The Changes That I See
In a few days’ time, President Muhammadu Buhari would have spent four full months in office. He recently marked his first 100 days without much ado. Many of the president’s critics noted that there was nothing substantial to define the president’s first 100 days in office. Perhaps they are right. For such critics, like many others who grumble in the background, they probably expect that all the plagues that have hounded us as a people in the last sixteen years would have been cleared with a magical deft. They would have expected that thus far, all our broken and gully-filled roads would have worn a new look of nylon-tar road network while all the armed robbers and kidnappers raiding and raging in our various communities would have suddenly turned Born Again citizens, surrendering their evil tools of trade.
To such ones, the promised change has not been seen or noticed, especially as the mass of our youths yet remain without jobs and food and living has not got anything easier.
Nigerians are hungry for a change. It is therefore understandable that there is a creeping forlorn feeling as the infrastructure are yet poor, decrepit and even abandoned.
The reality is that Nigerians are not going to wake one morning and find that our streets have been magically transformed to look like the streets of American cities. No, it won’t happen so. It may not even happen in my life time.
But what is important to me is that we should be headed in the direction of such growth and development.
In a way, I have seen the ship of state being steered in the direction of transformation in the real sense of the word, not like the adumbrated type promised by the PDP-led government. I see the dawn of a national rebirth when I hear that many people who had stolen huge sums of money from the nation’s treasury, without prodding, are voluntarily returning such sums to the public till. I see a national rebirth when I see government agencies even like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) really getting down to brass tacks in doing their job of hounding the crooks in our midst. I see the dawn of a new Nigeria when brazen acts of impunity are flying out of the window. It is a new dawn when civil servants take their jobs seriously and not devote their time to watching Tele Mundo or African Magic in offices and expect to be paid at the end of the month.
I see a new dawn when I read that the sum of N924 million which was fraudulently transferred to a private account by a certain accounts officer, Mr Adeolu Olugbenga Adeyanju has been recovered and returned to the Ministry of Environment which actually had the money. You can imagine all the projects and programmes the Ministry of Environment can execute with such an amount which had been “cornered” by the crooks in the system.
And yet another recovery by the ICPC of the sum of N56,211,086.23 food subsidy meant for some Federal Government Colleges in Ogun State. The money was recovered from a Federal Pay Officer in Abeokuta, one Mr Olusegun Lawal.
You can imagine how many such monies have been stolen unannounced in the past, and how such acts have collectively and persistently helped to under develop our nation. Yet those thieves have been the same ones the society has been celebrating as the icons and pillars of our communities.
I was at two launches this week—one a newspaper and the other a book (in Ibadan and Lagos respectively) and many of the donors refused to announce their donations. There is a new culture of caution in the air.
And as for those expecting that skyscrapers will suddenly grow out of the ground overnight and that our skylines will be coloured bright by the orient lighting of cherubic proportion, I declare that I see change when on the same Ijora bridge, Lagos, on which we spent hours unend few months ago, as we journeyed to work in Apapa everyday, I can now do 70km/h, without hitch or hinderance across the same bridge. What happened? Did the road get wider? No! Just order became the norm. How can we not celebrate that? Did residents of Apapa not almost all relocate because of the hellish traffic that plagued the people? Today, it is a huge relief. I see and applaud that change.
And those who argue on whether the improved electricity supply in the country is as a result of the “great reformation” work begun by the Jonathan administration or not, I note the declaration by Mr Igali, the Perm Sec of the Ministry of Power that since Buhari came into office, no pipeline has been vandalized, so gas supply has not been disrupted. Where did all the vandals suddenly go? They became Born Again? That is the attitudinal change I will rather see than skyscrapers germinating from the ground.
The multiplier effect of increased electricity supply to the economy is beyond contest.