Once a new person is sworn into office in Nigeria today, the languages most populace wants to read or hear about are ‘flag off, turning of the sod and commissioning’. It is good that a governor litters the face of his state with good and commendable projects, but most times, do these projects answer the social, economic and industrial needs of the people they are governing?
Many bootlickers to the governors will even call you a hater of the people, despotic citizen and other forms of unprintable names for criticizing the said projects. Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Adekunle Ajasin are not celebrated today simply because they erected structures and commissioned such but because the projects are a result of a well-thought people-oriented policies.
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What becomes a legacy is the policy you put in place as a governor or president and not the building, market space, etc that are commissioned. In Nigeria of today, the projects that our governors should be flagging off are industrial facilities; there is a long absence in the end user scheme of Nigeria’s educational route.
Ekiti state as of today is talking about building an airport, the question is, how many people will the facility employ as indigenes of the state; what investments are in Ekiti that will warrant anybody from anywhere in the world to come and see; the Akure or Ibadan airports, are they generating enough air traffics; won’t the people of Ekiti benefit more if O’odua textile, Iree Burnt bricks and a host of other dead and moribund industries in Ekiti are revived?
But we all know that such facility will only help the governor and associates travel to and fro Abuja and other choice cities at ease at the expense of Ekiti people. The problem of Nigeria’s inability to provide jobs for her teeming youth doesn’t lie in the exclusive list as governors want us to believe, it is their inability to think outside the box and fashion out how to utilize the resources at their disposal.
The projects the Nigerian youths want today are industrial establishments that will help put an end to hunger and desperation in the land.
Akinbiire Ifedayo,
Akure.