The 2023 general elections are just around the corner, and without any iota of doubt, of the issues that should form and inform the choice of who to vote for, and who not to vote for, would be question of development – those who are trying to get elected and are trying to replace a political opponent would be making demands on the incumbent holders of the office, wanting to know what they have been doing for over three years of holding the office, with the humongous amount of money that these elected officials collected as federal allocations from Abuja.
But those already in like all of their predecessors always find a way to fobbing off those new aspirants – this usually start by way of celebrating one form of project commissioning or the others. They justify through hard evidences of their achievements by taking several slots on both prints and broadcast media to show the progress they have made since the inception of their administration – they often show many of the road built in the colonial era which were worn out but got patched up by them. The assumption is that when people see the trendy new coatings on these roads, people would be convinced that that the governor, minister or president as the case may be, is actually working and indeed has earned the mandate of the people.
One of such political jamboree happened recently in the so-called Gateway State in the southwest , where the governor of the state is desperate to justify his mandate and to convince his people to return him to office. The governor in the celebrations invited Mr president from Abuja for the styled tagged “Legacy Project”. The supposed legacy project were five in number, and they got commissioned amidst fanfare. The governor after spending close to three years in office had just rehabilitated two roads which to his credit one was in dire state of disrepair, while the other one is for the governor to massage his ego. He spent 7 billion naira on the project of vanity called “city gate”, which has no bearing in the lives of the masses. Is this really development?
Development has three aspects – physical or infrastructural, human and social and the economic. All of them are interwoven and symbiotic to benefit the masses. You do not build a school without having qualified teachers and call that development. You do not build hospital even with qualified medical practitioners without state of the art equipment and drugs for the use of the patients. What is roads that were built with imported manpowers and equipment that are not in the best interest of masses. If one of the aspects are missing, I dare ask, where is that development?
The one parameter I know that people from saner climes use as standard for development is when such development is sustainable. Therefore, as we approach the time to activate our civic responsibility, we must endeavour to up the ante and ask probing questions to the people who want our votes. The people we must vote for should not be the ones who have erected some buildings and called them schools, hospitals and government houses. What this means is that if we have people in power who only focus more on building houses or park that are of no use to the general populace, we must vote them out and put people with likelihood of developing us as a people. Development of Human Resources is to be desired more than the development of houses that can not qualify to be called institutions.
