abdulraheem
let me start with a confession. This is one of those weeks when I cannot really make up my mind about what to write about, in the weekly dialogue that we have established with you, the dear reader over the years. Of course, those moments come in the life of every writer or the public intellectual. It is not that we are not confronted with a surfeit of issues: the recent events around the first anniversary of the Yar’adua administration; June 12 and the controversies which Professor Humphery Nwosu’s sudden exhumation from political nowhere triggered! Apart from the first anniversary of the Yar ‘Adua administration, I have elliptically commented on the June 12 anniversary when I wrote about the revisionist reading of history which Generals Buhari, Babangida and Abdulsalami embarked upon last week. Honestly, I do not want to become landlocked on that island of what might have been, which sits so centrally at the heart of the unending controversy from that political space in our national life. One thing seems certain to me though, and that is the fact that for as long as a sense of injustice continues to dog the nation’s political process, it will continue to be haunted by the memories we confront ever year on the 12th of June. It’s that simple as it is profound! But something else has caught my attention in reflecting upon the events of the last couple of weeks in Nigeria, and it is related to the exasperation felt by one of the political commentators apropos of the first anniversary of the Yar’adua regime. I cannot quite recall the name of the writer now, but he admonished Yar’adua to please do something, even if it is the wrong thing! It was a masterly expression of frustration at the dithering and lack of sure-footedness which sums up the first year of the absolutely colourless presidency and regime. In response to the urging to do something, a thought struck me, that maybe as a collective, the citizenry needed to force the hands of the government, help it against itself just to become a little bit more pro-active with the yearnings of the Nigerian people. The past one year has been one of the most difficult in my life. As a result of my mother’s ill-health, I have travelled back and forth to Ilorin, almost every two weeks. Any regular traveler on Nigerian roads, as I have had to confront our deadly roads, knows that each time he/she ventures on a journey, he/she literally dies temporarily, until he safety reaches his/her destination. There are potholes, famously described by Sam Nda-Isaiah, as capable of swallowing small cars; there are drivers who carry road rage to lunatic heights that I have not experienced in other countries, in my unending trips around the world; there are police men who relate with travelers as if we are all potential criminals: they stand astride highways ready to shoot, ever willing to ask a bribe, quote to you some obscure offence you might have committed or just plainly talk at whoever was at the receiving end of their often, drunken rudeness! It is no wonder that Nigerian roads deliver so many citizens to mortuaries more than in most countries of the world, including some of its best brains! This happens day in, day out, each month, every year; we take a fatalistic attitude of resignation, while a succession of governments appropriate billions of naira which leading light of these regimes just simply steal, as we witnessed during the Obasanjo regime. Since we do not really build political or social movements dedicated to the interrogation of the policies and actions of the succession of bandit regimes that have locked us into a near-perpetual underdevelopment, they in turn look out for more hare- brained schemes to reproduce the conditions which facilitate theplundering and entrenchment of our underdevelopment. The papers a few days ago, reported that the Yar’adua regime has said that it will no longer appropriate money for the rehabilitation or the construction of Nigerian roads. These will now be farmed out to “private sector” operatives (in real terms, roads will be handedover to a new set of cronies) to get new avenues to extract profits out of the Nigerian people. There is a consequence in the mad rush to privatise all areas of our national life; and that is the gradual collapse of the Nigerian state itself as a viable entity with any meaningful impact or noteworthy presence in the lives of the citizens. Non-state actors become stronger, in inverse proportion to the weakening of the state, because ideological choices have been made which erode the power and legitimacy of the state. Preying on the state or criminal activities against state structures become ever more brazen; and more than ever before, the state is only an avenue to consolidate the extraction of surplus which they off load into private pockets; but the delusion of a “private-sector-led development” remain just that: a delusion. Look around us, and all the tell-tale signs of state collapse are everywhere; of course there is also a handful of billionaires, a few banks, a couple of property development outlets, a number of communication projects, where monies stolen from the public sector have been laundered. But where is an integrated national development process able to mop up the millions of young people who enter the job market annually? It does not exist. Our case reminds me of an old story from so many years ago, of the absurd man who insisted that he would flog his only donkey until it accepts that it is an elephant. It will never happen; or put it another way. If you face the direction of Maiduguri from Abuja, and you lock yourself into the metaphysics that somehow, with a lot of prayers, the car will one day arrive in Lagos, you can only be engaged in self delusion. But that is the way that the Nigerian ruling class has continued to operate. It harangues all of us to a deluded piety, while it fails either to think historically or work out patriotic strategies for genuine national development. The chariot of our ruling class is tied firmly to the “Washington Consensus”: an elaborate project of international fraud, which is aimed at perpetuating the injustices at the heart of contemporary international division of labour. Regrettably, especially as we witnessed under the kleptocratic Obasanjo regime, there are the so-called “economic experts” in the system imposed to legitimize the fraud! It is this crisis of national life which drew my attention one more time, to the problems of railways development in our country. THE SUNDAY PUNCH newspaper of June 15th, 2008, carried an investigative story about how the Obasanjo regime inflated the so-called railways modernization project, to the tune of $5.8billion! It quoted experts as well as international rates per kilometers on railway modernization, that the contract awarded to the Chinese “should have been about $2.5bn and not $8.3bn”. The investigative report also revealed the in-fighting and turf warfare between groups of bureaucrats, who see the effort to “modernize” the railways as their own opportunity to make a fabulous killing. It was either they got that unique opportunity or the railways can remain in its rotten state. Not for this group a patriotic duty of placing the construction, modernization and development of a national railways system at the heart of a gigantic effort to develop Nigeria’s national productive forces! Yet all over the world, the modernization or construction of new railways systems is an expression of modern economic development. The French, Japanese and Canadians have over the years been at the top of railways development. Europe is modernising its railways systems, while ensuring a greater integration of those railways systems The Chinese, Indians and Russians also pursue very ambitions railways systems to bolster their economic development. It is quite interesting that Russia which is the country of the notorious “shock therapy capitalism”, when in a few years, the public sector was practically stolen by just a handful of capitalist oligarchs, decided that the railways was far too strategic to be handed over to a few capitalists. It remains state owned and is being systematically renewed. The SUNDAY PUNCH story that we have quoted above also reminded that “there was no budget for the railways in 2008 budget”! It sounds incredible that Nigeria did not appropriate money for its railways, but that is the truth of the matter. Malam Umaru Yar’adua has talked about a 7-point agenda; and as we write, billions of naira has been distributed amongst the three tiers of government. What is certain, just as night follows day, is that a lot of that money will be stolen; while some will go into elephant projects, which will not do much for national development. I implore Malam Yar’adua to think deeply and mobilize his governor counterparts, to move in the direction of putting so much of the easy money coming from the rocketing price of oil, into the modernization and construction of new railways that will criss-cross our country. Such a grand project will spur a genuine sense of national development, because hundreds of thousands will be employed to construct the railways; similarly, since all the states and local governments will be part of this endeavour, a patriotic fervour will be re-kindled and the multiplier effect on economic and social life will be very significant. Just fancy that the colonial railways system was actually constructed to plunder our country; however, as happens in all historical events, those railways also helped the Nigerian people to know themselves better, and in the process, we shared the anti-colonial ideas which galvanized the struggle for independence. If our rulers put their mind at the patriotic effort to modernize and build new railways in Nigeria, they would certainly open new apertures of development for our present and our future: I want to assure Malam Umaru Yar’adua, that if he moves on the railways track, I will become his number one supporter: and I am not joking!
