- If the Buhari government is to make its impact felt before 2019
Virtually all the challenges Nigeria has been grappling with for several years have spilled into the New Year largely unresolved.
Power supply remains fitful, crippling industry and impairing social life. Where manufacturing is not at a standstill, it is shrinking. Unemployment, especially among the younger population, remains scandalously high. The road network lies in acute disrepair. Spiralling costs have rendered off-limits goods and services that the average citizen could afford. The railways are still mired in the mid-20th Century.
But it has not been bad news all round. Agricultural production has increased significantly, but has not translated into lower food prices. Trucking produce from the farm to the market over cratered roads imposes significant costs. Much of the produce, especially fruits, rot away for lack of proper storage, resulting in losses to producer and consumer alike. Moribund river basin schemes have been revived to boost agriculture and fishing.
Refining capacity is on the uptick, but interruptions and rumours of interruptions of fuel supplies persist, as does talk of a “subsidy” that must be ended again if continuous supplies are to be guaranteed.
Recruitment of 100, 000 graduates nationwide to teach in various institutions and the same number into the Nigeria Police Force are positive steps to reduce unemployment. Various schemes aimed at empowering tens of thousands of Nigerians for self-employment have also been established.
The first phase of a social intervention scheme to reduce poverty took off recently with the payment of a stipend of N5,000 to indigent citizens in nine states, in keeping with an election campaign promise of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC). When fully implemented, a million Nigerians will profit from the scheme.
Questions have been raised about the criteria for selecting beneficiaries, and about the scheme’s sustainability. Good intentions are not enough. The authorities should address these questions to enlist public support for the scheme.
And with the establishment in the recent past of more public universities, access to higher education is being widened even as some of the older universities that had earned international recognition have lost rank.
The time has come to place a moratorium on the establishment of new public universities, especially when the existing ones are notoriously poorly funded. Resources should instead be concentrated on raising standards in the older universities to world class.
On the national security front, Boko Haram has been tamed, thanks to a military finally equipped for the task. Crushing it must be the ineluctable goal.
But the menace of “Fulani cattle herders” has become bloodier and more intractable. The carnage that turned swathes of Plateau State into killing fields is now being enacted in Kaduna State and areas as far south as Rivers State and Ogun State, with points between just as vulnerable.
It has been claimed that the ECOWAS protocol guarantees the herders free movement throughout the region. But it certainly does not grant them the right to destroy farmlands, raze entire communities and kill with impunity just to graze their cattle.
Whether they are foreigners or Nigerians, their depredations must be seen as clear and present threats to national security. The government’s primary obligation is to protect the lives and property of the citizenry against any threat from any quarters. The Federal Government should rise and be seen to rise to that challenge, urgently.
Overall, much has been done. But there is so much more to do, and so little time. Already, legislators at all three tiers of government and members of the political class are grouping and re-grouping to form a “mega party” that will supplant the present administration in the general elections scheduled for 2019. As the year progresses, this is likely to be the consuming passion of the mega-party proponents.
The government on its part will feel impelled to devise and implement strategies to thwart those seeking to supplant it, and to secure its own continuity.
Such a development will be a costly distraction the nation cannot afford.
The government must keep its eyes on the agenda on which it was voted into power. It is impossible to achieve before 2019 positive change on the comprehensive scale spelled out in its election manifesto. The government will therefore have to identify as priorities those areas in which it can make lasting change and then deploy resources there, without prejudice to other areas of need.
Three obvious candidates for the list are electricity and water, and roads. Major improvements in these areas will translate into resuscitation of manufacturing and small scale industries, healthier living, health, improved agricultural productivity, as well as faster and safer movement of persons, goods and services.
