Nigeria my country, where everything is in abundance. It’s a country where natural gifts in abundance become redundant due to rifts among the leaders. A country where a profusion of natural deposits leads to confusion among her economic planners.
It’s baffling that we have everything in this country, but we still lack everything! We have crude oil naturally deposited in our land, for instance, but we could not refine it, as our refineries are moribund and redundant. We have the sea with edible aquatic natural depositions, but we lack the zeal and vision to see this in the sea and convert them to our provisions.
We have everything, but we lack everything! Our population should be a strength, but it’s rather powerless, as our leaders continue to impoverish it to make them rich, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. So, instead of being a strength, our population now constitutes a threat.
The insincerity of our leaders has now resulted in insecurity in the land. All the things nature blessed this country with are in abundance. But for reasons of their unpatriotism, the free gifts lead to rifts among the leaders, thus the son of meat sellers eats without a piece of meat.
The truth is Nigerians are hungry, and that’s why many of them are angry. Leaders in this country are lucky for one thing; Nigerians are not only angry with them, they ignorantly are angrier with themselves. So, there’s the pervasiveness of man’s inhumanity to another man among Nigerians. Bizarrely, human souls are being killed with impunity and sold for as low as N5,000 naira!
No life lost in Lafenwa crisis ,says Police
However, considering our natural endowments, no Nigerian should be hungry; they may not have much money, (not everybody will) but they shouldn’t lack basic food to eat, especially in the same country where sons of the rich would not have appetite having been saturated with the aroma of delicious meals.
Currently, students in Nigerian universities are at home due to the ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). This is the second strike in less than two years and the 16th since the fourth republic democracy in 1999. This shows our children are more at home idle (redundant) than being in school. Why? Simply because our government did not accede to the demands of ASUU. So, the scenario could be likened to a fight between two elephants, where the grass (Nigerian students, in this case) underneath bear the brunt.
In Nigeria, we have everything, but having them turned upside down with priority misplacement. For instance, professors in Nigerian universities earn between N381,695 and N501,680, while a senator in Nigeria receives the sum of N750,000 naira per month as basic salary plus allowances of N13.5 million naira per month making N14.25 million naira. So, the monthly take-home of a senator in Nigeria pays more than the salaries of 37 professions combined in a month! And you still give these poor teachers reasons to embark on strike incessantly.
Olorede is a communication research scholar, college don, public affairs analyst, and poet.
He wrote in via oloredejimoh@gmail.com.
