BUHARI: ON SCAPEGOATING A PRESIDENT, DR. MANSUR DAWAKI

“We want an air-tight security system capable of ensuring the ceaseless, year-round safeguard of lives and properties on one hand; and yet on the other, we also want a porous, minimally patrolled border in order to have access to smuggled food items through countries that do not have the capacity to produce them. That not minding the fact that, the passages for the food are as well the escape route for terrorists, bandits, and other criminals; and the entry points for illegal contrabands including arms and drugs.”

Overcoming my fear of being labelled as being partisan based on some of the reactions and comments I got from one of my previous write-up was not entirely easy. I however still mustered the courage to write this short note, whatever the follow-up reaction might turn out to be. I have decided to structure this note in the following itemization pattern to aid understanding, comparison, criticism, addition and/or subtraction. My simple summary, based on the following observations is that Nigerians are a pack of self-contradicting people. Otherwise how else do we view the following?

1. We want a country with a vibrant economy, capable of creating voluminous amount of jobs; predominantly private-sector based and, tilting more towards manufacturing than service provision. Yet and concurrently, we want a regulated system with government’s interventions in form of subsidy and cheap foreign exchange to ease and encourage the importation of manufactured products including those that the country has the capacity to source for internal alternatives. We also want hardly earned foreign currencies, most of which are earned in exchange for trade in non-renewable resources that may overtime be depleted; to be made available for black-market racketeering, so as to ease our undying desire for overseas travels.

2. We want an air-tight security system capable of ensuring the ceaseless, year-round safeguard of lives and properties on one hand; and yet on the other, we also want a porous, minimally patrolled border in order to have access to smuggled food items through countries that do not have the capacity to produce them. That not minding the fact that, the passages for the food are as well the escape route for terrorists, bandits, and other criminals; and the entry points for illegal contrabands including arms and drugs. We also want loose customs and immigration services that can be bribed in order to perpetuate illegal crisscrossing of the boarders. We also want a police force; because of our inherent lawlessness and dislike for orderliness; we can bribe when we commit minor offenses such as road traffic violation, thereby enticing and encouraging them to take bigger amounts from hardened criminals. We also want to hide and protect, because of cowardice or on the pretext of kinship and friendship, criminally minded individuals and men with shady income sources in our communities.

3. We want a stable democratic entity, but would only want to talk about civic responsibilities. On comparative statistics, few, in relation to registered voters would want to queue up to sincerely vote; and yet even fewer would want to be in partisan politics with a clear conscience to be voted to bring about the political reforms we have been dreaming of.

4. We want giant leap in politics, governance, economy, security and social system; but wouldn’t even appreciate, talk less of taking small strides toward achieving the ultimate goals.

5. We want to compare our physical infrastructural and socio-economic developments with other nations in the world; both our contemporaries and those that are several millennia ahead of us; but wouldn’t bother to compare our patriotism and nationalistic tendencies with such countries.

6. We want higher productivity from our farmers and have them produce more in terms of quantity and variety of home-grown food; while on the contrary we only wish to payless for the products of their predominantly manual efforts; and would so much love for the food prices to be abysmally low, even if the farmers may lose incentive and motivation to produce again.

7.  Our desire for quality improvement in services in sectors such as health and education is contradicted by our lack of desire to pay for such, and our tendency to transfer the amount payable to improve the home services to offset costs of overseas medical and educational tourism. Even people in key sectors such as education, especially at higher levels, would oppose the levying of service improvement fees such as tuition, by embarking on counter-productive strikes that will only further create system collapse.

8. We want an immediate and uninterruptible access to the luxuries and comforts of life at the expense of the government, directly or indirectly; while we waste our own productive time by indulging in entertainment. We imagine sustaining the continuity of the enjoyment based on the assumption of the continuity of the free source; and not based on deliberate investment efforts in productive ventures or a persistent saving culture.

9.  We want to reach there early, but would love to start late; wanting to build our Rome in a fraction of a day with building materials that are yet to arrive by the dawn.

10. Yet, when we failed to achieve our wishes and desires, we turned around on our habitual scapegoat; the government of the day and the man in charge of it.

Yours sincerely;

*Mansur U. Dawaki (Ph. D), Department of Soil Science, Bayero University, Kano Nigeria. +2348029029330