Do you understand government people? Because I don’t

CHUKS OLUIGBO

An old schoolmate who lives in the United States of America recently shared how a few years ago he returned to Owerri, the Imo State capital, where he grew up, and wanted to renovate the basketball courts in which he played while growing up, but the government people asked him to bribe them first before they would allow him to do it.

The old schoolmate also narrated how his family got sued by the Ideato North Local Government of Imo State, his home local government, for fixing the dilapidated road leading to their family house in the village.

"We got sued by our local government for fixing the road to our house in the village when my grandma died! We approached the authorities and begged them to help us and they refused, but people were coming for the funeral and the roads were bad, so we had to do something,” he says.

“We tried everything. Even when we fixed the road, we used the local government tractors and machines and we paid for the job. We paid them for their services to fix their road and still got sued. And even the local government chairman and his officials came to the funeral and enjoyed too. My father bought septic cement pipes to rebuild the roads but after the lawsuit, they were left there and are still there till date. You want to help and you are told to bribe government officials to do their work they abandoned!"

It may sound strange to some, but it’s an all too familiar story. We often hear of how government people are preventing public-spirited individuals or organisations from rehabilitating roads or providing other essential services to the people, services that government itself has failed to provide. Sometimes too we hear about traditional rulers (so-called royal fathers) that ask for bribes from government before projects could be done in their communities.

There is a road just off the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway in Lagos leading into and out of Ajegunle through a place called Otto Wharf. Residents refer to that whole area as Orege. If you pull down the walls separating both of them, that link road might as well be within the premises of the German construction firm Julius Berger, which Nigerians have come to see as the grandmaster, the be-all-and-end-all of road construction. But if you ever have the misfortune of passing through that road, whether during the dry or rainy season, you wouldn’t need to go elsewhere to locate that valley of shadow of death mentioned in the 23rd Psalm of the Holy Bible. You'd ask yourself how hell came to be so close to heaven, how such a terrible nightmare of a road could sit side by side with the offices of Julius Berger, and why the highly revered construction firm couldn't just fix the road as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility.

I once asked the question myself. The gist about town is that several times Julius Berger, as a socially-responsible company, had wanted to do the road and bring relief to commuters, but the local government people refused. I guess that would be Ajeromi-Ifelodun. I’m yet to confirm this gist from the local government authorities, but it’s believable given previous experience.

You would wonder why a government would do that. I’m wondering too. That’s why ask, do you understand government people? Do you understand how their brains work? If you have a clue, I’d really like to know, because I don’t understand.

Providing necessary services to the people is a very critical role of government. It is appalling when you see government not fulfilling this role, with all the money in its vaults, but it’s heartbreaking when the same government prevents individuals or institutions from providing these same services it has failed to provide.

Truth is that many Nigerian people do not feel the impact of government, except in the negative sense – through terrible gullies that pass as roads, epileptic or non-existent electricity power supply, taps that do not exist or have run dry, a ban on essential commodities that we do not have the capacity to produce without a corresponding policy to cushion the adverse impact, or heavy taxation on essential services that people have provided for themselves because government abdicated its responsibility in the first place.

That’s why many people in Nigeria carry on with their lives not caring whether there is a government or not. Self-help has always been the word. “If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own borehole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline. One day soon, said a friend of mine, you will have to build your own post office to send your letters,” Chinua Achebe wrote in his 1983 book The Trouble with Nigeria.

And then, governments in Nigeria don’t seem to agree that a stitch in time saves nine. No. They won’t stitch that tear until it becomes many thousands. A small ditch on the road won’t be fixed until it becomes a gully and the road becomes impassable. Go round and see for yourself. They want to see people suffer first: several mishaps, broken limbs here, cracked skulls there, vehicles crushed beyond repair, scores of death.

A few weeks ago, it took an avalanche of ugly newspaper articles and audio-visual reports to attract the attention of the Federal Government to the disaster lurking at the section of the Apapa Bridge leading out of the city that harbours the country’s two most important ports. The Minister of Power, Works and Housing visited Apapa to see things for himself and, eventually, the outbound bridge was closed to traffic for a number of days for temporary repairs. But at that time, the approach to the bridge, even up to the foot of the bridge, was too bad to be ignored, but the government turned a blind eye. Now pockets of ever-widening gullies have rendered the road impassable. What next?

Talk about wastefulness! Imagine a government committing huge sums of taxpayers’ (or oil) money into a project, does the project halfway, and then abandons it! Evidence of this is everywhere – they call them white elephant projects. Or that a government claims to have completed a multibillion-naira project, commissions it with pomp and pageantry (oh, that phrase!), and then, years down the line, the project is not put into any use. Or that a government awards a contract worth billions of naira and does not follow up on it. Years later, citizens are told that a certain road is in a state of disrepair because those who got the contracts to do it pocketed the money without executing the contracts, and nobody is arrested, nobody is queried, nobody is prosecuted, nobody goes to jail.

Sadly, in all of this, the people are the worst losers.