2023 or Welfare of Nigerians: Which is more important now?
Did the American clergyman, James Freeman Clarke, have Nigerian politicians in mind when he said that while politicians think of the next elections, statesmen think of the next generation?
Come to think of it, with elected public officers less than six months in their posts, politicians are already jostling for the presidency, come 2023. Arguments over what part of the country will produce the president, has taken centre stage. To borrow a cliché, the polity is being overheated, with all kinds of intrigues, accusations and fireworks being attributed to 2023 permutations. It is so bad that, talks about the moves to impeach the vice president are no longer being moot secretly but have becomes subjects of open debates.
Posters of prospective presidential aspirants have started adorning public spaces while heated debates over the part of the country that should produce the president are roiling an already tenuous inter-ethnic balance.
It may sound uncharitable but the impression the politicians give is that they care less about the daunting problems of insecurity, youth unemployment and restiveness, declining living standards, corruption in high and low places and more, that the people are grappling with.
At the moment, some state governments are yet to establish the machinery of government that would drive delivery of the campaign promises on which basis they were elected; you begin to wonder if they care a hoot about the mandate they received! Such a pity! You wonder if the plight of the jobless youth, the trauma of the indigent widow, the pain of those who cannot afford the cheapest malaria drugs and the horrors faced daily by people in the frontlines of insurgency, mean anything to the average Nigerian politician.
Put bluntly, is it morally propitious that, instead of plunging headlong into addressing the myriad problems confronting the nation, rather than ameliorating the plight of the average Nigerian for whom extreme poverty has become an inexplicable companion, in the face of stupendous wealth of the country, politicians are preoccupied with their future turf games?
That is the theme of today’s debate.
Should there be no moratorium, if you like, on political activities, of this nature, that fuel divisions and distract attention from pressing national issues? For how long will Nigerians be treated as puns on the chessboard of the politicians whose open disagreements look like subterfuges to hoodwink a gullible people into some lethargy?
What is your take on this?
Please let us have your concise view on the subject matter.
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