Daniel Nyam Gwash-Gombe
1 October 2008
opinion
The market plays immeasurable role in the life of all citizens of a country and one of those important places in any city which any visitor tries to know its location on arrival.
It is a place he will do regular purchases for consumables and non consumables. The basic question crying for an answer which one must ask is this: how comfortable are those markets to both buyers and sellers?
The discomfort in many markets around our cities and major towns is enormous and owes this to many militating factors that are fast becoming helpless to sellers and buyers. For us to really enjoy and regard our markets in esteem as having recognition for all stakeholders, a lot of things that will ensure the comfort of all must be put in place. It has remained too difficult to explain, not to even apportion blame, one's inability to understand why some markets are poorly planned and unable to pick a queue from modern markets of the current civilisation. Although like many other things of human comfort in the country, Nigerian markets owe their origin or emergence to local collections.
They emerged as local gathering for the exchange of goods for money and so had no concrete foundation as object created out of a conceptualised form. This may also be the reason why no effort is being made to bring some of these mushroom markets back on track to serve purposeful economic attainment.
Our markets substantially are more of risk zones without guarantee of safety for sellers, buyers and goods as well as the local structures. Everything about our markets is nothing but subscription to risk-bearing. The sellers sell under monumental risks too numerous to list and the buyers are confronted violently by growing dangers, which they must ignore. Nigeria has come a long way. There ought to have been a reasonable shift from the old dangerous pattern to one marriageable to this century, one that will accord all stakeholders a responsible status and guarantee the safety of their lives, property and broaden the economy inherent in all markets of the world.
It is disheartening indeed to find mushroom markets in almost all capitals of our states. These markets lack access roads or lanes. Those available are so narrow that two people cannot pass each other without a brush of their shoulders. This problem is further compounded by the recklessness usually exhibited by some unruly visitors and traders. It has become a common sight to see car owners trying to force themselves into the market unmindful of the inaccessible lane. Motorcyclists are most guilty of this unruly behaviour.
In the past, state governments used to have edicts prohibiting certain lawless behaviours such as earlier enumerated. Law enforcement agents used to seize dangerous weapons such as knives, swords, bows and arrows from people. It was an offence for anyone to drive or ride a motorcycle in an unplanned market. The police seem to have been dispossessed of the virtues accelerative to their duties particularly when it comes to the enforcement of certain public laws. The organisation speaks preferentially about theft, armed robbery, rape and breach of trust. You no longer hear of anything about laws under state edicts.
The enforcement of laws under state edicts assisted immeasurably in crime prevention and control, but disobedience to law and order began to overtake the society when the police tilted away from state laws. It is a tragedy inherently dangerous, which will pose a lot of dangers to our society. It's time the police looked back and made amends toward the restoration of their excellent values of the past. Animals such as goats, cows and sheep share township roads and markets with human beings as if the law against stray animals are no longer in our statute books.
Most if not all the loss of the values in our society is attributed to corruption. I am tempted to feel that the devil only got to know and uses corruption as strong societal vice in recent years. Nigeria would have been wiped away and forgotten if corruption had captured it right from the beginning and flourished in earlier times. Our markets have electricity, but because of illegal tapping by shop owners just as it is the case in unplanned residential areas, the electricity constitutes a risk than service to traders. So whenever there is fire outbreak, substantial parts of a market would be consumed.
The loss usually incurred by traders is so much that it is hardly qualified or calculated accurately and not properly compensated for to enable victims to resettle with little or no hindrance. The reason is because of high illiteracy rate, which cannot give traders the privilege to benefit from insurance services. It's unfortunate that everything about insurance has become history today even among the literate class. Insurance companies cannot tap all the developments being witnessed in some parts of the country and which has increased insurable interests. Our traders particularly in this part of the country know nothing about insurance and so shoulder any risk associated with their lives and businesses.
There should be markets where sellers and buyers can have access to clean drinking water without having to risk their lives to water that is being dangerously hawked in unhygienic condition. Lack of planning has rendered the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) useless. The electricity enjoyed through illegal tapping flourishes with much relish to the helplessness of PHCN. The company needs to be rescued from this total confusion before it is knocked out.
There is virtually no state in Nigeria without Ministry of Lands, Survey and Town Planning which have experts trained with public money but are grossly underutilised. They have lost value of their talents and ethics of their professions. Little wonder we are made to witness shocking and disappointing the collapse of buildings and painful loss of lives. The burden of rehabilitating these Stone Age markets is a big challenge to present leaders who are products of a democratic dispensation. The enormous weight of the challenges must weaken and almost demoralise the willingness of these leaders particularly when considered in terms of cost and land or space for temporary settlement of the traders.
Military leaders like in many other cases are responsible for the woes in our markets. They failed to plan, rehabilitate and build new markets and didn't set any precedence for the present leadership to build upon. Those military leaders must shoulder all the blames associated with Nigeria's underdevelopment and also for plunging the country into the whole mess. What some of us see around us today in terms of physical and purposeful developmental achievement credibly qualifies the popular saying that 'the worst civilian government is by far better than the best military government'. From our traumatised experience, there's no military government that deserves to be described as best. Buhari tried to acquire this credibility, but the life of his administration was shortened.
Our political leaders now and subsequent ones have to bow to the needs of Nigerians for standard markets that would not only serve the interest of sellers and buyers on ordinary parlance, but ones that will guarantee the safety of lives and protect the properties of the sellers. It is time to depart from these Stone Age markets and embrace those that have emerged through concrete civility.
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