By OGACHEKO OPALUWA
Nigeria’s APC led government must have accurately gauged the somber mood of the nation in deciding to cancel all fanfare in the name of celebrating Nigeria’s 65th Independence Day.
This perhaps is the only occasion that I have seen President Bola Ahmed Tinubu accept the honest advice of his myopic advisers or that he personally guessed the plight of Nigerians under the prevailing atmosphere of despair and hopelessness correctly.
The government and its praise singers couid not have under any pretext rolled out red carpet and some lousy drums to celebrate the nation’s Independence Day anniversary when the clouds of death, hunger, pervasive insecurity and poverty hang ominously over the nation.
Only a few days ago, life was callously snuffed out of the young body of a lady lawyer and journalist while she slept impetuously in her room perhaps dreaming of a day when Nigerian politicians will come to their right senses and provide quality and good governance to the people.
She was rudely awoken by the sound of cruel guns of marauding robbers and wicked assassins that are currently holding sway virtually in all nooks and crannies of Nigeria. The APC led government could not have assembled some pot-bellied old men and women donning starched Agbadas and mountain range ‘geles’ to dine and wine, and as usual, perfect schemes on how to continue looting the nation all in the name of celebrating retrogression and under-development that has been wrought on this beloved country by the APC government.
So I doff my hat for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for thinking rightly this time around by canceling the 2025 Independence Day Anniversary Celebration. If this act brought relief and some calm to the laboured breath of Nigerians, the emptiness and hollowness in his Independent Day broadcast underscored the depth of his government’s visionlessness, cluelessness and insensitivity to the plight of ordinary Nigerians.
If nothing else, it reinforced what many Nigerians already know and have been saying; that Nigerians have gullibly entered APC’s ‘once chance’ governance vehicle that is currently groping around aimlessly and dangerously.
Like a hapless victim in a ‘once chance vehicle’, We need God to redeem us as it is currently because most Nigerian politicians, both from the ranks of the ruling APC as well as the selfish, amorphous and confused opposition have become tone deaf to the looming national calamity.
I can imagine that even as most Nigerians and keen international observers are sounding the death knell, Nigerian politicians had on our Independence Day Anniversary reclused around some indulging dining foyers of their exalted mansions in Maitama, Asokoro, Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Bourdillon street, Sokoto, Kano Maiduguri, Benin and Port Harcourt negotiating how to loot the nation dry. This is their usual character.
For want of what to do, I took a casual drive round Abuja city on Independence Day. The few grim faces on the streets on what supposed to be a day of celebration in Nigeria and the dilapidated public infrastructure told a gloomy tale of a badly managed nation.
Additionally, the chaotic scenes on the streets, especially under most flyovers where rickety taxis and mini-buses park indiscriminately to pick and drop passengers, reminded me of a lawless nation that we live in.
The darkness that descended on most sections of Abuja city as I drove back alone in silence, warned me of foreboding possibility as I approached the gates of my house . This is Abuja and anything can happen anywhere at any time.
This is a Federal Capital City where a Police vehicle was reportedly stolen from the premises of a Force Headquarters recently. A friend and colleague of mine that retired from public service recently who told me he was coming to spend the Independence Day with me in Abuja just to leave the chaotic Lagos scene behind at least for a day or two, couid not make it because his flight was cancelled with neither an explanation nor compensation after waiting endlessly in a dingy and smelly waiting room of one of our airports.
This is our Nigeria in the 22nd century. So I had to sit alone all by myself listening to the mirthless acoustics of Mr President’s Independence Day broadcast where he reeled out dubious statistics in an attempt to shore-up the waning acceptance of his administration.
I guess that Mr President himself did not believe those statistics that were fraudulently cobbled together for him to read out via a teleprompter. Yet, he had to read them to save the face of his inept and clueless government. Elsewhere, groups of Nigerian politicians with members of their families, friends and praise singers were seen gathered in humid halls and noisy arenas either clapping their sullied hands to Mr President’s Independence Day speech or shamefacedly trying without success to defend APC’s programmes and policies.
Their fat faces with oily lips and the kaleidoscope of their adornments contrasted sharply with the rag cladded frames of ordinary Nigerians that are scavenging living from rubbish bins and dump sites daily. Wè the ordinary Nigerians are on our own as it were; abandoned, exploited and hopeless under the I APC government.
Hear our President read out the scoresheet of his administration; ‘the APC government’s reforms are working, inflation is down, corruption has been drastically reduced and Nigeria’s worst days that began over 10 years ago are over’. The youths are to dream some more because the future is theirs.
Excuse me Mr President, did you listen to yourself at all? If he focused on the youths in his Independence Day speech, it was simply because he believed they are more likely to support him and his APC party in 2027 that our President and his political cohorts are so obsessed with currently. I pity him a lot and indeed, our President definitely needs another soothsayer.
Aside from rising hunger and poverty in Nigeria, security in the country has worsened with Nigerians currently living under conditions close to what Thomas Hobbes described as ‘state of nature’. Marauding terrorists, bandits, insurgents, armed robbers and ritualist have virtually taken over Nigeria.
Life has become ‘harsh, brutish and indeed, short’ in Nigeria under the APC government. Many of us thought that former President Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP had wrecked Nigeria irredeemably.
None of us imagined or contemplated the depth and enormity of the infernal abyss that successive APC administrations under late President Muhammad Buhari and currently President Bola Ahmed Tinubu were going to plunge the country into.
The current dire socio-economic and political situations in our country have unwittingly inducted the once reckless and patently corrupt PDP administrations, especially under former President Goodluck Jonathan, into national sainthood.
A common prayer among fanatic Nigerian Pentecostal reads ‘may wè never know a better yesterday.’ Our current situation attests to the emptiness and ineffectiveness of such a lousy prayer. The realities of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s APC government has made our yesterday better than our today.
Yet, our Mr President will not admit those realities. Instead, he continues to rely on some bogus figures and statistics that are being cooked by his confused and self-serving team. “Na statistics or figures I go chop?”, quipped one angry Nigerian that was told of President Tinubu’s national broadcast. Now, having ran out of options, Mr President and his men have resorted to corrosive propaganda, intolerance and what the GenZ community commonly refers to as ‘ghosting’. Blackmail is another weapon in their hands that they are using to silence opposition and turn Nigeria into one party State.
Corruption walks nakedly on the street in Nigeria and once you belong to APC or pretend to be a member, nothing will happen. As it stands currently, one does not need a soothsayer to know that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s APC government has failed woefully in democratic governance.
It has progressively torn public institutions into shreds, collapsed the various arms of government that are collectively the hallmark of functional democracies into a single contraption. Our President appointed some pliable and corrupt helmsmen to represent the established and well differentiated arms of government. These are helping him to steer the ship of State and governance aground currently.
As it is commonly known and held by most Nigerians, the Senate President and the Minister of FCT are the new faces of Legislative and Judicial arms of government in Nigeria. Other legislators and judicial people are mere appendages and scrums takers. President Tinubu’s government has basically shut down governance just after 28 months of assuming power because of unending excuse about low revenue base of the government.
Borrowing under the current administration is beyond unprecedented while the skeletal backs of Nigerians are breaking under his administration’s endless tax reforms. Yet, Nigerians lack basic amenities such as water, healthcare, transportation infrastructure, electricity, you name them.
Take Abuja the FCT for example, the Minister in charge is constantly singing about how the administration of his newly found political godfather is rehabilitating and constructing more roads and expanding water infrastructure to cope with growing urban population in the FCT.
Ironically, many households hardly have 12 hours of electricity supply in a day, with many parts of the city going without electricity for weeks running into months in certain cases. Pipe borne water is fast becoming a scarce commodity in the FCT as the public water work is working sub-optimally.
The city is no different from Gwoza or Zamfara as insurgents, terrorists, kidnappers, armed robbers, and ‘one chance’ taxi operators operate freely in Abuja. Residents can no longer move around freely while most city dwellers sleep with one eye open due to pervasive insecurity.
Let anyone take a ride around Abuja city any day from 11 pm and see how many locations he or she will notice the presence of law enforcement agents. The roads have become death coves due to the reckless and unregulated use by lawless motorists. Nobody obeys traffic lights in the FCT and elsewhere in Nigeria for that matter, while ubiquitous street urchins and vandals hold sway stealing and destroying public infrastructure with impunity.
Yet, the current Minister of the FCT will not let us hear a word with his constant take on how he and his Oga are doing better than those that were in office before them. All over the world, national capitals are well built, maintained and constantly improved upon as they are considered as symbols of national pride and prestige.
The story is however different in Nigeria; as everything in our own FCT is, to borrow the words of a famous Nigerian Singer, “jaga-jaga”. A worker could wake up on a faithful morning in Abuja to discover that the public water taps are dry, there is no network service on his or her cellular phone and no electricity in the house.
These are the unique things about Abuja. The projects that are being executed which the loquacious Minister of FCT uses every opportunity to talk about are nothing but avenues for official corruption and masks for syphoning of public funds for rigging the APC government back to power come 2027 general elections. God forbid!
To me, the cancellation of 2025 Independent Day celebration by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is appropriate and an admission that all is not well with the current APC administration. The President gave the nation a dirge instead of melody on the day that Nigerians were supposed to be celebrating freedom from colonialism and socio-economic slavery under successive corrupt administrations in the country.
Nigerians can only hope that this realisation by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will give his administration a new impetus to settle down and govern the country well instead of being preoccupied with reckless pursuit of a second term in office.
