By Asiat Meikudi
A chattering bird builds no nest. We have a slumbering government that is very eloquent in speaking about what is good but knows not how to do it. Day and night, the regime sleep-talks and dreams of doing good but ends up with foil excuses.
In August 2019, the former president of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari, was quoted in a statement as saying, “If India can lift 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, Nigeria can surely lift 100 million out of poverty in 10 years.” That was four years ago.
Four years after that presidential wish, the poor have not stopped getting poorer, what is bad has continued to give birth to what is worse.
According to the National Bureau of Statistic (NBS), 83.5 percent of Nigerian children under five years are poor due to lack of intellectual stimulation needed for childhood development.
The report adds that “school attendance is particularly problematic in the North-East and the North-West.” And these are zones with a cumulative 65.96 million poor people, about half of the national total of 132.92 million. These are not just numbers; they are human beings wasting away like millions of others before them.
There is an apt proverb that ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will soon burn down the village to get warm’. You cannot nurse millions of children with the waters of poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness and dream of peace and prosperity.
Here we are now, struck in agony, depression and security threatened. North to south, the road to the farm and the pathway to the stream are strewn with terror of bandits, kidnappers, armed robbery and terrorists.
High soaring on daily consumption, our only bequeathal becomes forbidden to use.
Who is not afraid to venture out anywhere today? People can’t work; the poverty queue lengthens; the oedipus cycle remains unbroken yet the flame remains glowing.
The new sworn-in President, Bola Tinubu said some weeks ago, that without working as one country, we could not tackle the huge problems bedeviling us.
He knows that this is a nation divided. Where the tribe and tongues differed. Where the cleric went to church and made the pulpit a shotgun. Where phone calls about religious war belied pieties of holy men and exposed the shenanigans of men of power who wanted their black shirts to transfigure into cassocks in the credulity of their followers.
Following his inauguration on May 29, he announced the removal of fuel subsidies, this was followed by widespread turmoil and hardship across the country. Nigerians are struggling to cope with the escalating cost of living, and the burden is placed on the shoulders of the most vulnerable individuals.
However, the hike in fuel prices worsens the economic challenges faced by Nigerians, particularly in light of the fact that the minimum wage of the country stands at 30,000 naira. This enormous disparity between the cost of fuel and the income of the average Nigerian has created a situation where the basic necessity of transportation has become an unaffordable luxury for many.
As we seek a new Nigeria moving forward, one of the issues we must begin to shred into their basics is the rush out of Nigeria to study in “mushroom” universities, just for the sake of acquiring the golden-fleece. Nigeria has descended into the abyss in education and very many other spheres but in that descent, it is still far more valuable than many of the universities of the world that our children run to. It is so absurd that many Nigerians rush to Benin Republic and Ghana to study in universities which have less global ranking as many of Nigeria’s universities.