Bring back our ECONOMY!

Bring back our ECONOMY!

By Julius Ogar

Every day on my way to or back from the office, I chance upon a regular convoy of four vehicles belonging to the Federal Fire Service. They are comprised of a siren-fitted pilot general purpose vehicle, two staff cars made up of a salon and a four-wheel drive SUV, a back-up security van with armed fire service guards make up the entourage.

The cars are ever in their pristine shape and the aura of this company simply tells that a “big-man” is on the road. In a typical Nigerian character, they drive with VIP progression and set off the siren at every traffic juncture to bully less important commuters out of the road.

Every single day this picture gets me pondering: If the Federal Fire Service were this big-man’s personal enterprise or registered company, would he allow one chief executive this much flamboyance and luxury? Housed, driven, protected, and fed at public expense even while earning huge salaries and allowances?

My point, though, is simply that there is so much waste of public resources in our domain. Public office is seen as a passport for unlimited access to self-indulgence.  One man ties down four vehicles, four drivers, an orderly, aide de camp, other personal aides and several armed bodyguards – all at no personal cost and for no particular productive value to the economy beyond showboating.

Make no mistake; I have not singled out any agency or organisation for criticism. I have only used a handy example because like many already know, this is the norm across the board in all public institutions in the land. The example I have cited cuts across all military and para-military institutions. In the police for instance, it is so tragic that while a commissioner or area commander could tie down several vehicles and motorcycles as part of office paraphernalia, there may be none left to respond to emergencies. And it is usually the case that while state employees at the top are over indulged and feted with official luxuries, those at the bottom are starved of basic necessities even as minor as office stationery. Many who have had course to visit a police station may have experienced the callousness of having to procure their own paper and biro in order to write a statement or complaint.

For ages have we lamented the fact that an unproductive political and bureaucratic elite feeds fat on the nation’s resources – yearly creaming off more than 70 percent of financial appropriations as salaries, allowances and all what not. This looting is perpetrated from the Presidency and all its appendages, down to the local government secretariat. The greed is so mean that even the small wages of the labouring masses could get pilfered or remain unpaid.

Many states, not to mention local governments have refused to upgrade to the recommended minimum wage for employees. Yet the administrators make sure to allocate to themselves cosmetic allowances that come with clockwork regularity. The question then arises: is such a system sustainable?

Forced into a state of dysfunction, most citizens have learnt to provide their own electricity, security, healthcare and other necessities. Only children of the very poor in the villages and suburban areas attend public schools. Only in really desperate situations do the poor venture to take their sick to the hospital because they have learnt through abject poverty that every illness approximates to “typhoid and malaria”. Of course they can help the roadside medicine dealer with the prescription and even the dosage which, you can be sure, will accord more with what they can afford, than with what they actually require.

Likewise, we now have vigilantes or form militia groups to secure us; we drill our own wells or boreholes to get water or buy it from vendors or better-off neighbours; we procure electricity generators because the high tension cables overhead are no better than laundry lines; we must struggle to own a motorcycle or a car if we desire the convenience of moving around with relative ease; it goes on and on.

For many, many years, the symptoms and manifestations of a failing state have been around like the biblical writing on the wall. Those who have held the reins of power have only used it for self-enrichment, abandoning the majority of the citizenry to their own wiles.

Like his colleagues at the federal and state levels, the thinking of the average local government chairman is local. For instance, it suffices for the chairman to procure a four-wheel drive vehicle for his use than to fix a community road riddled with potholes; likewise, it suffices for the state governor or minister to procure an armour-plated vehicle than to equip the police with training and facilities to do their work; and as the PDP recently tried in vain, they would rather provide a huge budget for propaganda campaigns in negation of the common sense that practical achievements need no advertisement.

The wastage of resources must be done away with. We are long gone past the era when money was not the problem but how to spend. We are now facing the reality of a drunkard who borrows money just to buy more bear. Borrowing to pay salaries is the most embarrassing economic logic we have faced in the era when some peacocks proudly told the world that we had become the leading economy in Africa.

There is no more time or money to waste. The generosity of a drunkard is praised in the pub, but more often the drunk’s family is neglected and famished back home. It is time to take back our economy from generators and plug it to the national grid. The short circuit of lies with which our affairs have been run is no longer sustainable.

Politically, we have escaped John Campdell’s forecast that in this 2015, we would have fallen over from our cataclysmic dance on the brink. The incoming administration must be prepared to also pull the economy back from the brink to which its predecessors have treacherously pushed it. It is the only way we would have jobs, infrastructure, development and security. There is a formidable challenge to be encountered in dealing with officially sanctioned wastage. May Buhari and Osinbajo be granted the strength to lead by the sheer force of example!