Eight tears for the South, eight years for the North and zero years for Nigeria

The same intrigue as we have seen over the years affected the development of the new city of Abuja which was to be a milestone development and a world class city to behold. If Abuja continues with the present level of “development” the city will become a very big slum in the next twenty years. The architect of the city of Abuja engaged the services of one of the best consultants in the world to develop what was to become the best new capital city to follow the movement that was made from Rio to Brasilia in Brazil and from Sidney to Cambria in Australia. These countries made their moves just before us and were visited by our consultants mainly to learn from their mistakes because you don’t make such a monumental move without running into crises.

But from what I have seen over the development in the last twenty years, mistakes upon mistakes have been made because at a stage the masterplan was abandoned.

I was one of the first people that worked in the new capital city that was no city. I had to operate from Suleja, about one hour drive to the city of Abuja because there was not even a place to stay in Abuja.

Few years into the building of the new capital city, the sharing of positions, the sharing of lands and the sharing of the cake made nonsense of what was intended, and the masterplan was no longer adhered to. I was part of a team that established a soil database for the whole territory; thereby any building of a major infrastructure must refer to the data base before designing the foundation of such a structure.

For me then, the building of a new city from scratch was to showcase the immense human resources that were put together, drawing Nigerians from every part of the world, from ministries and professional bodies. Not too long ago, I was shocked to know that the authorities did not know about the soil data base. In all my activism, as some may see me, especially since turning eighty almost a year ago, I not only state the problems as I see them backed by facts, I also proffer solutions to the issues that have befallen our nation.

Therefore, we the people must admit that we have failed our nation in many ways. We must not wait to
be told by outsiders anymore. We must learn from what was done with the telecommunication industry
that made it possible for the poor to own phones. The same partnership can be introduced so that the poor can have electricity and water. The same partnership can be employed to give our nation airways, airports and railways. The same can be done with our steel plants, refineries, the motor assembly plants, pulp paper mills, the river basin authorities, and saving Lake Chad for our agricultural pursuit. We borrowed money from around the world to prepare the nation for industrial take-off many decades ago but somewhere down the road we have presided over the collapse of that foundation, and we spend almost half of our resources servicing our debts despite the debt forgiveness that was offered by both London and the Paris Club.

My take, therefore, is that if Nigeria must move away from the present quagmire, we must move back a little, accept our failures and begin a process of repositioning so that we the people can make and rebuild once again.

For the sake of the present and future generation and as was mentioned in my previous columns, we the present actors must leave the nation a better place than we met it and we must start to change today not tomorrow.