Mr Emmanuel Agada Abah believes that the current hardship being experienced by Nigerians is a pathway to sustainable development that we long needed. Mr Abah who is a social and political activist bore his mind in an exclusive post on his Facebook wall on Monday.
"THE HARD WAY, THE BETTER WAY.
Nigerians have of late resorted to the shouts of hunger all over the country and laying all the blames on the present administration. Yes it is true. The masses are hungry, the people are not smiling and lots and lots are happening but can we look at it from one other angle?
As much as I am not a member of either APC or PDP, I think when I see some things happening, I should either praise or criticize not minding who is involved. I see the present situation as a way Foward for Nigeria not because I'm eating comfortably my three square meal or driving in my comfortable cars or being happily in charge of an office, a contract or in hope for any of these at sight but because I feel that at times it is important to sacrifice our today's comfort for the betterment of our children yet unborn. There is an adage that "my father walked for me to run and I'm running for my child to fly." Can we run today for our children to fly tomorrow?
I was surprisingly happy recently when some young guys who were niggers, big boys in their rights and clean town boys were proudly asking to take me out not from monies from dash or government salaries but from that which they referred to as ATM. In my quest to know more about the ATM, one of them told me that ATM was their cassava farm and went further to explain that he recently realized that he was all the while wasting and had he known what he knew today, he would have been a millionaire today. As apt as his explanations were, I knew he wouldn't have been a millionaire if he had gone to the farm three or four years ago because the necessary platform to make a Nigerian farmer a millionaire was yet not there then.
The case then was like that of a rich untrained child who has neither financial discipline nor trade. If the father dies, he becomes a poor child within a very short period but because the father is still alive, people think he is the best child on earth. Same people who praise him LL be the ones to insult him if his situation gets worse for any reason.
The past periods in Nigeria especially after Nigeria moved from agriculture to oil based economy, when the cocoa from the west, the groundnut pyramid from the north, the cotton and all the cash crops no longer brought money into the economy but just oil, that became the beginning of Nigerian future hunger days which could only be averted by a hard willed individual.
Granted that the past administrations especially those between 1999 to 2015 made millionaires and billionaires, it is also noteworthy that the middle class that existed and bridged the gap between the rich and the poor became eradicated. The poor got getting poorer and the rich got getting richer. The relationship between the poor and the rich became mutually exclusive. The rich no longer has much need for the poor as they can at will import the least thing that the poor could produce and earn living. Farming which was the most viable employment industry became dead and hope became deem for the poor.
This whole thing created a situation very convenient for electoral malpractices, thuggery, and other social vices as an impoverished man is a vulnerable man who accepts anything that comes his way. This is one major reason for the insecurity in the country today as well as corruption divisiveness, cessation struggles and every vices in the country today.
With the inception of this administration and the policies accompanying it, people have decided to go back to those little things that were yielding livings for them. People now know their unused talents and can now independently go about making ends meet. Nigerians now know the value of farming and crafts again though with a painful restart.
NOTE:
I say this only with regards to the government at the center and few state governments (mine excluded).
Biblically it happened; taking Israelites from Egypt met Moses and the people with this situation as recorded in the book of Numbers. And precisely chapter 11vs 5 recorded how the Israelites complained of not seeing cucumber and other things to eat.
(Numbers 11:5 We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick)
In my study of development, I came to understand that development is either at the expense of stability or vice versa. Development in the eyes of Karl Max is not the building of sky scrapers and driving in the most luxurious car or other means in the society but the situation where everyday is made to have a livelihood and be happy at last.
We can't continue to eat ourselves to death. I think what we need to do as a people is to criticise approaches that are not good in the current movement so as to pave a better way forward than looking at the hunger of today at the expense of tomorrow and the lasting succor to come.
In Singapore, Keen Kuan Yew (1923-2015) the first Prime Minister from 1959-1990 came up with such a policy, people cried and shouted for hunger and all that we are shouting for in Nigeria today but after a while, Singapore became better for it and the country is not just called an Asian country today but Asian Tiger.
I write this piece even with an empty stomach this morning but after sitting to make a critical analysis of the current situation in relation to other countries in the world. It is easier to destroy than to repair. Like the mad man about to be cured, it is difficult to accept or cope with the journey to better destination because it is always rough.
Let us hold the state governors to account for the hunger because they are the closer governments to the grassroots and the federal allocations and other entitlements to the people are always paid them from the federal purse. Our governors are the wicked ones not the people at the centre. Let's flush them in 2019.
Enough for today."
