Muhammad Muhsin
Ibrahim
@muhsin234
As a special
gesture to mark Nigeria ’s
Independence Day, I wrote an article on October 1st, 2014, extolling the country. It was a rare piece, for I and many others have written
several other articles decrying the decay in the country’s polity, insecurity,
falling standard of education, depreciation of the naira, and various other
unmentionable issues. Nonetheless, I painted Nigeria as great (as it is supposed to be), and, somewhat, ‘denigrated’ my host country, India, by comparing it. I now kind of believe I was wrong, as a friend pointed it out
to me at the time. I think he’s even more right than he thought he was.
Last Sunday, March 22nd, President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan commissioned
a 2.5b naira flyover popularly called “Gadar Lado”, meaning Lado’s
flyover, in Kano
state. Bashir Garba Lado is the senator representing the state’s central
senatorial zone. He was credited with spearheading the project. Nevertheless, just yesterday, March 25th, the flyover reportedly cracked and was cordoned off by the police. That soon became a sensational subject
of ridicule by the supporters of his opponent, Engr. Rabiu Kwankwaso, the
current governor of Kano, is also vying for Lado’s seat in the coming election, a few days away.
The context here
is: Kwankwaso’s administration has already built some, perhaps better, flyovers in
the state. If he, at the state level, was able to do that, how come the federal
government couldn’t deliver a better one? That accomplishment made him and his
teeming supporters literally euphoric. Not everyone, though, was that happy. I
have read a few rejoinders saying that the whole saga was just allegation…that
the flyover is ‘hale and hearty’...that it’s all campaign of calumny. I can’t
say who’s telling the truth and who’s not, as I am not in the state.
However, everything
besides and to my firm belief, the whole politics surrounding the flyover and
others, too, is at best laughable, and at worst, ludicrous. How or why, some
people would ask. Don’t you know that Nigeria
is unarguably the giant of Africa with the
biggest economy and the largest population? Don’t you know that many other
countries worldwide (and in Africa, too) that lag behind Nigeria in many
respects have more than numerous and far more advanced overhead bridges (simple
flyovers, cloverleaf junctions, etc.)
for roadways and railways? Yet, nobody takes that as something worth politicising in the same way we have taken ours. I doubt even their politicians are bragging or ‘fighting’ over who should earn the credit for their construction projects.
For example, Punjab, the state I live in, India, is not listed among the advanced states of the country in terms of infrastructure and so on, like the capital, New Delhi; Gujarat (Ahmadabad), Karnataka (Bangalore), Maharashtra (Mumbai), etc. However, flyovers, even
longer and far better-made ones, are commonplace all around here. They greatly streamlined
their traffic control system.
I am not criticising Lado’s detractors or
Kwankwaso’s supporters; not at all. I am just trying to expose the kind of
malnourished thought, if you will, of many of us. We are like doomed to think
inferior, for we ought to have passed that stage in infrastructural development
in Kano and Nigeria as a whole, yet that’s
where we are. That’s why I couldn’t make any reply to all the posts I have seen
on Facebook and Twitter about the ‘tragedy’ of Gadar Lado. My friends here might
have made fun of it. No doubt, we are here, attending their schools.
May our country and my state be better than
they are in the near future, amin. May we witness free, fair and peaceful
elections on March 28th and April 11th, in sha Allah. May
Allah grant General Buhari victory, amin.
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