Our Girls; Expressway disaster – Vote out this NASS

Our Chibok girls were kidnapped on April 15, 2014. Inexplicably our Dapchi girl, 15, Leah Sharibu is not released.

The president should explain to the country why he has not accent to the new Electoral Act. Will any new law be effective in this coming election? We have expended a lot of hot air on this and the Petroleum Industry Bill. We need closure.

NASS staff strike, ke? It demonstrates clearly the problem with Nigeria. If those at the heart of an indisputably greedy National Assembly, (NASS) could not be trusted to ensure that their own staff get paid as and when due by whoever should have paid them regularly.

 I wish that the people would follow suit and ‘strike’ against all members of NASS in the coming election in 2019 and ensure that every single one of the current crop of NASS members is removed and replaced by non-past governors.

 The Senate should not be converted into an ‘immunity from prosecution’ retirement home for tired governors and serial political office holders. I and tens of thousands of others have just suffered a total of eight hours travelling to and from Lagos, a four-hour maximum travel in normal times.

 This trauma was inflicted on me and millions of fellow travellers this last Saturday and Sunday, only because, NASS when given the opportunity to serve the country in an already laid out manner, deliberately held meetings and budget review sessions in which someone actually decided to suggest NASS take steps to deny adequate funding already put in the last 2018 budget for the sole purpose of finishing the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

For the traveller daily ensnarled in the construction constricted areas, we can blame Julius Berger or even RCC for not taking note of the volume of traffic when restricting access.

 But the buck stops at the desk of the NASS for the contractor delays and failure to provide adequately for the easy passage of the tens of thousands of vehicles daily.  

All this work would have been finished last year or latest mid-2018 if NASS had shown the slightest sense of responsible behaviour when it was asked to fund the remaining part of the road in the 2018 budget. 

NASS’ complete disregard for the travelling public along that heavily travelled artery should be rewarded by the citizens’ complete disregard for NASS members seeking public office. 

The NASS action in the matter of delaying and denying expressway funding should be recalled in full detail and acted upon by any and everyone who has suffered or knows someone who has suffered on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway during the last year, numbering in their millions. I repeat, no NASS member deserves a return vote to a seat in the red or green chamber judging from their lack of support for the completion of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

Nineteen drowned in boat mishap Chewuru in Kwara. Sorrow is deep but Nigerians must get used to the fact that lifejackets are cheap. We have lost too many to drowning across Africa this year.

There is nothing new in the ‘New’ Public Buildings Maintenance Policy. I am a witness that routine maintenance according to a well-oiled step by step plan and diary was done routinely on government residences in the colonial times when a seven year cycle of painting and general upgrade maintenance was performed on government quarters and Public Works Department (PWD) was available for other maintenance work during the intervening period. 

Short term greed and perhaps contractor collusion killed it once the colonialists left. Well, I suppose we should be grateful it is back some 40 years after it was killed by high ministry officials but it should never have been changed in the first place.  I wonder where the diary of the seven year cycle of maintenance used in those days is today. It would make interesting reading and a guideline of how things were done correctly in the pre-computer days.

So during the darkest days of the Abacha Error, not era, when I was invited to give the Obafemi Awolowo Lecture under the chairmanship of Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo and convinced that it would save many lives, I undertook to plead for the extension of the cell-phone to the medical personnel, particularly doctors on duty and nurses estimating that the immediate market would be 3,000,000 subscribers.

 I considered doing something dramatic like kneeling down and begging on camera but fortunately I did not go that far. If I had, I probably would have been roped in to the infamous ‘coup plot’ begging video.

 How wrong I was and how wrong were the forces which denied Nigeria and 100m Nigerians the cell-phone for another five years until Obasanjo allowed’ it, kick-starting a communication blitz and a trillion naira business.

 And so it will be for all the other restrictive policies of a strangulating federal system which was installed to strengthen the head, mafia and government, at the expense of a starved, strangled body – the people.

Why are suspects held together, kept together, tied together during parades, transported together and then tried together. Are they interrogated together? Separating them from arrest to trial allows for crosschecking statements about an incident under investigation.

 Isolation from fellow accused is a tried and tested method of establishing the truth without violence or torture.

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