Nigeria’s dire situation: When followers become accomplices, by Sani IDRIS

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Purchasing a Kaduna-Abuja train ticket was not possible online due to some abrupt technical glitches. It has been discovered that junior staff have resorted to taking advantage of the interim system failures to express their full-blown wickedness by selling N3,000 tickets at N9,000 (200% increase) to commuters. They are saints, only the leaders are wicked.

When last year’s flooding ravaged residential areas in Hadejia-Auyo-Kafin Hausa axis, the people blamed government for not responding to their plight. Upon investigation, I found that their grandparents were paid huge compensations as well as allocated plots on the adjacent upland for them to develop and relocate. They collected the money, gradually sold the plots, married more wives and continued to inhabit the flood-prone areas. The leaders are still the cause of their continued predicament.

During the #EndSARS nation-wide protest, youths carted away toilet seats, signboards, tractors, goats, onions, other valuables in malls and shops, as palliatives, all in the name of fighting bad governance.

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The #EndSARS panels in some southern states have been put under serious pressure by “activists and Human rights’ Lawyers” to acknowledge fake extra- judicial killings of protesters for compensation but nobody appears to mind the many lives of security personnel gruesomely and innocently killed as alleged during the protest. Are policemen rats??

I once asked a shopkeeper why he increased the price of an item and he responded, “Oga (sir), it was N2,500 before but now N3,500 per carton (33.3% increase) when I calculated the gross increase on the item per piece.” He was solely responsible for causing 145% inflation per carton. Yet, he joins customers in slamming the leaders for making life difficult.

Parents are abdicating their primary responsibility by abandoning their biological children for Almajiri – no clothes, no food items, no laundry stuff, no routine visitation, no proposed date of coming back home, yet, they curse government for proliferation of social vices, moral decay and insecurity.

Very few people troop to political office holders, NOT to present the need for education scholarships, improved healthcare facilities, or provision of skills acquisition centres for their communities but to get a paltry sum for themselves- wedding, naming or burial ceremonies. Still, leaders are the only reason we are backward.

Travelling from Zaria to Sokoto state, one is bound to come across close to 60 police check points but not a single one carries out patriotic and professional work. All they do is the popular “handshake exercise”, like ticket vendors of football viewing centres, including giving out change to extorted drivers. Now, a policeman collects N50, allows deadly weapons and suspicious characters to infiltrate, settle and, in return, ambush and kill other police officers on duty. Who kills the policemen?

When an overnight fire gutted properties worth millions of Naira in Sokoto market, means of livelihood was lost. I later learnt that for about two years before the incident, Sokoto state government had built a modern market and allotted shops at a very low cost to all shop owners to relocate. However, the business people resisted, thereby causing congestion, blockages and other careless practices which culminated to the fire outbreak and the inability for firefighters to put it off. Who is to blame? Are the Leaders are not doing justice?

When WAEC and NECO are around the corner, the Principals summon all teachers concerned and place them on “malpractice readiness alert”, make special provisions for exam bodies’ supervisors, recruit lower class students as siphoning assistants and strategize fully to ‘gang rape’ the exams question papers, in their tone – “we have to help the students, they are our brothers and sisters”. All the same, bad leaders alone are responsible for low-quality education.

While serving as a polling unit officer, I saw youths clustering the elderly, bargaining with political retailers on their behalf, selling out their franchise. The teenagers don’t mind that their future is being traded and the elderly don’t mind merchandising the future of their own children. Hmm!

When COVID 19 was ravaging and people were under lockdown, vigilantes and youth volunteer groups proved that they were more wicked than the unpatriotic policemen.

In spite of the economic hardship, the Federal government plans to introduce N1 million tuition fee to public university students and promised to improve the general welfare of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) members but the union jumped up on its feet to say ‘NO’, our students cannot afford that. Government had to bureaucratically punish ASUU members for that resistance – just a scenario of a candle burning itself to light others. As a payback, the students abused, accused and even ambushed ASUU. Who is the wicked? What a mentee!

Students of a particular higher institution cried for help due to the untimely hit and run deaths from reckless driving mostly along main roads. Consequent upon that, combined pressure from students’ unions, lecturers and institutions’ managements culminated to overhead bridges being constructed in many tertiary institutions. After all the work, students refuse to use them yet, when another student is crushed, as is the usual case, they start to protest and call the VC wicked!

As your leader is wicked, then so are you!

Quid Zaria-Nigeria

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