The Make-Believe Railway Transformation Of President Jonathan; A Watershed
The Make-Believe Railway Transformation Of President Jonathan; A Watershed. 'Since the campaign season started, Buhari has been PDP's perfidious recurring decimal. He is their daytime nightmare and night-time wrath.
They have practically abandoned the marketing of their own candidate for the reactionary task of discrediting Buhari. Ask them what their manifesto is because you want to assess their plans for Nigeria, or inquire about the content of the “continuity” agenda they proclaim on roof tops, you can be sure they will go to sleep only for them to awaken to another Buhari chant”. - Abimbola Adelakun.
The over-hyped transformation of the Nigerian Railway Corporation meant nothing to me until I saw everybody that is anybody on the PDP Presidential campaign team, at every stop, touting the transformation they claim President Jonathan has chalked up in the sector. By the time I read Idowu Akinlotan, in Palladium, dismiss it, saying that the task before Nigeria next month is to put a man in office that best approximates the archetypal leader with character and not one who cites antediluvian projects like narrow gauge railway as trophy, I knew it was time to go read the eye witness account of The Nation's Adeyinka Aderibigbe, whose intended 3-day, eye witness trip from Lagos to Kano on the 'new' train, became a totally unexpected 5-day odyssey. It was after reading the well written piece I discovered that like the 'statistical agricultural revolution' Nigerians have been inundated with these past four years, the one in the railway sector is also nothing but a chimera. That the over-blown agricultural revolution is only a make-belief is indicated, not only by the high prices Nigerians still pay for food items or by the fact of licences still being given for rice importation, it is rather, much more poignantly, illustrated by the fact that the beneficiaries are so uncertain about the Jonathan rice project that they flagrantly overshot their approved limits. It must be mentioned too, that as has become routine with the Jonathan government, the import quota were allegedly skewed in favour of some people who have no demonstrable interest in rice production.
With that, there hardly needs be any further evidence of the emptiness of TAN's sundry claims of a Jonathan transformation; a transformation that leaves large swathes of the country in darkness with residents asking electricity companies to withdraw their services because of their ineffectiveness, as we saw in Benin-city and Egbe-Idimu LCDA in Lagos, massive insecurity, not to talk of life itself becoming short and brutish.
Back then to Aderibigbe's narration of his hellish Lagos-Kano journey on NRC's 'new' trains.
After indicating that the take off was unfortunately delayed for hours as a result of an accident somewhere on the rail line which had to be fixed, he went into a description of the facilities: 'the entire space in the arrival/departure hall was filled up with all manner of luggage, with people fighting for a leg room. What went for ticket was a small piece of letter press printed on cardboard indicating that the corporation is far behind in modern rail system comparable to what obtains the world over. Also baffling was that those tickets still bore old rates despite the fact that fares have been revised twice since the arrival of the modern coaches'. You can only imagine how corrupt that would be giving the number of persons that will be out to take advantage of such lapses.
He then discussed a passable First Class compartment but the Second Class compartment should be of greater interest to readers. Wrote our reporter: “The more popular second class zone, already nicknamed 'Ajegunle Molue', is a 90-seater specified contraption with six overhead orbit fans and slit windows in each cabin. Here, there is no limit to the number of passengers. Indeed, while the manufacturers specified 90 passengers, no trip has taken less than 180 passengers on the Lagos -Kano journey since the service started.” The class, he said, was likened by an official of the corporation to a 'lizard sliding through an opening on the wall', and at many of the stations, you find passengers entering the coaches through windows when access through the doors proved impossible as a result of the sheer number of people fighting to enter”. He actually had the great fortune of seeing a woman, a passenger, who had prepared a pot of stew for the long journey, empty it all on the heads of other passengers as she struggled to board to Kano.
He was not done on this otherwise good project which, if done right, could have been a blessing to Nigerians as it is much safer and cheaper than most other means of transport. He therefore continued: “Because the second class cabin windows are permanently open, it is usually heavily dusty. Here you find all manner of people – beggars, in different degrees of tattered clothes, with their bowls, the poor, the aged, babies with different sizes of rotund stomachs, students, low income workers, frail looking males and females co-habiting etc. One thing associated with the second class is the putrid smell, oozing not only from the body odours, but as a result of the absence of functioning lavatories. Ideally, he wrote, the coaches should have two toilets and two bathrooms at each wing. The toilets have, indeed, been converted to luggage rooms.
Pray, what manner of transformation, to be celebrated on political campaigns, is this?
The reporter was told that in the last 10 years, none of the drivers in the corporation has gone on leave nor are they paid leave bonus nor travel allowance. These are the people in charge of these trains to far flung places who, but for meals in the kitchen, and music blaring from what the reporter described as a creaky, speaker box juxtaposed with the din of all night long noise emanating from the train would have seen their workplace no better than a prison.
And what manner of transformation is this that PDP's exuberant campaigners must burst our ear drums just to listen to them rehash? As I read through the report, I couldn't help thanking God that the Liberian, Mr Sawyer, did not have to head straight to any of our train stations to make even the shortest journey during his ill-fated visit to Nigeria. May his soul and those of others we lost to Ebola, by the mercy of God, rest in perfect peace. Amen. Can Nigerians therefore be surprised at the level of panel beating our economy and over all well-being have been subjected to this last six years, but which some jokers -the keepers of whatever they call themselves – use as template to dress our president in borrowed robes, comparing him to world leaders?.
It becomes totally befuddling that billions of Sure-P funds have gone into a project which is beginning to look more like a sink hole. It is clearly indicative of the level of seriousness the PDP government attaches to this extremely important sector that it considered the corporation the equivalent of a political Siberia to banish a floundering party chairman to when he was yanked off his giddy seat.
Whereas in places like China, high speed trains do about 300 kilometres per hour it takes Nigeria's modern railway two whole hours to arrive Agbado from Lagos -a journey of less than 50km.
I urge Nigerians to ponder all these as they vote on 14 February, 2015