Nigeria lawmakers: they‘ve started again

Wonders, they say, shall never end. In Nigeria wonders always mesmerize and baffle any right thinking mind. It is just few months into the Nigerian 7th republic and the well known stories of bickering and fighting amongst our politicians are fast surfacing. From those fighting shamelessly for the provision of jeeps as official cars, to those shouting blue murder for the accommodation they are allocated.
When will our politicians ever learn to serve their motherland patriotically? Some analysts have concluded that the Nigerian politicians are cursed people; the reason most of them are always blind when they get to the corridors of power. They hardly practise what they preach. News of some legislators rejecting some particular cars purchased for them by the state government is making headlines across the country. Our selected and elected members coming out audaciously to say they prefer big jeeps or nothing. One wonders which one of them came to this world with anything in the first instance.
The current selfish agitations by our legislators in some states and at the national level clearly shows that we have learnt nothing from the previous assembly, where those failed legislators did nothing throughout their tenure, but to bicker and fight shamelessly over sitting allowance, furniture allowance, car allowance, house allowance and other selfish remuneration.  They were given so much by the Nigerian people, but all we got was various committees of inquiry and expensive sightseeing by these men and women. They visited various purported power plants and set up committee on power generation, yet they left us more in darkness than we were before. They made various expensive trips to ascertain the poor states of our roads, yet did nothing to salvage the daily death traps and insecurity in virtually all the roads in the country. They were at our various higher institutions on self assessments, but still left our schools in shambles and shame.
It is almost three months into the Nigerian 7th republic and our lawmakers are still toying with the lives of millions of Nigerians as we painfully wait for them to settle down and carry out the functions they were elected for. But so far, nothing meaningful seems to be coming from them as most of them are still fighting over positions and head of committees and House leadership. Surprisingly, one significant bill presented by a thoughtful legislator among them from Kaduna State on the urgent need to decongest our mollycoddle federal capital city by compelling the Federal government to move Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) out of the Central Business District of Abuja to other Area Councils in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), was blindly rejected by those, who it seems, are still carried away by the fake glitters of expensive Abuja.
One would have expected a House with visionary members to see the logic behind this sensible bill. But no way,our legislators are not interested in redeeming our battered and neglected rural settlement and satellite towns across  the glitzy Abuja, forgetting that  developed cities across the world were once  villages ,slums and ghettos, including  their gigantic National Assembly Complex and  the  now  expensive looking  Federal capital city. They have proved to us and the whole world that they cannot initiate development and move us forward. It shows that they don’t really have the people at heart, especially those suffering Nigerians that live in these suburbs who would have benefitted tremendously from this idea.
Over the decades, the Nigerian elite, especially the politicians, have always had this myopic idea that the right to enjoy all the good things of life belongs exclusively to them and their cliques.  They have always had this illusion that they were elevated to live above others and derive some cheap joy in seeing their fellow countrymen and women suffer and come running to them for salvation; part of the reasons most of our villages and towns are still looking like somewhere out of the 18th century.
Some of our present selected representatives are too happy to carry on with the ways things are and not ashamed to continue to live on the legacies of others. They see nothing wrong in our outdated schools, roads, infrastructure, and other historical glories left behind by our past dedicated, patriotic and God-fearing leaders, who zealously built most of the edifice and systems they are now enjoying.
Funnily, they abandoned their villages immediately they are lucky to have a position in the cities, with only a few of them remembering to return to the village schools that gave them a ray of life. Visible across most of our rural communities are abandoned dilapidated primary and secondary schools, where most of our elite freely passed through, but are today a sorry sight, and yet we see them flying their offsprings abroad with huge capital flight, investing hugely in foreign schools; pretending as if they never went to those schools in the villages. No wonder some of the new legislators are coming out to boast that they have help reduced poverty in their constituencies by distributing motorcycles to youth in their communities. I believe a logical nation should understand that political motorcycles  distributions  add nothing, but more accidents and cheap selling of the pride of the youth who are suppose to be the leaders of tomorrow, not Achaba and Okada riders as we now have all across the country. All across the country are visible decaying infrastructure and establishments that are begging for quick attention and intervention, but our elected representatives are not too keen about them, what seems to be more paramount in their minds are their wages and political ambitions.
The seconds are ticking and the days are fast running , and our politicians are still left stranded, carried away by the thoughts and vision of 18th and 19th century, contented with the ways things are. Please will someone kindly remind them that we are now in the 21st century and the world is fast moving ahead, leaving them blindly behind at the station of  globalization and development.
NEW  NIGERIAN  ON  SUNDAY, JULY 24 ,  2011

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