By Akanimo Sampson
From Katungo in Gombe State, Northern Nigeria, came the loud voice of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, tearing through the desert that next year’s election is providing the citizenry an opportunity to decide if they want to continue living with killings, growing insecurity and rampaging hunger.
For him, the election year is pregnant with a lot of uncertainties given the way the authorities have been handling the affairs of the country since 2015.
In an e-mail to this reporter on Tuesday, the speaker’s media aide, Turaki Hassan, said his principal declared that the elections will be a referendum of sorts on the state of security and hunger in Nigeria.
Dogara was in Katungo for an empowerment programme organised by Binta Bello Monday. There, he challenged Nigerians to do a introspection and decide if they have made progress in the last three and half years or have witnessed a decline in their living standards on a general basis.
While lamenting the current state of situations in the country, Dogara remarked, ‘’2019 elections is about insecurity, whether we can be secured. Then look at your own lives, even if nobody loves or likes you, advise yourself, hold a consultation with yourself, sit down and argue with yourself, ask yourself what progress you’ve made in the last three and a half years?
‘’Don’t even ask any other person, in case that person may give you a biased opinion about yourself, but you know yourself very well, just sit down and if you want assistance, sit down close to a mirror so that you can see yourself. Compare yourself the way you look now and the way you looked some three years ago and then you’ll know, and then decide for yourself whether you want to continue looking like this, that is if it doesn’t get worse in the next four more years. By the time you’ve finished having that conversation with yourself, make a decision.
‘’If this is the kind of life that you want us to live, if this is the kind of insecurity you want us to perpetrate for Nigeria. Today in Nigeria 13 million of our children are out of school, 1.3 million of those children are from my home state of Bauchi. If we continue like this, the numbers are bound to increase, and the crisis we will face in the future will be more than that of Boko Haramwe are witnessing. This is because by refusing to give free and compulsory education to our children, we are raising an army for insurgency that will come and consume us as a people.
‘’So the vote in 2019 is not about anything, but about you, about you and about you. Do not make it about any other thing, but about what progress do you want to make? What kind of country do you want to raise your children in? What kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of education do you want to be giving to your children?
‘’All these are what we have in the 2019 ballot. And we trust as educated and enlightened opinionated people, that you’ll make the right choices.’’
Lamenting that the Boko Haram insurgency is still fresh, the speaker said there was never a day under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administration was more than 100 soldiers killed, adding, ‘’in any other country, that would have made their security forces to declare a national emergency, but here it didn’t happen.
‘’Is that the Nigeria we want beyond 2019? Do you know that today, you cannot travel between Kaduna and Abuja? It is very difficult. Most of the people that can afford it are always commuting by train, and we thank God for the railways that was almost 95% completed by the PDP government, before All Progressives Congress (APC) took over. If you travel by road, there is a 70% chance that you’ll be kidnapped. In those days however kidnapping was very strange in the Northern part of this country.
Dogara is urging the people of Gombe not to be tempted to deviate from the course, which is the PDP that has brought development to the state. ‘’If you make the mistake of putting an untested person in the Gombe State Government House, I tell you that you will regret it. As someone who has seen the difference, I beg you not to make that mistake, because we will not join you in crying if you make the mistake’’, he said.
Noting that the current administration has failed in securing the lives and properties of Nigerians, and in spite of all the blame game, ‘’security in its current state is worst than under PDP rule’’, insisting for Boko Haram insurgents to kill 100 soldiers in a day, ought to warrant a national emergency on security.
Coupled with the hunger and deprivation in the country, Dogara said if the APC administration is allowed to continue in power with the way it is handling security, it would only be a matter of time before more insurgents rise up to unleash terror on innocent Nigerians. He also claimed that two-thirds of Nigerians can no longer afford three-square meals a day, even as criminal attacks were increased with kidnapping daily.
