Cane rats popularly known as grass cutters are strictly herbivores and primarily nocturnal. The grass cutter prefers eating stalks to eating leaves, and after devouring the stalks, it excretes right on the spot.
This rodent is practically a nightmare to cassava farmers.
The emergence of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan as the president of Nigeria at first was interesting, just as some religious zealots have attributed his announced victory at the last poll to the hand of God, without perceiving it frantically as the hand of some electoral Maradonas, or even the pollex of the enduringNigerian masses.
I still remember vividly, like yesterday, how Nigerians
trooped out en masse to vote him, although for me, it was my first time of voting and I was anxious too. I saw teeming youths were eager to make a change
through their votes; obviously they were tired of the seemingly unending poverty, stagnant status quo and suffocating corruption prevalent in the land. We so much gasped for the much professed fresh air and hoped to ride on the wing of a once shoeless boy whose feet had like ours, toiled on the degraded soil in the creek. He came out by his own volition and the collision of the powerbrokers.
Nigerians perceived a grass cutter in him; a grass cutter that could cut the stalk of unemployment, poverty, insecurity, corruption, and underdevelopment. A fearless grass cutter that could cut the stalk of
insecurity nocturnally, arrest underdevelopment diurnally and bravely throw excreta at the faces of the ruthless cabal that had caused us so much pain, the cabals that made our roads death traps, our schools
worthless and our hospitals unhealthy.
Since Nigeria started exporting crude oil in commercial quantity, she has made about 55 trillion naira, yet her citizens live in penury. Proceeds from the black gold have been cornered by the few in
government and their cronies. The blessing of the black gold has rather become a curse to the Niger Deltans, a visual impairment of the people and degradation of their soil consequent upon gas flaring and
oil spillage respectively.
They witnessed the slow poisoning of the waters of their community and the destruction of vegetation and agricultural land by oil spills which occur at oil companies’ greedy explorations. But since the inception
of the oil industry in Nigeria, more than forty years ago, there has been no concerned and effective effort on the part of the government, let alone the oil operators, to control environmental problems associated
with the industry.It is visible to the blind and audible to the deaf that Nigeria is besieged with plethora of problems. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Nigeria ranks 191 out of 192 countries in the world with un-safe roads bearing 162 deaths per 100,000 populations from road traffic accidents.
Lagos/Ibadan expressway and Benin/Ore road are familiar death spots on Nigerian roads. Every day, we cry blood as parents bury their children and sisters; their brothers. We shout to be heard, soon we slump into complacency, and shrug our shoulders to the admittance of the mantra; ‘that live goes on’. But not anymore for that boy whose mother died because the light went off during caesarean operation; not anymore for that girl whose father died in an automobile accident as a result of the poor state of our roads; not anymore for that woman with eight children whose husband died in a managed-to-fly faulty plane that crashed; not anymore for those three innocent children that a plane crashing on their roof made them
orphan; not anymore for the family of the Dana, Bellview, Sosoliso plane crash victims; not anymore for those families in Niger, Jos, Kano, Bornu, Kaduna, whose relatives have been slain by Boko Haram and
never anymore for you and me.
Nigeria has the second highest rate of maternal death in the world where one in every eight woman dies because things are not in place that should be in place. Don’t pray that the next victim of maternal
death will not be your sister or your wife, but act, for most of it is avoidable. It pinches to watch our sisters, wives and mothers slip into death; they are our unsung heroes.
This government is only interested in widening the gap between them and us; we said all animals are equal, but they said some are more equal than the others. We made them custodian of our commonwealth but they starved us of it, they steal with pride and with impunity.
The amalgamation of 1914 appears to be a mere amalgam of water and oil, especially as succeeding rulers make things work as if it is only the turn of a region to marginalize the others. Our legislature is a consortium of overpaid epicurean senators. Our rulers come up with new probes every day, but at the end, they only bark but they don’t bite. What happened to the power sector probe, the Siemens probe, Malabu oil bloc scam? They have all been buried in the cemetery at Aso rock. Now, helpless Nigerians are only waiting for the subsidy probe to be laid in state.
The educational sector is bedeviled by darkest at this very dawn of the 21st century by demons from the forest of corruption, mismanagement and misappropriation of funds.The state of insecurity and violence imprinting on the psyche of Nigerians is a portrayal of the government security apparatus
incapability of guaranteeing the safety and security of its citizenry. Unarguably, the most secure place in Nigeria is the Aso rock.Otherwise, the life of every average Nigerians is characterized by
fears of the known.
Ironically, Nigerians though are the most religious people on earth, the once happiest people on earth but the most corrupt people – what a contrast!
I ask myself, how do we salvage Nigeria from Nigerians, how do we help her, must we watch with a tearful eyes as she is been raped to death by her own? Leadership involves a leader effortlessly conveying his people with aship from where they are to where they ought to be, from underdevelopment to development and from retrogression to progression. Nigeria still needs a grass cutter that will be able to cut the stalk
of concentration of power at the central level and adopt the Swiss model of government whereby power is decentralized, and each region is given autonomy.
I write this piece not as incitation for us to do away with our brothers but a call for us to embrace regional system of government to fast track development. This will enable the people of each region to pull themselves by their bootstraps from where they are to where they ought to be. The situation though has deteriorated, but we can rise to it. A living dog is better than a dead lion. This task lies in our Nigerian Mikhail Gorbachev, the president.
When we came out en masse to elect him, weoffered him a promissory note that he will be accountable for in due time and asked him to sail us to El Dorado – now is the time!
He must live up to be the warrior and cut this diseased cord called Nigeria quickly.
-Mubarak Onyibe-Akenzua
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