Nigeria, we wail thee

The Senate reports that there are nearly 12,000 abandoned projects in Nigeria initiated by the Goodluck Jonathan administration alone. There are no plans to complete them, rather the energy is to initiate new ones. The most prominent of the present regime is the mega-million-dollar construction of the Lagos-Calabar highway. Capital projects top the preference of successive governments for obvious reasons. Turn-key projects require mega-money and mega-money swims in uncommon corruption.

Ordinarily, we should assess the state of the Lokoja-Abuja highway, awarded by Mr Obasanjo; the Benin-Ọrẹ road; the Ilorin-Ibadan highway and the grandfather of them all, the intractable Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

Suddenly, somebody with a brainwave and the right connection pulled through the Lagos-Calabar superhighway from the dustbin and pronto we are to beat the Pan American highway, make the German autobahn look like a footpath and lampoon the engineering wizardry of the China National Highway 318.

The legislative backing for this project came almost surreptitiously. It greased through the contract-awarding Federal Executive Council meeting with zero clatter and like Randy Orton’s RKO, sprung almost from nowhere launching works minister, David Umahi into federal limelight.

Before you could say wait a minute, a demolition order was served on the maverick investors that built their resort businesses on virgin Lagos beachfront. They were simply told in Lagos terms that – títì tí jẹ ilé-owó yín – a superhighway has consumed your mega business. The shock sent most of them to book appointments with shrinks to avoid total emotional breakdown. Ethnic soldiers recruited to whip the nation into national discourse failed as bulldozers were mobilised to site.

Their sacrilege is now in the open. These proprietors connived with Olókùn, the god of the seas to block the proposed highway route by moving the internet and telecommunications cables under the proposed site just to save their business. How idolatrous that it happened before subsidised pilgrims were exposed to their plot. These idolatrous entrepreneurs tried to frustrate the diligent environmental impact assessment that had ruled the route free of any encumbrances except their resorts.

These people did this to rubbish the one-year achievements of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in office. They tried to portray the president as a slovenly sloppy leader that acts first and thinks later. They know that the Tinubu administration scrapped fuel subsidy without thinking it through only to return it through the backdoor. They realise that it floated the naira in the hope that dumping heavy support for a flailing national currency might help it survive the tidal waves of pounding currents from other currencies. They want to portray this regime as playing kalo kalo, or lottery, with our foreign reserves. They lie – it is the pensions of our retired heroes that government is targeting to revamp the economy.

Their count of the litany of half-baked policies did not end there. Government banded electricity supply in a way that should make Pieter Botha’s apartheid policy green with envy. However, as Muhammadu Buhari would say, the president was not consulted and as soon as the policy hit a sinkhole, the president quickly moved to block it. What a good man!

Our president would like to complete abandoned projects or improve on half-conceived ones. There are talks of him auctioning our biometric data to a credit card company that wants to process another national identity card scheme – the umpteenth in 20 years. That project would be the first in history that a nation would surrender the fingerprints of its citizens to foreign entities as a vote of no-confidence on the National Identity Card Scheme as well as the Pantami NIN and BVN mega schemes.

Back to the botched adjusted superhighway project, we all know that for every monumental failure of any government scheme, there is a silver lining. Those whose empires were destroyed before the route adjustment know that they have forfeited their traditional rights of first refusal to these plots the values of which have now quadrupled. They are forbidden from bidding.

The adjustment opens a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the big girls and boys in government to start falling over each other for the redistribution of these ‘virgin’ plots. Supporters of our great party finally have the right to apply for some of the most expensive land in the country – Lagos beachfronts.

That opens a new battlefront for Nigeria’s overpaid, underwhelming and underperforming bourgeois elements to get their hands on a piece of prime land. Not equipped with cerebral efficiency to run things efficiently; they could put them on the auction block just like they do to oil blocks and huge contract papers. That way and without lifting a finger, they could make millions to stow away in offshore accounts far from the prying eyes of Zaach Adedeji, the FIRS chief. Such loots help secure the prospects for born and unborn children to inherit unparalleled wealth.

Those losing out in this re-demarcation of the land ought to be charged with sorcery while those who failed to do the initial due diligence before plotting a superhighway could be awarded the highest national honour. That some resort proprietors could metaphysically shift internet and telecommunication cables to places where they were initially absent is an unmatched level of sorcery unmatched by the infamous witch of Ota.

Stuff like this is why we must agree with our good friend, very extraordinarily distinguished Senator Opeyemi Bamidele to revert to our decommissioned National Anthem – Nigeria we hail thee. We can’t keep our compatriots eternally on their toes as the current one prescribes because the fatigue suffered in the process has left the labour of our past heroes in the ocean of vanity.

Let’s return to the old anthem with a bit of amendment a la Canada – Nigeria we hail thee! Because if the level of idiocy daily unleashed on us were initiated pre-1960, the British could have found a good reason to stay on and bestow on us Commonwealth citizenship and British passports. Japa would not have happened. This president is working very hard to remove our hopes.

  The return of Amr SLS

Not since the dissolution of the House of Chiefs in 1964 has the legitimacy of a King been as controversial as the reign of Kano’s Amr – Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. The man who broke diplomacy in openly craving the throne of his forefather would later attain his dreams. However, like one suffering from sleep paralysis, politics would turn that dream into a nightmare. Amr Sanusi has retraced the sad footprints of his grandfather with the success of a phoenix.

Perhaps knowing how pointless it was challenging his deposition, the 14th Emir challenged his banishment and won and waited for the verdict of history refusing to be called an ex-emir.

Last week, without as much as lifting a finger, he was returned to the palace in the same politically charged circumstances that once dethroned him. The mainly ceremonial position became news distraction last week and perhaps would remain on the scale for a time to come depending on long-suffering of Kano people. This writer, an unabashed fan of the erudite King,  should not be the last to bring the King back. Gyara Zaki!