Hon Nkeuruka Onyeajeocha, former Chairman House Committee on Aviation, represents Abia state in the House of Representatives. In this chat she spoke on how Nigeria became comatose barely ten years after independence in 1960, how the church, the mosques and traditional institutions failed Nigerians. Excerpts.
In 1960 we got it right, but now we are back to the bad days that nothing seems to be happening in Project Nigeria. What went wrong?
Hon Nkeuruka Onyeajeocha
The things that went wrong are too many. Number one is that we left our values; we decided to go to other gods just like the Christians would say they abandoned their God and began to follow idols.
When the traditional institutions began to honour those who have stolen funds and when the Church abandoned the Bible and decided to honour people who are known criminals and are giving them front row seats in the Church.
In the old days prior to the sixties, people who committed crime which the Bible would call sin, they would suspend the people from the church and they would give them back seats. Ask yourself, in our churches today how many people do they suspend? How many people are taking back seats because they have done something that is wrong in the eyes of men and in the eyes of public and also in the eyes of God?
And so the church has failed in following the dictates of Jesus Christ. So also are the Muslims. They have failed by not upholding the teachings of Islam; that is why some people can come up and they brand themselves one kind of name and they begin to fight their fellow brothers and sisters based on one issue or the other.
And also the society, the government also has failed when they refused blatantly to offer leadership to the country. When they refused or neglected the constitution and they began to do things that are contrary to the constitution.
How do we get out of this debacle?
One, it is mandatory that the government should provide for the welfare of its citizenry. Unfortunately, they are providing for their welfare. They started enriching themselves. When individuals began to be richer than the government; when those people who stole so much money were the people who came back to form government at all cost;
when electorate are being given money to vote people who are hoodlums and419ers; when those who are supposed to be in jail are the people presiding over issues in the local government, in the state government and of course in the federal level too what do you expect?
That was when and how we got it wrong. The system refused to reject bad people, the church refused to call people to order. The traditional rulers are custodians’ of laws, who are custodians of customs and traditions left those laws and started to give people with questionable character Chieftaincy titles.
Some Nigerians said we abandoned agriculture and embraced crude oil to survive.
In our days we got most of our food items from school farms when we were in the boarding houses. Our food were brought from the Agric department or from the Agric section. So when the oil started coming out and people started sharing the oil boom, agriculture was neglected and those ridges were abandoned.
People do not to go to school again to study agriculture, you now have less teachers in agriculture. You now have teachers in ICT, you have teachers on oil and gas and so we neglected agriculture, the groundnut pyramid was neglected, cocoa was neglected, the palm oil, the cassava, we left them and then decided to come to Abuja and share excess crude money and so on.
A nation that does not produce will not prosper economically. If you don’t produce and take to other countries, you are not going to bring in foreign exchange and we started even importing tooth picks. Our woods that were suppose to export and others were abandoned.
I know in the 1990’s if you come to work, you have a section that they export woods, now people import furniture. Now if you look at it that was when our economy started collapsing and instead of even sharing this excess crude money and use it to develop or import technologies, people were sharing it and they were pocketing it into their own accounts. In that way when you check money that you were supposed to put back to education, the schools had become dilapidated, you would ask yourself.
If you go to the school where I went to, they still have the buildings that were there when I attended school years back and you would ask yourself the people who built those schools then were they stealing money? They weren’t. The Nnamdi Azikiwes the Okparas, Awolowos and so many of them. And so you bring in people who are supposed to be the custodian of the policy trust of government to protect lives and they start looting funds, what do you get? The result is what we have as Nigeria.
And even when they share it to states, the people who get the money convert it to their personal use. They neglected our schools, they neglected our hospitals. If you go to LUTH today, you will know that the people who initially built LUTH had good intentions, with so many structures, and those structures were left unattended to.
Those structures were not maintained; those structures were left the way they were from the sixties. And I can tell you not many structures after sixties or seventies, eighties, including nineties had been rebuilt till date .
If you go to University of Nigeria Nsukka you will see the old buildings, you will see the old hostels. I was in hostel. You will see even our secondary schools now. They don’t have hostels, so what has happened? And we have money now more than before.
It is simple, the people who are now custodian of the government trust, of the money of the people have diverted them to some other use and this is why when you come you will see somebody, an individual, having hectares of lands, having so many houses, having so many airplanes, cars, you name them and yet the states are not having anything to the extent that they cant even pay salaries.
If you could not able to pay salaries of workers, is it roads that you built, is it schools that you built, is it hospitals that you built? What you are simply telling the whole world is that you have not done anything because salary is first line charge, so if you couldn’t Pay your workers what have you done?
What is the way forward?
The way forward is for all of us to come to ground zero, begin to obey the laws of the land, begin to be accountable, begin to make sure that anybody who is given position of responsibility becomes accountable and responsible, begin to answer questions that would be asked and begin to be ready to submit to the authority of anybody that has employed you.
Going back to civil service days because when people say oh, politicians are corrupt, I know that there is no one single politician who is corrupt without the aid of a civil servant. There is no one single politician who has stolen money without the aid of a civil servant.
So both the down trodden, the upper level, the bottom and top should come to ground zero. People are neglecting our institutions because their children are not there. People are neglecting the institutions because they have security problems.
I am soliciting that these days we should not all third class materials or people who came out from the university with a pass as teachers. When JAMB sets a score, they will say two hundred and something, three hundred and something for certain courses, then once you don’t make up to a hundred and fifty, you will go and do education English, education Physics, education Economics and end up being a teacher. There have been a defect and so it is not going to be right.
So our institutions must be overhauled and that is why I said everybody must come to ground zero. In the budget that is coming, I said yes, I believe that we should forget about foreign trips, let us declare emergency on infrastructure in our country.
We want a situation where the UNTH in Enugu, people from Gabon, will come there because of the quality of professors, quality of surgeons, the quality of those people who are working in those hospitals and the equipment. These days Nigerians go to Ghana, these days Nigerians go to India, these days Nigerians go to all sorts of countries because we have neglected our institutions.
So I believe that what we should do now is to make sure that we revamp our institutions, health, education, schools etc.
Vanguard
No comments:
Post a Comment