Letters

Devastation in the North-East

Published by

January 11, 2023 2:30 am

One can easily shed tears looking at the degree of hardship the people of the North-East region are undergoing due to the ravaging outgrowths of the long Boko Haram crisis. The region has been completely dried leaving people with zero infrastructures besides the huge destruction of properties and the death recorded.

The long decade of trauma has left millions of people homeless, endangered females and children into begging, and increased the high rate of out-of-school children and poverty in the region; it has also exposed many young girls to prostitution to earn a living. The crisis adds fuel to the collapse of the nation’s economy.

Thus the preponderance of the people in the North-East are agrarian and herdsmen while few are businessmen and women. Most people are no longer going to farms, markets and grazing areas in fear of Boko Haram onslaught. As such, multiple have been disengaged and not doing anything for survival; hunger and starvation have killed thousands.

On the other hand, the huge destruction inflicted by the insurgent group stopped the existence of numerous schools and business grounds. Based on the available figure printed by the United Nations around 2021 on its site, over 14,000 schools were destroyed, many forced to close and nearly 2295 teachers were killed, all by the insurgent group.

With this, I want to appeal to President Buhari and the concerned cabinets to come to the aid of the North-East and complete those projects. These include the Manila Hydropower project, the dualisation of Akwanga-Jos-Bauchi and Gombe to Adamawa roads as well as speeding up the exploration of the Kolmami oil wells. This will go a long way in boosting the nation’s economy.

To this end, I am appealing to the president to ensure the realisation of all the projects in the region before the end of his tenure and in the event of the failure to do so the North-East would end up benefitting nothing from his administration.

On a final note, the completion of the projects like the dualisation of the Akwanja-Jos-Bauchi and Gombe roads, Mambila power projects, and Kolmani oil wells among others, will play a pivotal role in improving the lives of the citizens of the regions and the nation entirely.

Ukasha Magama, Magama Toro, Bauchi

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