We Are In Bad Times, No Doubt, But We'Ve Been All Along by... Chris Onyishi

I was reading Vanguard online recently and I saw where Obong Victor Bassey Attah (two-time Gov. of Akwa Ibom) was quoted as saying that “no sculptor can carve a masterpiece out of a rotten wood”.

There are some opinions that the wood – the Ibom King was referring to - could be treated by some gurus and turned into amazing objects. I did not agree less but I insisted that such treatment will require time and resources no matter who was treating it.

When a country is not interested in saving during the dry season, she will certainly pay some price at the rainy season. Our country is as bad as it could be now. Nobody can successfully deny that fact.

But I have a picture to paint here. A man had a young son. He put the son in a school (feted him with money) and never cared how the boy was fairing. The boy joined bad group and grew with their influence for 20 years.

The boy eventually came out of school - as an adult - and got back home. He quickly fished out bad gangs within the neighborhood, and, where he joined to unleash what he has learnt back in school all his life.

The father - who never cared about his son’s upbringing - turned around to blame the new gang he joined not quite 12 months for his son's criminal behavior and activities. He suddenly lost interest in how the son was brought up. That’s unfair. If anything, it is to work hard and make sure the son is re-orientated.

I see a lot of people who insist that we must not look back. They argue that we should start solving problem immediately. And I always ask them, what is the essence of history? History does not insist that we repeat all things the way they were done. History shows what were faulty in the ways they were done so that we do not do what? Repeat a bad history. Looking back through history is akin to a patient going to a doctor for diagnosis. If the doctor does not have a grip on the root cause of an ailment, there is little that can be done in terms of treatment. In some cases, the doctor refers the patient to a laboratory for examination.

In a post election (PDP) retreat in Gov. Wike’s Port Harcourt somewhere in 2015 organized for PDP assembly men and women and other "party" stake holders, two Ghanaian parliamentarians from the tow major political parties in Ghana - invited by PDP - were on ground to warn PDP against making some obtuse assumptions on APC. Their charge was that PDP becomes very pragmatic and avoid alleging that APC failed to do, in a limited time, what it (PDP) could not do in 16 years. They promptly told PDP that such notion could backfire in view of the fact that the electorates are getting wiser. I hope we, the electorates, are really getting wiser.

We all are aware that oil price in the international market crashed from all time high of above $120pb (and we did not save anything) to an all time low of below $28pb. And our foreign reserve was nothing to write home about. All these happened within the beginning of this administration. I may conjecture that ex-president Jonathan would, even, be very happy today that he did not win the last election. He just escaped at the right time. If we tell ourselves the truth, no economist would have turned things around better within this short period. But I’m not making case for any group. I’m only being objective in my assessment. If I were called upon in May 2015 to manage Nigeria, I would not have gladly taken up the offer.

We were also told that we had the best economy in Africa and that was at a point when Nigerians were streaming out of our country for a greener pasture. We were, as well, told about the school system being revamped to its best form while every wealthy people had their children schooling abroad and those who were not very rich settled for Ghana and elsewhere in sub-regional West Africa. We were told about roads having been constructed or reconstructed to the length of 16,000km around the country. And last power minister (Prof. Nebo) in Jonathan’s administration told us how the power situation would turn around in two years. I remember his mantra then that” nothing could happen overnight”. We remember the booby trap called 2nd Niger Bridge.

But my fear is that we cannot see any of these things they claimed they put in place less than 2 years they exited from office. My question sometimes has been, did the 16,000km of roads they claimed they built got destroyed by this administration? Did they go with the power they said they had started fixing? What about all the FDI’s they claimed flew into this country within the last months of that administration?

I do not want us to begin to find fault either way now. I want us to know how deep the rot is and make sure we guide the present administration alright. The way it is now is that we do not quite know the tail or the head of PDP and that – in itself – has become a major problem in a multi “party” democracy. I consciously put “party” in quotes. One would have expected that PDP is up and doing and take their role of constructive opposition. We now see clearly that there was no "party" called PDP. It was a group that came together to share money and when once the source of money being shared is blocked, the disintegrate. I'm even surprised that APC has not imploded while struggling to start their own brand of sharing. The truth is that the presence of President Buhari and Prof. Osibanjo may just be the cohesive "aradite" holding the group together.

I had earlier – severally – opined that we do not actually have political parties (with identifiable manifestos) in this country. What we’ve had all along are groups that come together when it suits them to share the wealth of the country – amongst a few – and not to develop the infrastructure of the country for the good of all and sundry. Most of them have migrated around each of the major groups many times over. Most of the bigwigs in APC today were once in PDP and conversely

Our problem is that we begin to align with one of the groups against the other when what they do is to rubbish all of us as it pleases them.
Let us insist, henceforth, that we hold our politicians accountable irrespective of the political group that is in power. And in so doing, we should be very objective so that we do not become guilty of what the Ghanaian parliamentarians charged PDP retreat against...

Chris Onyishi