By Ochereome Nnanna
Everywhere you look  there is mounting evidence that the system that currently drives Nigeria as a nation is not working. Nigerians are not benefiting from the normal objectives for which people belong to countries.

Today, everybody is running helter-skelter from Boko Haram terror. And yet, barely two years ago, the regime of President Umaru Yar’ Adua had taken decisive action against the group and stopped their murderous agitations for Islamic rule without Western education.

No sooner had the leaders of the group been extra-judicially killed than the system went to sleep, rather than taking the consequential follow-up steps to avert a future occurrence. This gave them the breather they needed to regroup, this time with massive local and foreign financial booster. In a similar vein, military action was declared in Abia State to stamp out a vicious network of kidnappers.

Little was done to do a professional follow-up work. On my trip to the East last weekend, I was dismayed to hear of a resurgence of the menace, not only in Aba but also the villages. We have many serving and retired security chiefs with a long list of paper qualifications and awards (you will be intimidated by those of the current National Security Adviser, General Owoye Azazi) and yet the nation’s security agencies seem to lack the most basic knowledge of intelligence work as the cornerstone of securing a nation.

Apart from the failure of Nigeria to protect Nigerians from local and foreign threats, the level of our infrastructural deficit can only be compared to countries that have just emerged from decades of war. According to the Managing Director of the Urban Development Bank of Nigeria, UBDN, Mr Abdulrazaq Oyinloye, Nigeria would require $200 million or N30 trillion to upgrade her infrastructure to standard level. According to him, at the current average rate of budgeting N830 billion per annum, it will take this nation 37 years to make up for 50 years of deficit in infrastructural development.

When he was being screened for appointment as minister by the Senate, the current Minister of Works, Mr Mike Onolememen, disclosed that the greatest obstacle to infrastructural development in Nigeria was sustainable funding. Since the second return of the military to the political scene, Nigeria has not been able to close the gap between the ratio of recurrent to capital expenditure in her annual budgets. The larger chunk of the oil-derived revenue goes to salaries, allowances and overheads. Most of the little left for capital development is corruptly frittered away.

This accounts for the high volume of abandoned federal projects now estimated at the cost of N7.78 trillion. A recent report puts the number of abandoned projects in the 120 oil producing communities in six Niger Delta states (Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta, Abia, Ondo and Imo) at 287. Fully aware of this poor funding syndrome, Onolememen is going into the highly inefficient Federal Ministry of Works knowing that he might not be able to do much.

A former Minister of Works, Dr Hassan Lawal, also frequently blamed his incompetence on poor funding and yet the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has put him on trial for allegedly defrauding the nation to the tune of over N70 billion!

Now with Labour pressing home its demand for the full implementation of the national minimum wage law, we are headed for a brand new systemic instability occasioned by strikes and stoppages, with attendant massive losses to the economy.

The Federal Government is in a fix because though President Goodluck Jonathan signed the N18,000 National Minimum Wage Bill into law in March this year at the top of the electoral season, reality check shows there is no money for immediate full implementation.

Secretary to the Government of the Federal, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim led a Federal Government team to a failed meeting with Labour leaders last Monday, where he informed them that only the payment of junior officers from Level One to Six could be accommodated in this year’s budget. The offer to start paying Level Seven and above from January 2012 was hotly rejected.

With all these security, infrastructural and Labour challenges always breathing down the neck of this country, the only way out, as I see it, is for us to rethink Nigeria. This country will never move forward without a major overhaul of the system to cut down drastically the cost of governance and give more power to the people. Merely reducing the jumbo pay of senior government employees as the House of Reps says it will do, is just like whitewashing a sepulchre. It will be a drop in the ocean.

The system that is driving governance in Nigeria breeds instability and endless crises. A nation that is always in crises will never develop. But the tragedy of Nigeria is that every idea suggesting change is violently rejected by the established cabals employing all sorts of political, ethnic and religious sentiments and disruptive tactics. A good step towards genuine democracy in Nigeria was taken in April this year.

For the first time in our history a minority president was popularly elected from the Niger Delta. A clique that feels it has been deprived of the right to rule unleashed war on Nigeria (just as they threatened they would before the polls). First, street urchins were sent to burn, kill and maim. Then, a Boko Haram that had been decimated suddenly made a deadly come-back, and an attempt to cage them is being sabotaged by well-choreographed calls for the withdrawal of the military.

Countries that were able to rethink their underdevelopment (Singapore, South Korea and South Africa) in the seventies, eighties and nineties are now more developed than some European countries. Even African countries that have taken similar steps, such as Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, are beginning to function.

Unless we find a way to do some of these things that others did to escape their demons, this cracked building will surely collapse.