By Sonnie Ekwowusi
There is nothing we will not hear in this Buhari government. Having monumentally failed in the last seven years, the Buhari government now seeks alibi in over-population. It ascribes poverty, unemployment and food starvation plaguing the country to over-population. It says that we are too many in Nigeria and therefore we should kill our babies through abortion, infanticide, sterilization of women and abortificient in order to decrease our population in order to improve the “quality of life” and “standards of living of all Nigerians”. Consequently President Buhari has recently created what has been dubbed the Revised National Policy on Population. He has equally recently inaugurated the National Council on Population Management (NCPM) principally chaired by the Vice-President of Nigeria Prof. Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) to implement the Policy.
The Buhari National Population reduction Policy is already dead on arrival. Why? Because it doesn’t make sense at all. Boko Haram, ISWAP, murderous Fulani herdsmen, bandits, abductors, unknown gunmen, kidnappers, hunger, malnutrition, poverty, illness, migration have been reducing Nigeria’s population day by day in the last 7 seven years. The government had been failing in its constitutional responsibility of protecting the lives and property of the citizenry. No day passes in Nigeria without any of the aforesaid merchants of death hacking at any least 5 Nigerians to death. Nigerian medical doctors and other Nigerian professionals are continuously fleeing Nigeria unabated resulting in decrease in the population of Nigeria’s working capital. Our borders are porous. Young men and women from Chad, Niger Republic, Sudan and other neigbouring countries are daily trooping into Nigeria and swelling up the Nigerian population. About 70% of Okada riders in Lagos, for instance, are non-Nigerians without any papers. In 2015 and 2019 many of them voted in the election. Come 2023 election they will still vote. Now, the same Buhari government which cannot protect lives and property of the citizenry and which cannot halt the constant influx of non-Nigerians into the country let alone halt the exodus of the country’s finest working human capital is asking Nigerian families to reduce the number of their children. Haba! I don’t know how many children President Buhari has. I would suggest we start with his family. Let him first reduce the number of his children and his household so that we will follow suit. Ditto for Vice-President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo (SAN). Let him also reduce the number of his children and his household so that learn from him. Also the members of the National Assembly should equally reduce the number of their children and their expansive households.
Example is better than precept. The other day the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives Alhassan Ado-Doguwa boasted on the floor of the House that he had 28 children at the moment and plans to have up to 30 children before the end of the current 9th National Assembly. He jokingly said that he was considering the allocation of a polling unit to his private home, as part of the amendments to the Electoral Act 2020. Go and tell him to reduce the number of children and you will see what he would do to you. And he is not alone in this matter. For example, Muhammadu Bello Abubarkar Masaba Bida married 120 wives and fathered 203 children before his death in 2017. Alhaji Adamu Loddo, a Jalingo-based 68-year-old man has 30 surviving children. He said he has done yet. Not to talk about the Amajiri parents and their uncountable numerous children scattered all over the place. When the last Obasanjo administration threatened to enforce the one-man-four-children population policy in Nigeria, an angry Muslim retorted: “Obasanjo has plenty of children. Who is he to tell us the number of children Allah wants us to have?”. Similarly after former President Good luck Jonathan appointed Festus Odimegwu and 22 others to reduce the population of Nigeria, some Nigerians were heard querying at that time: “Who is Festus Odimegwu to dictate to us the number of children we should have?”
The unassailable deductions from the foregoing are: If the efforts to implement the population reduction policy in Nigeria in the past were met with vehement resistance it is unlikely that the policy would be embraced in the last days of the Buhari government. If the policy cannot be implemented in one part of the country because the people there are opposed to it, why implement it in other parts of the country to the disadvantage of the people living there?
More importantly, it is only a bad carpenter who quarrels with his tools. By analogy, it is only a bad leader who quarrels with the population of his country. The vibrant young people that constitute the bulk of the population are indeed a vibrant work force that should be used to fast-track economic growth as we are currently witnessing in China, Singapore, Bangladesh, India and many Asia countries. With its enormous population China is now ruling the world. You will recall that China embraced the one-child-per-couple policy in 1978. But the policy backfired on China and consequently China had no option but to quickly scrap it. It resulted in sex imbalance and gendercide (the practice of killing unwanted Chinese females before they were born) in China. Because of this killing of unwanted females, the Chinese boys outnumbered the Chinese girls. This has created a “Wild-West” sex industry in China today, an entire generation of Chinese girls missing because they were being killed in the womb.
Today China is reaping enormous demographic dividends from its huge population. Why is the Buhari government not reaping demographic dividends from Nigeria’s population?. Having squandered the confidence and trust reposed in it and having failed to live up to its bidding, the Buhari government is now passing the buck to the population. This is dishonesty and propaganda at their peak. It is a fraud. The average Nigerian knows very well that our problem in Nigeria is not over-population: our myriads of problems in Nigeria are incompetence, corruption, wooden-headedness, incestuous narcissism, stupidity, dementia, foolishness, cluelessness and ignorance in governance. Wooden-headedness, in particular, can ruin governance. Remember the rice pyramid propaganda in Abuja last month? The amount of money spent in borrowing the bags of rice from neighbouring African countries, transporting them to and fro Abuja and erecting a pyramid with them would have been enough to fix about five major federal highways in Nigeria. Standing in front of the rice pyramid, government show-lady Lauretta Onochie was shouting: “Everyone should come and see this, this is marvellous, this is wonderful. I have been hearing about it over the last few weeks and today I am so delighted to be here.. Look at this, they are all rice. God bless Nigerian farmers, God bless Baba Buhari, sai Baba, Sai Baba Buhari. This is made in Nigeria rice, it is not foreign, it is not from China or Thailand, this is original rice from Naija with flavour and good taste”. This is what you get with the triumph of wooden-headedness in governance. .
As I keep saying, it is difficult to pinpoint one singular achievement of the Buhari government in the last seven years. The government came to power on the mantra of fighting corruption. Now, seven years on, the government itself is defined and personified as corruption writ large. Perhaps one achievement of this Buhari government is to drag Nigeria into the membership of failed States. Imagine the most populous and most richly endowed African country joining insignificant countries such as Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Somalia, South Sudan and Myanmar as a full-fledged failed State. But Minister for Works and Housing Babatunde Fashola (SAN) says the federal government has been brazing a trail in infrastructural development in the last six years. In fairness to Fashola, he has proved his mettle at least in railway project and road construction as evident from some of the railway projects and roads projects in the country. But the lingering face-off between the Federal Ministry of Works and the NNPC and NUPENG is worrisome. NUPENG alleges that a whopping sum of N621 billion has been misappropriated in Federal Roads rehabilitation.