Tunde Asaju
10 November 2009
opinion
The problem with all educated illiterates is the fact that they read the laws with the candid simplicity with which they read Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
They forget that while they spent three or four years for an arts degree using lesson notes acquired by lecturers who were trained before independence, our learned friends spend more years acquiring a law degree and being called to the bar. When they finish, they become learned while the rest of us glamorously remain 'educated'. Just see what a Member of the House of Representatives is doing to the logic of our nationality by trying to make laws for citizenship of people whom Nigeria is contented to classify as good neighbours?
What is wrong if non-Hausa speaking kids are sent back to Benin to go and learn ibini, or non-Igbo speaking kids are made to return to Onitsha to trace their roots and return with an indigeneship certificate qualifying them for school admission? Who says that just because their parents adopted the city life to the humdrum life of village life, they automatically qualify to become citizens? How can anybody accept a situation where a Yar'Adua writes Osun on the space provided for his state of origin when we all know that there is no such indigenous name in Osogbo?
Or why should Ikechukwu call himself a Kanawa when nature already decreed him to live in Sabongari or new town? If an Awolowo must play politics anywhere, it should be within the south-west and among his tribal kinsmen anywhere else. That is the essence of our constitution until this jobless rep woke up from Abuja slumber. I smell a rat, he must be one of those reps who breed like rabbits and who wants the state to take care of the products of his genital recklessness. He will not succeed.
We practice selective presidentialism. It's an innovation unique only to us. It's a system that demarcates indigenous quarters from strangers' quarters without the pass system of the apartheid age. And where we have created even sharia laws, we try, as much as expedient to excuse non-indigenes from facing the amputator. So far, no non-indigene has been Jangebe-d for stealing a goat if you know what I mean. Let it remain so, so help us Jah, Rastafari!
I see Media Trust is trying to pioneer citizenship journalism. How can they be counting for the Federal Office of Statistics how much we have spent on electricity only to generate darkness? Somebody should caution Mahmud Jega's boys to stop exposing what politicians have hidden. According to his paper, $5.08 billion has been spent on electricity and an additional $4.6 billion is required to reach the benchmark 6,000 megawatts of obscurity. The corollary to that is that this is money down the drain.
This is pure incitement to sedition and only an educated illiterate will not know that it costs more to generate gloom. In its quest to drain more tax payer's money, the Ministry of Power to Steal has my support. At any rate, why not give the money in our foreign reserve to Rilwanu Babalola instead of giving it to state governors who will share it and go abroad for medical treatment?
Some statisticians say that Nigeria is the world's sixth or seventh producer of oil. I think the error is obvious; we are the sixth or seventh consumer of refined crude. We may warehouse crude, we sure don't produce it and the last time I peeped through the window of a dilapidated molue I found a long queue of cars invited by the NPC for the 2009 Tokubo Car Census.
Nigeria never follows where the path leads; we go where there are no paths and leave our footprints! Other nations usually carry out car surveys using statistics from vehicle registration agencies. But trusting some Nigerians not to register their cars, the accurate way to guesimate the figures is to make all mobile cars queue up at fuel stations-simplicita. We must value such ingenuity and not blame government for it. This is a subject for a Harvard dissertation- if I lie, ask el-Rufai.
I lost count of the amount of money we have spent on the four obsolete refineries we have from the halcyon days of Gen. Abacha. The budget office has closed for the weekend and I couldn't get the correct figures. Suffice to say that compared to the effect of the cabal on fuel subsidy it must be paltry indeed weighed against what other insane countries spend building new refineries.
If the cabal is draining the lifeblood of subsidy from one side, why should government not find a way of draining the remaining lifeblood from another side - after all, the essence is to annihilate the poor man without incurring the wrath of Ban Ki Moon. Ask Rilwanu Lukman how he maintains a slim figure and he'll tell you all about it. Such Zaria logic saves the nation from all the troubles associated with obese citizenry and we must be grateful for such ingenuity.
Besides, what further prove is there that deregulation would increase supplies? Take a bicycle ride round the cities and see that more fuel is available at road sides than at fuel stations. That, my dear friends is the essence of deregulation for those who do not know.
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nigeria is not just a land of contradictions,where a nation has so much in aboundance in both human and natural resouses yet her citezenry lives in abject poverty.there is no light,no good road,no water to use and the oll we have so much in aboundance is a curse for the nation.is deregulation the problem of naija now?all the trillions of naira that have been allocated and looted what has the govt done about that?the only are that excites our govt is any are that will inflict further pains on nigerians.honestly the only solution to naija problems is REVOLUTION.Nigerians lets arise and fight fight for our right.
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