Wike’s misplaced priority in FCT road rehabilitation

Sir: The high-handed policies and residents’ unfriendly regulations being imposed on Federal Capital Territory (FCT) residents by the dictates of the current minister are becoming both outrageous and unbearable. This shylock demand has worsened the already harsh economic times and conditions that Nigerians are largely subjected to courtesy of irresponsible political leadership. There is no breathing space for the underprivileged people of Nigeria. Everyone is gnawing and gnashing their teeth in utter misery and melancholy.

The over-concentration of road projects in the urban areas of FCT calls for urgent review. If it is not a way of patronising the elite politicians and their palaces and frontiers, then I am curious to know what else. A cursory tour of the hinterlands in Abuja  – the Chikakores Kubwa, the Jikwoyis, the Qudus, the Lokogomas, etc, to mention but a few – will unravel to any dispassionate evaluator the level of insouciance and abandonment in squalor and desolation in comparison with the opulence lifestyle and the aesthetic environment status of the nearby township space. Now the political class has the disrepute to take this quality for granted.

Truth must be told, all is not well with governance in Nigeria generally and in FCT in particular. Nigeria’s GDP as of this day is all-time appalling. The purchasing power of Nigeria’s legal tender in comparison to nearby smaller countries is nothing to write home about.

What is the rationality behind some draconian policies that are aggressively enforced in Abuja? I witnessed a gory traffic situation that was too fatal for me to behold recently in Wuse Bridge Abuja. A man who just lost a relative and was heading to the market to buy funeral items alongside his stripling, had some scuffle with the Federal Road Safety Corps officers, dragging who would get the car key from the ignition. When the man finally lost it to the revenue-drunk officers who overpowered him, and tried to push his vehicle to the side of the road to avoid obstruction, with the driver’s door widely opened, a speed-moving leading jeep of a top echelon of police convoy, crushed him to death instantly. It takes a stout-hearted witness not to shed profuse tears. And thus the matter ended.

It is quite baffling how Nigerians survive this terrible economic situation putting into consideration the harsh reality on the ground. The income versus expenses deficit; the midget salaries confronting behemoth bills and financial responsibilities; the precarious and perennial energy scarcity; the ongoing misleading information and deception in the petroleum ministry, etc only serve to convince even a bigot that Nigeria is staggering at the cliff of the precipice. The politically brainwashed elites deliver homilies and speeches embellished with rhetoric and fallacies sugar-coated with plausible hopes that only gullible ones consume. But most Nigerians are wiser now.

Steve Obum Orajiaku can be reached via [email protected]