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18 — Vanguard, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2022 FLOODING is a natural occurrence. In civilised parts of the world, one of the jobs of government is to evolve systems of taming routine and predictable flooding to keep the people safe. When routine flooding keeps occurring year after year, it means that government is not living up to its duty. That is the situation that Nigerians indescribable suffering. Many spend living along the pathways of our major between seven and 10 days on the road rivers, lakes and other flood-prone from Kogi State to Abuja and other water bodies, suffer every year. parts of the North. States and communities inhabiting the The flooding has claimed the lives of Niger and Benue troughs and the Niger 76 people in Anambra. Homes are Delta area experience avoidable overtaken by floods in Niger, Kogi, flooding due to the failure of Adamawa, Benue, Anambra, Rivers and government. Bayelsa states. This year’s episode has been so Nigerians have been hit by the double pathetic. Nigeria’s Confluence Town, tragedies of losing their homes and Lokoja, the Kogi State capital, is under farmlands. When the flood recedes, water. Transportation between North these victims will be left to start life all and South through the state is disrupted over again until the next flood comes. because the federal highways are under The primary purpose of government water. is to provide the people with adequate Commuters are going through welfare and security. When will Caring for flood victims government wake to its responsibilities? When will the authorities begin to fulfill their own side of the social contract? It is the duty of government to channelise river pathways, routinely dredge them to allow more water travel within its natural bed, provide embankments, dykes and platforms to guard against overflow into human settlements, and harness the resources of these waterbodies for the people’s benefits. It is government’s duty to turn these river resources from pain to gain. Additionally, it is the job of government to provide temporary shelters for the people when the floods are imminent. Government should not only be engaged in the Nigerian Metrology Agency, NIMET’s, routine warnings about the oncoming floods. Governments are fond of warning people to “relocate to higher grounds”. In truth, majority of the people have nowhere to go. We have for years called for the collaboration of the federal and state governments along with public spirited capable individuals to build permanent shelters in all the flood-prone parts of the country where people can go and be safe until disaster situations return to normalcy. Hapless Nigerians who are increasingly exposed to insecurity arising from armed attacks and flooding need to have a place to go and be safe and catered for until they can safely return home. It is irresponsible and inhuman to abandon the same people that vote politicians into power when they need government help. OPINION Federal Government, apathy and flood in Niger Delta ByBRAEYI EKIYE UNDERSTANDING how to use political power constructively makes a difference in leadership. Therefore, political power and the use of it can be broken into the negative and the positive. Such use of positive political power, imbued with the desire to evoke regulatory command in the process of giving leadership, is capable of galvanising a people to achieve set goals. Furthermore, such use of power has the kinetic energy of firing previously frustrated and helpless people during times of harrowing challenges, such as the recent flood in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the Niger Delta, including the oil and gas rich Bayelsa State. I doubt if any Nigerian leader led from the front in this regard as the governor of Bayelsa State, Senator Douye Diri did when the flood came rushing into the state like a thief, consuming properties, destabilising human traffic, and causing dislocations of unimaginable proportion. Bayelsa State was cut off completely from her neighbouring states to the east and to the west. Citizens were displaced, even as most of the state’s population in the eight local government areas were suddenly displaced and became internally displaced persons (IDP). Thank God, Governor Douye Diri stood doggedly and, imbued with the desire for social justice, faced the odds of the floods by traversing the nooks and crannies of the state, in spite of the overwhelming and raging floods. Bayelsans and the international community witnessed the governor and his aides walking and swimming through the flood-ravaged environment.At some point, he had to resort to the use of canoes in his on-the-spot assessment of the flood situation in the state. It was a devastation that history would never forget in the region's centuries-old flood experience.This is not to mention the loss of valuable lives, farmlands, and properties, the dislocation of communities, and the closure of schools due to the flood. The flood has yet to recede enough for normal life to resume across the eight local governments in the state. Yet, Sadiya Umar Farouq, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development, glibly made very offensive and provoking comments on the flood situation in Bayelsa State. Madam Farouq, who was in the heart of the floods, said that Bayelsa State was not among the top ten most affected states by the 2022 flood that is still ravaging some of the states in the country, including Bayelsa State. Indeed, Minister Farouq dared the tiger’s tail, and she got the expected barrage of reactions in the form of strong criticisms against her unguarded and provocative utterances in her assessment of the flood situation in Bayelsa State, nay, in states across the Niger Delta region. Top among these reactions were those from the Bayelsa State Government, Niger Delta members of the House of Representatives, the Bayelsa State Elders Forum, members of the State Traditional Rulers Council, and the Ijaw National Congress, INC. All of these institutions condemned the minister in very strong terms for her unthoughtful comments and called on the Federal Government and ministries saddled with the responsibility of responding to national emergencies of the magnitude of this year’s flood, to rise to their calling by promptly responding to what they described, as a national emergency. In fact, the INC president, Professor Benjamin Okaba, described Minister Farouq as a disaster instead of a disaster manager. The Bayelsa State Government's statement was followed by a breakdown of flood displaced persons, those affected and injured, the number of deaths, partially damaged houses, farmlands, and schools in each of the state's eight local government areas.From the data prepared and published by the Bayelsa State Emergency Management Agency (BYSEMA), the total number of flood affected persons in the state was recorded as three hundred and twenty seven thousand, eight hundred and sixteen (327,816), while the number of displaced persons was put at one million, two hundred and ten thousand, one hundred and eighty three (1, 210, 183). Bayelsans and the international community witnessed the governor and his aides walking and swimming through the flood-ravaged environment The number of injured was recorded 382, while the number of deaths was 96. The number of houses totally damaged was 864, while houses partially damaged had a score of 3205. Farmlands totally damaged 11,412, while schools partially and totally destroyed were recorded as 95 and 62 respectively. Alagoa A. Morris, a frontline environmentalist, has also condemned Minister Farouq’s unguarded statement concerning the flood that has badly ravaged the state. He swiped: "Her bombshell should be condemned, and condemned it should be." Alagoa, on the other hand, said it was unfortunate that the Bayelsa State Send Opinions & Letters to: opinions1234@yahoo.com Government had done nothing substantial to be applauded in terms of flood and erosion control in the state since its inception. He regretted that a committee formed by former Governor Seriake Dickson Restoration Administration on January 16, 2012, at the Chevron KS Endeavor Apooi facility to address this threat was still in the works. Alagoa disapproved of the Federal and State Government’s statistics collated on the ravaging flood in some parts of the country, including Bayelsa State, He said the statistics were horribly dished out, and therefore cannot be accurate or accepted for any reason for now, for, as he puts it: "Because every aspect of the impact needs to be taken into consideration if justice should be done on the subject matter. Neither states nor the federal government can give accurate data on losses as per public, corporate, and individual losses at this point in time.".He therefore said, "Anything cooked up now is a mere estimate, at best, or politically laced with the Nigerian factor. It is worth noting that Minister Farouq's offensive, and insensitive statement laced with impunity ignored the fact that Nigeria's petro-dollar spinner, the Gbarain-Ubie Gas Gathering Plant in Bayelsa State, with one billion standard cubic feet of gas and up to 7,000 barrels of oil per day and the largest in West Africa, was severely damaged by the floods. This therefore, necessitated the shutting down of the Nigerian Natural Gas Plant's (NLNG) at Bony Island. Apart from this expensive national asset under the scourge of the flood, Bayelsa’s only link road, the east-west road, has been cut off both from the western and eastern flanks. Continues online:www.vanguardngr.com * Ekiye, publisher of EnvironmentWatch, wrote from Yenagoa, Bayelsa State.
Towards the Federal Republic of Illiteracy EDUCATION Minister, Adamu Adamu, after presiding over the N5.6 trillion Education Budget in the last seven years and the N1.3 trillion intervention fund in four years, announced he has failed. It is not that as Education Minister, he has failed to preside over spending about N7 trillion in seven years, but, has failed to deliver on basic programmes and promises. However, like other smart alecs, he exonerates himself. He, rather, blames the state governors for his manifest failure. Adamu said the main policy of the Buhari education programme was to pull: “children out of the street back to the school, but evidently, the actions of the state governments are pushing the children back to the streets.” Adamu’s tale is that in 2016, he wrote a Ministerial Strategic Plan which he took to the Federal Executive Council requesting that a State-Of-Emergency in Education be declared especially at the lower level. He continued his story: “A decision couldn’t be taken on this because the issue of emergency in education at the level of primary school is a State Government responsibility. So, I was directed by the President to turn that into a memo for the National Economic Council which I did with the thinking that if the Council bought into it and the members are State Governors, it means it would just become a nationwide thing.”Let us assume, without conceding that this Adamu story of state governors truncating the education programme is true, how does this explain the case of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT controlled entirely by the Federal Government where the population of the out-of-school children under Adamu has dramatically increased? The Executive power over the FCT in line with Section 302 of the constitution is vested in President Muhammadu Buhari who exercises it through the FCT Minister. So, if Adamu could not cut or eliminate the number of outof-school children across the country because the state governors allegedly obstructed him, what about the FCT where the President is Governor? Perhaps if Adamu and the government he serves had tackled this problem in the FCT, they could have held it up as a shiny example. But tragically, as the number of these hapless children, according A red tsunami that never was BY NICK DAZANG THE mid-term elections in the United States are usually conducted two years into the tenure of a president. They are often viewed as a referendum on the performance of a sitting president. Historically, most presidents come out of them bruised. The Tuesday, November 8th Mid-term elections were inevitably defined by four major issues, namely: inflation, abortion, crime and climate change. Not since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter held sway as President, has America witnessed inflation crossing the seven percent threshold. Though inflation was engendered chiefly by the Russia-Ukraine war and other complications arising from supply chain that came hot on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, it impacted negatively on the cost of living. The upturning of the Roe Vs Wade legislation, by a conservative dominated Supreme Court, has miffed not a few Americans and abortion rights activists. Additionally, the buffeting of America by a series of hurricanes and tornadoes, leaving in their trails death and destruction, has put climate change in the front burner. The mid-term elections were heralded with the hype and hoopla that characterise presidential elections. President Joe Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump campaigned for candidates across the Democratic and Republican aisle. The campaign was exciting, with Biden and Trump on the hustings, prompting experts to suggest that it to the United Nations Children Fund, UNICEF swelled from 10.1 million in 2021 to 18.5 million this year, the FCT and ten other states are responsible for this huge leap into illiteracy. Unlike the Jonathan era, children today, in their thousands roam the streets of the FCT during school hours. This is a common sight in the satellite towns of the FCT. So, it is not entirely true that it is the state governors that have stalled the fight to drastically reduce the number of out-of-school children, rather, the main problem is the Buhari administration and its grossly incapable Education Minister who is ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ I can further demonstrate the validity of this assertion by We need to urgently check the increasing number of out-of-school children, otherwise Nigeria would be marching towards a Federal Republic of Illiteracy was a preview for the 2024 presidential election. Former President Trump deployed his huge war chest to support candidates of his ilk who denied the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. He and his cohorts proceeded to tout a massive red wave or a Republican tsunami at the end of the elections. The rhetoric leading up to the mid-term elections was so violent that Katy Kay, the BBC Correspondent and a veteran of several American elections, described it as “unnerving”. As a matter of fact, prior to the elections, the spouse of House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was assaulted. Four hundred and thirty five (435) seats of the House of Representatives were up for grabs. So were 35 out of the 100 for the Senate and 36 governorships. At the time of writing this piece, the elections were notably peaceful, assuaging the anxiety of those who feared for the worst. And rather than result in a tsunami of Republican wins, the Republicans took the House with a slim margin. Even though results of one or two Senate seats such as Georgia’s are being awaited, the outcome for the Senate remained stalemated and a dead heat. Overall, the outcome of the mid-term elections threw up a number of firsts. They were also interesting and revealing. For the first time, a Blackman, Wes Moore, emerged as governor of Maryland. For the first time a woman, Sarah Sanders Huckabee, former spokesperson for Donald Trump, became governor of presenting another aspect of this issue which is entirely under the purview of this government and Minister Adamu. The 18.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria today, include 3.5 million children from nomadic background. The Jonathan administration set out deliberately to eliminate this phenomenon by heavily investing human and material resources. It built over 165 special schools specifically for the children of nomads. Some of these integrated schools, had integrated language laboratories and health clinics, free hostels and feeding. But with Vanguard, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2022 — 19 the advent of the Buhari administration and Adamu as Education Minister, almost all these schools were shut-down and the pupils pushed back to the streets to populate the out-ofschool children. Today, due to the inability of the government to protect our towns and villages, many of our people in the North have been forced out of their homes and with their children, have found refuge in the various Internally Displaced Persons, IDP camps in the FCT. These children are mainly out of school. What has stopped Minister Adamu and the Education Ministry under him ensuring that all the children in the IDP camps are in school being provided free education including books, uniforms and meals? Or are the state governors also responsible for this abandonment of the hapless and helpless? When we move to tertiary education under Adamu’s ministerial suzerainty, we are confronted with failure on an unimaginable scale. The fact that public universities were shut-down for eight months this year partly due to Adamu’s insensitivity, inability to comprehend basic issues and grandstanding, is an undeniable testimony to the monumental failure he has turned out to be. So monumental that even those of us with the same DNA as Adamu in journalism and column writing, could not stake our reputation to put in a word for him. In a sense, his admission of failure after seven years as minister, and given the fact that he has less than seven months to climb down from his ministerial mountain top, is a strategy to smoothen his return to earth. His self-confessed failure is not an honest assessment or admission; Arkansas. And for the first time a lesbian gay, Maura Healey became governor. Eight Nigerian-Americans won seats. Perhaps the fellow who got the most bruised in these elections is Donald Trump. He did not only insert himself as a juggernaut and presumptive presidential candidate for the Republican Party, he promoted the myth of an impending red wave. At the end of the day, the myth was exploded. His array of celebrity and If Donald Trump was subdued by the mid-term elections, which he had hoped to latch onto to announce his presidential bid, President Biden was buoyed by their outcome prominent candidates for the two houses were trounced. Consider the abridged catalogue: For the Senate alone, the sleek television medical doctor, Mehmet Oz, was defeated by John Fetterman in Pennsylvania; Don Bolduc was defeated by Senator Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire; Leora Levy was defeated by Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut; and Gerald Malloy was defeated by Peter Welch in Vermont. As if that were not bad enough for Trump, the margin of win for the Republicans in the House is far from the “wave” he predicted. Worse, Ron de Santis, the Florida governor, being considered as his replacement by more sedate members of the Republican Send Opinions & Letters to: opinions1234@yahoo.com if it were, he would not blame others for his failures. A principled man would have made an honest admission, apologised for the millions of souls his failure has affected, and bowed out. But since it is a poorly scripted drama piece, he declares he is a failure but sits in the same Ministry in his ministerial toga, enjoying the perquisites of office and adding to his unenviable records as Education minister. At the weekend, the differences in the education standards between Britain and Nigeria were evident in the meeting of two men who are products of the same British education system. President Buhari, 79 who since becoming Nigerian President in May 2015, has cumulatively spent over seven months residing in Britain for medicals, visited 73- year old King Charles III. During the visit, the latter jocularly asked Buhari whether he has a house in Britain. The satire was lost on the latter who thought the King meant a physical structure. Buhari himself recounts the encounter: “He (King Charles III) asked me whether I have a house here (in the UK), I said no. I live in Nigeria alone, the only house(s) I have are those I have (sic) before I got into government and I am not very much interested in having houses all over the place. I feel much freer when I have nothing.” If Charles, as the sovereign head of Britain wants to know if Buhari has a physical house in the country, he does not need to ask him, all he needs is request the British government for such information. We need to urgently check the increasing number of out-of-school children, otherwise Nigeria would be marching towards a Federal Republic of Illiteracy. Party, won re-election by a landslide. It is a measure of the likely shift towards de Santis that the New York Post, one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, proclaimed him as “the future”. Apart from the re-election elevating de Santis’s profile, his powerful, Kennedy-like acceptance speech was a clear play for the presidency. In fact experts are predicting that his formidable win will generate a “huge internal civil war” in the Republican Party against Trump. If Donald Trump was subdued by the mid-term elections, which he had hoped to latch onto to announce his presidential bid, President Biden was buoyed by their outcome. The tsunami the Democrats feared didn’t happen. Even Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and a notable Trump ally, acknowledged:“definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure”. President Biden, who had argued before the elections that “democracy itself was on the table”, proclaimed the outcome as “a good day for democracy”. He said that the voters had spoken clearly about their concerns and that he was ready to work with Republicans. For good measure, Biden who was previously coy about running in 2024, said confidently that he would. The mid-term elections, their peaceful conduct and their emphasis on issues, confirm America as a bastion of liberal democracy and the “Shinning City on a Hill”. These attributes and values should commend themselves to us in Nigeria as we conduct the 2023 General Elections. *Dazang, a public affairs analyst, wrote via: nickdazang@gmail.com
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