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Last Updated: Aug 27, 2008 - 11:33:28 AM |
We are being
told that by that year, a certain stroke of magic will flush out our
mounting fears and worries and our anxieties would be turned to boom,
that our country would become a land flowing with milk and honey. We
are being told that by dint of some factors we are yet to come to grips
with, all nations in the world will screech to a standstill while
Nigeria races up to become a country where everything works. But we, as
defrauded, cheated and heavily scammed citizens of a country that has
become a legendary testing ground for consistent scam, have been
willing partakers in such hollow and absurd optimism. We witnessed the
scam of the magic year 1990, 2000, 2010 and such other contraptions by
those we delude ourselves as our leaders to lull us to deep slumber
while the only business that has had a luxuriant life in Nigeria,
corruption and official graft, deepen and eat away the ebbing life of
this unfortunate country.
We are sure that 2020 is not the exit point for such scandalous
diversion and that sooner or later, the alecs that have made life such
a living hell in Nigeria will come out with another magical year when
pains and misery will cease in Nigeria. We are sure that we are being
employed as willing guinea pigs by men that have failed to show any
creative thinking, even in the con art they have periodically unleashed
on the rest of us for the purpose of furthering the art of official
stealing which governance has become in Nigeria. By every standard, the
regimes of Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo have been the most corrupt
and bestial in the league of the predatory pestilences that have
afflicted the country since independence. Curiously however, these
regimes had been the loudest, the most profuse and the most prodigal in
fangling these mastheads of deception while they carry out the most
obscene and primitive looting of the patrimony that would have been
used to develop the country and make it stand in league of the 100 most
thriving countries in the world by 2020, a far more realistic dream
than the fraud of Vision 2020.
While Babangida developed the template of the 1990 and 2000 magical
years as he preened the country of its heirlooms and assets, Abacha
developed the Vision 2010 blueprint while he was raping the country
blind and cornering its choice wealth. Obasanjo, schooled in the arts
of rustic guile and deceit and faced with the prospect of a grand and
resounding failure in eight harrowing years of beguiled, purblind and
visionless leadership, coined the Vision 2020 idea, driven by the most
corrupt and unscrupulous etiquette, as a leeway for a shameful exit
after ensuring he stripped the country of every available asset to
enrich himself, his bed mates, menservants, hirelings, and co-partakers
in the thriving business of public enfoolment he promoted for eight
wasted years. As he left, in a blaze of infamous actions that drove the
country on edge, he ensured he canonized himself in self-flattering
epaulettes and told us to wait for 2020 when his guile fruits would
mature. with the Yar’Adua government, a fruit of the negative
infestation of the body polity by the Obasanjo regime, showing
incontrovertible streaks of rudderless ness in the face of the odious
fallout of the Obasanjo misgovernment, it had resorted to investing in
the hollow slogan of Vision 20 2020, when we are told that Nigeria will
become one of the twenty richest countries in the world. His government
has found comforting refuge in repeating this obvious hoax that is not
backed by any indices on the ground. He has adopted it as a curative
remedy to his own false-steps and abject sparse understanding of the
means to tackle the country’s myriads of exacerbating problems.
As Yar’Adua and his kitchen cabinet continue the futile singsong of
2020, life in Nigeria has plunged to the barest known standard. Power
generation ebbs so badly while Yar’Adua is still planning on when to
announce his much-hackneyed emergency on the sector. Such necessary
infrastructures like roads, potable water supply, air, rail and water
transportation are abandoned to decay so intolerably that they are fast
going extinct. The educational sector operates on mere crutches as
criminal neglect and abandonment marks the official attitude to the
sector. The health crisis deepens with public health institutions
graduating from mere consulting clinics when the military intervened in
1983 to sprawling mortuaries. The precarious state of insecurity has
plunged the country into the Hobbessian state where life has become
brutish, short and nasty. While a food crisis that aims at the fragile
jugular of the expanding poor, the sick and the weak community runs out
of control, a spiraling inflation has ensured that poverty widens in
every ramification and hunts Nigerians with an insensate vengeance.
Unemployment soars out of control and the vicious circle of poverty
finds a permanent abode in a country, seized in the orgy of official
deception. Meanwhile, official corruption finds great flavour in the
everyday conduct of supposed leaders who find it fashionable raiding
the common till while selling poor placebos to Nigerians.
These are just a few indices that are driving Nigeria’s quest to become
one of the greatest countries on earth by 2020, as officially espoused
by those who have grown so demurred as not to realize that Nigerians
see through such racket. Nigeria has fast regressed into a leviathan
and a seamless hell on earth while our leaders find comforting
satiation in deceiving their fellow countrymen of a great future that
will dawn in 2020. From all possible indications, such quest is
anchored on sheer magic and maybe witchcraft because nothing suggests
that the country is on the footing for such lofty aspiration. While it
is certain that the authors and marketers of this dimmed vision anchor
it on a widening revenue base from the sale of oil, they are yet to
tackle the contradictions inherent in Nigeria’s prevalent poverty
status while drawing from a persistent oil boom. Those who know have
counseled that even if the top 50 nations in the world flag their own
growth and refuse to take any real step to progress while Nigeria fires
its dormant growth pins, there is no possible way this country will
become one of the top 50 nations in the world by 2020. This therefore
makes Yar’Adua’s present postulation on Vision 2020 as a deliberate,
wild and unrealizable dream, a howling scam that that is sustained for
the diversionary value it adds to the carnivorous art leadership has
become in Nigeria.
Nigerians are demanding of Yar’Adua and company, a tokenistic
appreciation of the demand of the high office they covet. Nigerians
demand that Yar’Adua jettison this grand and infantile hallucination
and approach Nigeria’s problem from the most basic level. They demand
that he and his team bend down and don the work garbs to fix the roads,
build new ones, build railways across the country, up-grade the
nation’s public educational and health sectors, fix the intractable
power sector, wean governance of the burgeoning bureaucracy that has
made it very costly and ineffective, create sustainable factors to make
for the thriving of the real sector, invest progressively in
agriculture, tourism and commerce. They demand for a fast-tracked
tackling of the escalating security crisis and the enthronement of
merit as the driving force in the nation’s quest for greatness. Above
all, Nigerians demand the uncasing of the cloak of corruption that
presently enshroud governance and official business in Nigeria. These
are not rocket science as those that have taken turns to rape and
plunder this country in recent times, make it look like. They are
simple and realizable targets for a government with the least modicum
of knowledge, vision and sincerity. This provides a surer grounding for
grander dreams as contained in the Vision 2020 template than mere
wishful thinking of a sleeping government and idle, parasitic political
class of rent-seeking denizens. If we remember that Dubai, which is now
seen as one of the wonders of this century was a mere desert just ten
light years ago, two years before Obasanjo took over power, we would
realize that with sincerity, knowledge and the will power, Nigeria
could, by 2020, start the real quest to be one o
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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