.
There are numerous examples to draw from: recall the deaths in the stadium of young men and women trying to gain employment into federal agencies. The figure was known, ordinary sitting down and imagining scenarios would have sufficed, but trust our leaders, nothing of such took place so young citizens were exposed to harm and they died. Yes, they died. It was not for their carelessness just that Nigeria happened to them. What about flooding and its horrendous devastations.
This is a familiar story. We all know what had been happening, the negative outcomes and the response of the government. Initially nobody gave advance warnings later we begin to have them yet citizens have had to die. Their country failed them.
We come to the latest chaotic occurrences last week, when citizens left the cities to return to their country homes, to celebrate the Christmas and end of year festivities. Citizens were held up in traffic jams across various parts of the country. Many travelers spent either a day or two for a journey that ordinarily shouldn’t have lasted more than 10 to 12 hours at most.
The victims included women and children. Many of them could hardly find food and water at some point of the journey. A good number were exposed to manifest security challenges in view of the high level of a culture of thinking through and reasoning out our situations before things happen or begin with the contemplation of policies and their implementation. We have noted for instance that under no condition should our young ones be made to go through pains let alone dying in search of jobs.
These are simple things. Officials put out notices of job vacancies, receive responses and determine those who qualify for call ups. What this means is that officials have the number of job seekers they are looking for. Knowledge precedes action. What should be done is simple, identify space and officers available and allocate different dates to an agreed number of the job seekers. That is a very simple
But this is not what our officials did, instead they gathered everyone in one location and hell came calling. Flood issues are the easiest to solve. In the first place the natural waterways are known. We have offices that man these areas, they have requisite expertise. There’s in addition town planning and survey units, agencies and ministries. Part of the job description includes ensuring that people don’t go building in flood prone areas.
We know the duties but not the work. In the country we see citizens for whatever reason go to build along river banks. They establish their businesses on the borderline of big rivers. The consequence is often massive destruction of property, business ruination and in some instances death of innocent citizens.
Travelling towards the end of December isn’t a new phenomenon. That there would be movement of citizens on a massive scale doesn’t require clairvoyance, it is a given. Yet, we stumble into the season as if we don’t know what would happen and what the likely fallouts could be. Commonsense which we have been told doesn’t grow in the back yard of the foolish should tell that when citizens have to move into the roads in droves traffic jams are likely.
What to do? Study the trend, draw from experience and fashion out clear answers. Some of them should be mass deployment of security officers of different but inter-related functions. But this is not what we do. In our case we allow things to happen and thereafter begin the chase for remediation, not permanent solutions.
In the country it has become a culture to punish the citizens. Officials inflict pains before they begin the search for right answers. This pattern needs a change. We don’t lack capacity what is missing is the will to ensure we run things well. There is a need for a change. Let it begin today, even now.
