By Suyi Ayodele
After settling KWAM 1 with ambassadorial epaulettes, it appears that the 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 the 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 N23.6 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 N23.6 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 N142,028,576,008.17. 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?
How would a government think that in 2025, a bus terminal built in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital, would solve the road transportation problems of the remaining states in the South-West? Couldn’t we have channelled the N142,028,576,008.17 to the East-West Road that has remained in a state of interminable construction?
How does one explain that of all the problems confronting us as a nation, the priority of this administration is the construction of “modern bus terminals” in the six geo-political zones of the country? How do we tell generations to come that at a time Nigeria was battling with insurgency and banditry in the North and kidnapping, farmers cum herders’ clash in the South, the Federal Government was busy constructing motor parks, a project that local government councils could handle? Why this lack of compunction by this government of promised but undelivered ‘hope’?
In China, there is a bridge that is 168.8 kilometres long. The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is rated as the world’s longest bridge, spanning 164 kilometres! Constructed between April 18, 2006, and November 15, 2010, the bridge cost the Chinese Government $8.6 billion US dollars. That, in our currency, is a whopping N13.175 trillion.
Back here in Nigeria, we have our darling 3rd Mainland Bridge built by the Alhaji Shehu Shagari and General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) administrations in two phases between 1980 and 1990. The span of the 3rd Mainland Bridge is 11.8 kilometres. And to repair the bridge, this administration said it would cost us N3.6 trillion! In mathematical terms, the cost of repairs on the 3rd Mainland Bridge is one-third the cost of the construction of Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge.
To know who we are and what the government thinks we are, we must understand that the Chinese Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is 14 times longer than our 3rd Mainland Bridge! If Fela were to be here today, he would simply sing: arrangee na be that o. And he would be right!
That is not all. In the last two weeks again, the FEC also approved the sum of N712 billion to remodel the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA). In justifying this prodigious spending, we were told that by the time the facelifts were completed, Angels would want to fly to Nigeria because the airport would be as beautiful as the gold-paved streets of heaven!
Nobody is saying, by any stretch of argument, that the government should not fix decaying infrastructure. Our argument here is that the government should get its priorities right. The data gleaned from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) as of December 2023, gave a figure of over 5.9 million passengers at the MMIA in two years.
What percentage of Nigeria’s estimated population of over 200 million people is that? The simple implication is that there are far more Nigerians on the road than in the air. A government that is masses-sensitive will address critical segments that touch the lives of the highest population distribution. If more than 70 percent of Nigerians use road transportation, the focus should be on building more roads in addition to rehabilitating existing failed roads across the country.
In the last one week, Ekiti State has been in the news for the wrong reasons of the bad roads there. The videos of the terrible states of the roads are too graphic to ignore. The state is almost completely cut off from the rest of the country. And the situation is the same in all states of the Federation. There is no state in Nigeria without its own tales of woes when it comes to bad roads.
Worst hit is the Niger Delta where we get the resources that oil the engine of Nigeria. It is an eternal shame that the East-West Road has remained in perpetual state of construction. It is a national embarrassment that the terrible state of the Benin-Warri Expressway makes people spend six hours on a journey that was less than one hour before!
For Pete’s sake, the MMIA is not in a beauty pageant with any international airport. Yes, fix it, make it good but not with the humongous figures the government is throwing at us. That we are not hunters does not mean we cannot identify the spores of games on wet soil (àìi sode rí, kò ní ká má mo sa kò ko níhîn). If the government is looking for chop money for the boys, it should come out clean.
The defence by Tunde Moshood, Special Adviser on Media and Communications to Festus Keyamo, the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, asking Nigerians to adopt a ‘more informed and constructive approach’ to the N712 billion MMIA project, is to say the least, very insensitive and insulting to our sensibilities. We cannot all be slaves to our stomachs; Moshood should be told to be bold enough to advise his boss and the government he represents that certain things can wait. He and his boss are the ones to learn to gauge the mood of the people before they begin to call the dog monkey for us!
A Federal Government that is talking about building motor parks in a true Federal State needs elementary tutorials in Government and Devolution of Power. Minister Alkali got it completely wrong to think that lack of bus terminals is the reason why crimes like kidnapping and armed robbery happen on our highways.
The felons on the bad spots of the death traps we call highways don’t need any bus terminal or motor park to operate. They don’t have to register their vehicles and their content before they move to ‘sites’. We should be able to boast of someone with bare-bones penetration in this government. The jejune argument for the Federal Government ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ is annoying, very unnerving.
It is odiously nauseating that presumed men and women of class sat in that FEC to approve such a proposal. If the short among them is lacking in depth, the tall should show acuity (bí kékeré won bá gò, ó ye kí gíga won gbón). Someone should have shot down the Alkali’s proposal as lacking in sensitivity to the needs of the people. Someone should have reasoned that Nigerians cannot be going through the pain in the land and a FEC would be debating or approving inane proposals like the motor park project, no matter the deodorant sprayed on it!
How did they all sleep with their heads in one direction in that Council? How did the cabinet members come up with the conclusion that six motor parks in six different locations in our 36-state federation is the best the government could offer? And these are the ones leading Nigeria of 2025? Yes-men and women with illogical minds? Ghosh!
Can someone please tell President Tinubu to spare us this farce! Can those close to the President tell him that his boy, MC Oluomo, cannot be doing the monkey business of motor park management pan Nigeria as NURTW President, while the Jagaban himself is running the same show at the centre, from Aso Rock? This ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ project is nothing but an agbero business. Mr. President, e kúrò nídìí ìdò, eré omodé ni (Leave the hide and seek game, it’s juvenile play)!
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
