[dropcap]B[/dropcap]abatunde Fashola is a man on the brink. The last time I saw him, which was not long ago really, he was finding his way into the senate building. His steps had no strut. He was lifeless in a hunched sort of way. His suit wasn’t frayed but the sprite wasn’t there either and it hung loosely. His shoes were flat, tassaled, more like those a medical doctor on ward rounds would prefer.
He shuffled on, looking dead to even those who were around him. No gait had he. No verve; nothing.
His mustache was left overnight. His graying hair wasn’t a wonderful sight. His face was lined with rivulets of broken wrinkles. A glance at him sparks an immediate sense that he is a man not enjoying his life at the moment.
It’s not that Fashola isn’t intelligent. You cannot put that past a lawyer. He damn well is! But a lawyer’s intelligence cannot sully the dexterity of a solid electrical engineer who wouldn’t have had to spend a year in studying the intricacies and vagaries of power the sector, truth be told.
Fashola represents a symbolism of the floundering government run by a floundering president in Nigeria.
Nigerians have missed the senseless policy overkill of lumping the three economy driving ministries together under a faux pas attempt to save cost. Many disadvantages bedeviled that decision even before one could point out one good reason for it.
Buhari came into office with a single track mind to overturn every policy of a government whose running he had neither capacity nor time to understudy. In his hate and distaste, there was a shoddy bungling as he took hasty, largely uninformed policy decisions; overturned many, guzzling back some, and so on and so forth.
The overall effect is that he has left our economy comatose with small and large scale businesses plummeting miserably by motley mix of decision, indecision and crass somersault.
How else can one describe the decision to lump housing, works and power all under one person?
Shelter is the most important of the three basic necessities of man! Housing affects every other aspect of human economic endeavor. The greatest problem, and the single decision factor for the high cost of living in Abuja, for instance, is the cost of housing. Everything else, food, transport, sales etc, all depends on the cost of housing. The clothes in people’s boxes in Abuja alone can meet the needs of seven states in Nigeria. The poorest families can rustle up a solid meal and a half daily. But not so with housing.
Nigeria is in deficit of seventeen million houses! In Abuja, there are hardly any government housing plans as at today. Private property developers control how much every single house would cost. The least price for a shop outlet is about one million naira per year. Items for sale necessarily go up in order to meet rents. Other things follow suit.
Life becomes a vicious circle of harrowing gamut of struggles to make up for income just enough to pay up next housing bills.
Let’s leave the ministry of works aside because Buhari has already proved to be the laziest president of all time.
Fashola came to the portfolio against the background of his masterful insolence of a statement which attempted to rubbish the past government’s response to the power problem in Nigeria. By so doing, he had set himself up for an unnecessary pressure. The power situation in Nigeria alone, or actually the lack of it, is daunting enough for a single minister. All of Fashola’s moments are consumed by the onerous burden to succeed in bringing stability in power supply.
The result of the foregoing is that housing and works die a natural death, and subsequently pale behind in neglect, doomed to failure and rot.
To run those ministries, or at least coordinate them, we are also left with another bane: He has to appoint his assistants and special aides. The result is that we are left with people whom Fashola deem necessary and fit to oversee functionaries which otherwise would have required that the Senate should screen and establish their track records, and ascertain their level of capabilities, or not. So we end up with thousands of federal government workers supervised by people who are under the whims and command of Fashola.
Yet, this is a man who, just about a month ago, admitted to being overworked. He admitted to his unhappiness over the overwhelming task forced upon him.
Nowhere else have I seen the three most important ministries of a country housed under one man. Nowhere!
Instead of this penny wisdom in a pound foolishness, one would have expected an intelligent president to set up a ministry of steel, appoint a minister to see how to get Nigeria on the way to harnessing the massive opportunities in the steel industry-which, of course, have been scuttled for about forty years. The last government had put so much into reviving that moribund, shameful, draining pipe of an industry.
But then, there is no drop of intelligence in the government of Buhari. All you have are the wartime spin yards of dazzling stories and propagandise spree.
In an era when oil has lost its sheen and attraction, we have a president who has elected that minister to himself. The states that produce the oil are his worst enemies.
When I said we were doomed, I knew just what I meant.
Diamond Akpanika is a political analyst. Connect with him on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
