Nigerian Politics and Lies (Part 1)

Pin It Now!

Politics is a way of formulating policies and making decisions that would affect the country and its citizenry positively. It is the essence of forming government and electing people to represent their constituencies so nobody would be left behind in the scheme of things. The Nigerian politics seems to be different from all other countries’ in that it is characterized by lying, looting, thuggery, election rigging, extermination of political opponents, and deceit.
The Nigerian presidential system of government is fashioned after America’s, but unfortunately we don’t seem to copy the moral aspect of the American presidential system, its respect for the rule of law and the equality of everyone before the constitution. We have only created a system whereby we lie to the electorate. The Yar;adua government came into office about 3 years ago with the 7 point agenda which then seemed to be the solution to our multifaceted political and social problems. It promised to give a facelift to education, economic reforms, rule of law, power, security of lives and property; agriculture, and roads rehabilitation, but as I write this article I can’t remember which of the points has been pursued to a logical end.

To start with, the government threatened to declare a state of emergency in the power sector within few weeks of assumption of power but two years and nine months later, not only has it failed to declare the emergency it has also failed to generate a meagerly 6,000 megawatts of electricity. The inability to generate the needed electricity to boost the economy had always been blamed on the restiveness in the Niger Delta region vis-à-vis the pipeline vandalism but since the declaration of amnesty nothing has changed. The 6,000 megawatts target set for Dec.2009 eventually ended up being a pipedream and power supply still remains erratic and epileptic. In fact power generation has now fallen below 3,000 megawatts for a country with about 150 million people.

Secondly, our educational sector has continued to suffer neglect. This administration witnessed the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) embarking on strike that took one complete semester. Today Nigerians are going back to Ghana to further their education. It has even deteriorated to the point that some Nigerians now send their children to Ghana for secondary education. What a calamity! Nigeria with over 91 universities cannot boast of one of these universities ranked among the first 200 in the world. Where are we heading?