The problems are many; where do we even want to begin from? So humongous are the problems that many Nigerians have given up hope; they have chosen to accept this lot as their fate and this is obvious in the silence of the citizens to the state of epileptic power supply, glaring corruption, inadequate transportation system, poor and useless policing, poverty and infrastructural deficiencies.
Nigerians no longer care, or so it appears; but one thing Nigerians ask for is that there should be peace; that no 'Boko whatever' kill anyone – you can continue your looting but don’t let us die while you live large and quite frankly I do not think this is too much to ask.
We woke up to the news of Nyanya Bomb blast or is it explosion? I could not look at the pictures because it's probably the most gruesome act I have seen in a while. How did we get here? This has gone on for so long and we need to tame it immediately. As if that was not enough, 200 innocent school girls were also abducted the following morning by enemies of Nigeria and we still live as though everything is normal – Nothing is normal people! There is fire on the Nigerian mountain and nobody seem to bothered.
The most painful part of all of these is the insensitivity of Mr. President and his cohorts. Somebody need to ask Mr President if he would dare attend a rally the next day if his son was one of those who lost his life at the Nyanya explosion in Abuja. Would he have the legs to go and dance at a stupid rally? I don’t hate Mr Jonathan but I don’t love his ways either; even if I want to, he is making it difficult for me to, because no empathetic father will lose his son a day before and go out to celebrate the day after – this is why I do not believe that we have a President that has the competency, the will power, the effrontery and the commitment to combat terrorism and lead Nigeria to greatness.
You may argue the above points, but you cannot argue the glaring truths that this administration has not done anything close to enough. Where or what are the structures or systems put in place to combat terrorism since Mr President has been in charge? I need you to remove your racial and bias microscopic glasses now and think for once that – if you were at the Nyanya motor park a day before the incident and you noticed suspicious activity from some human elements, is there a system put in place that makes it extremely easy for you to report such suspicious act? Before you stop thinking look at it this way, is there no possibility that there was one or two persons who noticed suspicious acts on the day of the explosion or a day before but because there was no adequate provision made for such a person to report such acts, such persons kept mute. In developed countries, you only need to make a simple phone call and in less than three minutes the cops are crawling the area but because we do not have regard for human lives here, we do not take those things as priority.
I disagree with you that Mr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is fighting terrorism and if he is fighting it, he is fighting it wrongly. You cannot win this war without using ‘People Policing’.
Shall we continue like this and assume that the rest of us are safe? No! This is why I am writing this piece and appealing to everyone in government and citizens – there is a lot we can do that we have not yet done; there is a national disaster phone numbers we ought to have that we don’t have yet; there is a swift response squad we ought to have that is not yet in place; there is selfishness, greed and corruption playing Barcelona football on the Nigerian pitch that we need to park the bus against. If you think you are safe because you live in a mountain I urge you to look out the window and you will realize that there is fire on the mountain!
Gabriel Olatunji ‘Legend’ currently lives in Lagos where he runs his business and the inspirational blog, www.olatunjispeaks.com. Tweet at him @OLATUNJISPEAKS
No comments:
Post a Comment