From Suyi Ayodele
After settling KWAM 1 with ambassadorial epaulettes, it appears that National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) President, MC Oluomo, is next to receive Baba’s blessings. With the approval of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) at its meeting last week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be building six motor parks (aka bus terminals) across the country.
Our President is a personality prone to hilarious performances. He has introduced another phony enterprise into the business of state with the planned ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. Please pay attention to the qualifier, ‘modern’ because what follows is pure superlative! When the government is deliberate in its dictions, using adjectives to qualify its head words, you should know that it has something up its sleeves.
The motor parks are evenly distributed this time around. The ‘dot on the map’ zone got its own fair share. There is no ojooro, no magomago, no wuruwuru! The principle of ‘Federal Character’ is at its best element. There will be one bus terminal in Kano. That will take care of the seven states in the North-West. One will be in Gombe for the six states of North-East. The Confluence Town, Lokoja, Kogi State will have one for the entire people of the North-Central zone.
Down South, Abeokuta, Ogun State, will have one for all the children of Oduduwa in the South-West. The Ndigbo will all travel to the commercial city of Onitsha, Anambra State, to enjoy the proposed state-of-the-art bus terminal. The oil-rich Niger Delta is taken care of, also. Their motor park is going to be tucked in the belly of Ewu in Esan Central Local Government Area of Edo State.
Never mind the distance; never bother about the 9.3 hours travelling hours between Sokoto and Kano; a mere 537-kilometre distance. The government has the magic wand to bridge the gap and extend the dividends of the bus terminals to everybody. Fela Anikulapo Kuti called it “government magic”! This government works wonders! Ógbenután!
Now the main gist. Each motor park, the government said, would cost ₦23.6 billion. Please don’t shout! Yes, the bus terminals will be built with bricks and mortar. It will merely cost the country an arm, a leg and several pints of blood. That is not too much of a pain to inflict by a government that is far away from reality!
But the beauty of it all is that the bus terminals will be beautifully decorated and equipped with world-class facilities and equipment. When completed, Angels would no longer want to fly. Our Celestial brethren will travel our roads with us. That itself gives us peace of mind. Nothing can be safer than to be in the same bus with the Angels, the Malaikas and the principalities in high places! We are lucky folks, aren’t we?
No sarcasm is intended. Methinks that every Nigerian that will commence and terminate his or her journey at the bus terminals (please add modern), is guaranteed of his or her safety. How? Aso Rock Villa will be able to monitor every vehicle that leaves each of the bus terminals (or is it bus stop sef?). I put my shirt on it! It is a sure banker! A ₦23.6 billion bus terminal must have security gadgets that should be able to monitor our present, our progress and our future! If it is otherwise, then it is a waste of resources, and President Tinubu blocks wastages!
Nigeria is an ojúmó kan, àrà kan (one day, one stunt) country. We don’t run out of damfool ideas here. The only thing in short supply is a leadership with depth. A complacent followership equally promotes inept leadership. We are gradually gravitating towards the precipice of a failed nation. Many people believe we are already one!
President Tinubu may end up the luckiest president by the time he completes his tour of duty. He is one president who treats the country like his personal estate. And he gets away with it, all the time. Nobody questions him, nobody interrogates his policies. Nobody has the temerity to say: “Baba Seyi, you are not fair to us.”
In Aso Rock Villa, where he lives at our expense, Tinubu marks off the number of the strokes he has administered to our backs. Then, he takes his champagne. Or is it freshly tapped palm wine? He asks the boys to go back to procure more canes for future flogging. We are completely pummelled! How does he do that; how does he achieve that total appropriation of the people’s resilience?
We simply swallow whatever pill the President forces down our throats. We agonise like the proverbial woman being pleasured by a man with a big phallus. And nothing more. She merely waits in palpable trepidation for the next round of tortuous grinding.
Nigerians have been conditioned to be perpetually complacent by a government that trades in poverty and profits by inflicting pain! We blech. We stretch. We look for any available pillow to rest our weary heads. Then we wait for the next round of dosage. Our ruiners of this epoch are not just mean, wicked and audacious; they are inorganic, pathologically cold-blooded!
That the Tinubu administration is heavily transactional is no longer ‘a topic for future symposium’ (apologies to Fela). That itself is not the real problem, not the real bad case, here. The brazen way the administration goes about its Mr-Giwa-is-a-trader activities is the most irritating. The citizenry appears completely battered such that not a whimper is heard from them anytime the government comes up with its nothing-go-happen policies.
By the approval given by the FEC last Wednesday, the six motor parks, colourfully presented to us as “Modern Bus Terminals’, will be built for the sum of ₦142,028,576,008.17. Nigeria’s FEC is the gathering of all ministers and any appointee of cabinet rank. Sa’idu Ahmed Alkali, the Minister of Transportation, told us FEC approved the project.
By simple Arithmetic formula of Division, the cost of each terminal is N23.6 billion! That will depend on the inflation rate between when the contract is awarded and when it is executed. If prices of goods and services go up the way they do daily in Nigeria, there will be room for contract variation. So, by the time the terminals are ready, the cost might have gone up.
When Alkali announced the ‘deal’, my mind raced to my secondary school days when we were taught Types of Legislative Power. Did our Government subject teachers misinform or miseducate us by saying that building a motor park is a function listed in the Residual Legislative List? Were they wrong to have said that construction, running and the maintenance of motor parks or ‘modern bus terminals’ are the responsibilities of the third tier of government, the local government? Do I simply say this “is confusing me?”
The minister, a former senator, while justifying this put-on, attributed “crimes, road accidents and illegal arms proliferation” to the lack of major bus terminals in the country. How can a man be phony and funny at the same time? How do we situate this type of reasoning: “because there are no bus terminals to address the interests of millions of Nigerian commuters, as a result, we have a lot of crime, road traffic accidents, and proliferation of arms and ammunition on our highways?”
What logic! In Alkali’s reasoning and Tinubu’s approval, once these bus terminals are built, all the bandits, kidnappers and other felons operating all over Nigeria will have no way to move their weapons? The Kano bus terminal designated for the North-West for instance, would ensure that bandits in Kaduna, Kebbi, Jigawa, Sokoto, Katsina and Zamfara are shut out of arms and ammunition supply? What exactly is lacking in this administration?
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