Nigeria: Our Beloved Federal Republic of Confusion

22 November 2017
opinion

A few years ago, someone said that he didn't like spending a lot of time in Europe and America whenever he visited, and he actually used to make a lot of visits. His reason was that those places were too organised for his comfort. He would rather spend time in Nigeria with its confusion. He could get away with anything and did as he liked. Most people in leadership positions in this country are well travelled. While some went to school abroad others have lived there for a reasonable amount of time. It is, however, a shame that just like the citizen I referred to above, we seem to enjoy the confusion that Nigeria has become in different aspects of its existence. We seem to like the fact that most things don't work here. In some cases, what is required to make things work may just be very little, but instead of fixing them we would rather wait for them to degenerate completely. This is true of our railway system that we left to rot and completely go out of business for several decades before the recent efforts to bring it back to life. Most public utilities are treated as if they belonged to no one, while we protect our privately-owned ones. That is the reason why someone would live in a comfortable house with all the amenities working, while similar amenities in his office are left to breakdown and permanently decay, particularly, if in the public sector!

Recently, I was trying to locate someone in one of the streets in mainland Lagos. It took me some hours of going back and forte before I could find the place. I then wondered, why we could not geographically map the country like it is done elsewhere. Why don't we have post codes so that everyone can easily be located once that person identifies his post code? I am not sure it is such an expensive project to embark on and even if it is, the advantages far outweigh the cost. Mapping every part of the country will not only help in locating ourselves, it will also help in fighting and reducing crime. With mapping, criminals will not be able to strike and disappear the way they do today. It will be easy to track them down and prosecute them. Even the numbering of houses on streets appears an intractable problem. In some places, you will have No. 9 come before No.3 and it could be that way for several years. In some cases, one street would bear two or more names at the same time. This is the case even in the highbrow Ikoyi Lagos, where some of the most expensive real estate in Nigeria are found. Related to mapping is our confused identity management system. Before the advent of the National Identity Card project, which by the way, does not seem to have so much traction, we did not have any way of identifying who was a Nigerian, except for those who could afford international passports. The introduction of the Bank Verification Number (BVN) by the banks has helped in identifying genuine and ghost bank customers. What to do with fake accounts and the balances therein is another matter altogether. If we have the will to execute a biometric identity management system, many criminal activities will be tough to execute as it will not be difficult to track down those behind them. A reliable identity management system could be integrated with the election management system and thus remove the need for permanent voter's cards since the identity cards will have all the information that a voter's card should have.

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