By Abutu Agada
Following the declaration of Friday and Monday as public holidays by the Federal Government to mark the Easter period on the Christian calendar, I decided to take a much anticipated and long overdue tour to the South Western part of the country. To make it a wholesome experience, my tour company elected that the journey should be by train.
While relaxing and taking in the scene from my first class compartment in the outbound Lagos-Oshogbo train, something unthought-of and before now, unheard-of – at least by me – happened. Along the Agege route, the train began to slow down inexplicably. Well, I reflected that the train had to slow down because of the ever-busy Agege terminal. How wrong I was!
Shouts of Ori ti jade! Ori ti jade from outside the train revealed that the head end, that is the lead coach that pulls the train and pulls the other coaches, had disconnected from the rest of the train and gone ahead causing the train to come to a gradual stop. After some delay, the head end was brought back and reconnected to the rest of the train.
In the midst of the confusion, I got talking to a seasoned train traveler onboard who told me that a similar incident happened during a journey to Kaduna a while back. She said passengers got stranded for several hours because the engineer at the head end was unaware of the anomaly for quite some time!
Hours into the journey, I began to get bored. So, I decided to go move around to stretch my legs at one of the train stops somewhere in Abeokuta. I got carried away by the beauty of the landscape so much so that I was brought back to reality by the harsh blare of the train as it signaled its intention to continue on its near snail pace ride. Seeing that I will not make it to my coach in time before the train left, I jumped into the closest coach to me.
The staggering difference between my first class coach and where I found myself was jarring. The sheer number of people in the coach was overwhelming. Movement in the coach was an entirely different experience. The jangling and dangling of the coach contrasted sharply with what I experienced in the first class section. The effort to get to my seat on the train became a daunting task. I had to push, beg, and flail through the throng of bodies lying prone, sitting on the aisle, bent, contorted and otherwise before I could to get to the second coach, a first class compartment.
The train stopped several times along the way due several mechanical faults. On enquiry, I was told that the generator behind in the last coach was leaking water at a fast rate. In addition, some component parts of the train also needed repairs. Much later, I was told that an ‘Aregbesola train’ which left earlier in the day is very close to our train. At the end of the ride, the journey from Lagos to Oshogbo that should take a few hours took us more than eleven hours!
The experience brought me to the realization that the train which had succumbed to the ravages of time amidst a culture of poor maintenance shares an uncanny similarity with the journey of the Nigerian state. With the exception of the first class coaches, the train has certainly seen better days and is long overdue for the scrap yard. What happens when you have such trains functioning at this point in time? Your guess is as good as mine – more head ends will keep leaving the body.
Unfortunately, my train experience sadly mirrors what pervades the polity in today’s Nigeria. There is a ‘disconnect’ between the government and the governed, the leader and the led, the representative and the represented. Like the train, the government of the day is disconnected from the people it is leading. It has gone so far away that it is unaware that it has left the masses far behind. Very obviously, it needs to be called back…or rather it needs to heed the cry from people shouting ‘Ori ti jade’.
The discordance between the expectations of the led and the reality of the status quo has a lot to do with the make-up of those responsible for aggregating and articulating the collective aspiration of Nigerians.
The country is stuck with a set of tired and old leadership that has grown used to the primordial approach to governance it has consistently employed since the dawn of independence. The bulk of them may have no idea that the approach that worked for them in 60s, 70s and 80s is already out of place in a 21st Century Nigeria.
The leadership is, unfortunately, mostly comprised of the same people who were at the head end of our affairs long before some of us were in diapers; leaders whom we’ve read about in days when our teachers ‘deceived’ us by repeatedly drumming into our ears that we will become the leaders of an ever receding tomorrow.
Instead of reinventing themselves, incorporating many more young minds in governance and grooming neophytes to take over their positions, these same leaders of yesteryears are still dexterously recycling themselves continuously back in power as presidents, governors, ministers, legislators, permanent secretaries and board members of parastatals. These leaders are still calling the shots today in what used to be my tomorrow.
The consequence of this is that policies, laws and programmes that should better the lives of the average 21st Century Nigerian is given a stale, archaic and retrogressive approach with little input of fresh ideas and approaches to governance by a tired gerontocratic and quasi feudal leadership which should be retired and resting. The case of our septuagenarian president who is managing his health and country readily comes to mind.
What of the case of our lawmakers who are supposedly in Abuja to serve the interest of their constituents, among other things? Among other reasons, we elected them to perform functions such as lawmaking, oversight and representation roles and they are also expected to perform constituency services, which is perhaps one of the most influential functions of a parliament.
The parliament embodies the will of the people and thus provides the space to express that will. Effective representation requires legislators to continually interact with their constituents to understand their views and perspectives and to use various legislative or parliamentary processes such as questions, motions, resolutions and other oversight mechanisms to bring these views to the attention of implementing institutions to consider and redress.
The reality on ground is a sharp contrast to the expectation Nigerians had while going to the polls in 2015. The 8th National Assembly, as it were, has developed a penchant for majoring in the minor and ‘minoring’ in the major.
It is no longer news that some of our lawmakers are unaware of the needs of their constituents. Many of them get so used to Abuja that they forget that they are representing their people. To them, ‘stomach infrastructure’ is the hallmark of the democracy we are practicing in Nigeria. These people are more interested in the pecuniary gains that their position ‘entitles’ them to. It is no surprise to some of us therefore that it is when elections are approaching that they find their ways to their dusty offices in their various constituencies to deceive the electorate again.
There is need for the head end coach to come back and be coupled with the rest of the train. The leadership must strive to consciously carry the led along, and understand that the citizenry is tired of the old approach of doing things. We need new approaches to our multi-faceted economic, social and political problems as the current stale and archaic ways of thinking are grossly inadequate and incapable of addressing our numerous 21st Century challenges.