By Joesf Omorotionmwan
Last week, we started a series, which we hope to sustain in the remaining part of this year — attempting to remind ourselves of some salient issues raised during the year, which we consider important enough not to be swept under the carpet. Given the frailty of the human mind, there is the constant need to follow up on our actions, lest we forget.

2014 goes down in history as the year of the Ebola. We see the bold hands of God in the affairs of Nigeria. For God so loved Nigeria that He dispatched the nation’s heath-care givers on strike at the approach of the Ebola. They were already too far into that strike when Patrick Sawyer strayed into Nigeria. The major hospitals were under lock and key. Otherwise, Sawyer would probably have been rushed to a larger health institution like the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH, instead of the “Obalende Dispensary” that was open.

We have maintained elsewhere that at a larger institution, perhaps between the doctors and the nurses; between the paramedics and the pharmacists down to the wards; Sawyer would have come in contact with thousands of people and we would, indeed, have been talking of infected and dead people in their thousands. And more so, with our usual yearning for the Dollar, that expatriate would have been embraced by all, unknown to them that Sawyer was really a time-bomb, waiting to explode.

Later, we were told that the World Health Organisation, WHO, had certified Nigeria “Ebola free”. We took that with a pinch of salt, given the fact that the Ebola is a creation of the Western World in which the same WHO and other UN agencies have been implicated in selecting and enticing Africans and African countries to participate in the testing events, promoting pretentious vaccinations, while pursuing various testing regiments.

For too long, the international conspiracy against Africa in which Africans were used as guinea pigs, on African soil, has been going on. Some respondents to our article, “Ebola As Grand Conspiracy Against Africa” feel that the points raised in that piece deserve further investigation by the leaders of this continent.

Early in the year, when INEC issued the time-table for the 2015 general elections, a storm of indignation burst forth, particularly on the aspect of placing the highest election, the presidential one, first. This was widely criticized because of its propensity to aid rigging at the lower levels, as it did in 1983 and other elections where it produced an unfair band-wagon effect. The ordering of an election from top to bottom has been likened to climbing a tree from the top. The ideal thing is to start elections from the lowest rungs of the ladder and move upwards.

INEC ignored the entire outcry. This is where INEC lost all its claim to any democratic credentials. Essentially, we see no major difference here between INEC and the Idi Amin or Sani Abacha regimes.

For two years running, the Director-General of Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, Ms Arunmah Oteh, and her organisation, have been consistently de-budgeted; as they have been denied needed funds in the annual appropriations. In spite of the denials of appropriation, we see that Oteh still remains DG of SEC.

From where is she being paid? And for how long shall we continue to have a National Assembly that is inconsistent and most incoherent? While SEC bemoans its exclusion from the annual appropriation, its opposite, number, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has flouted the request to submit its budgets to the National Assembly for information, talk more for approval. In essence, the National Assembly is too weak to enforce fiscal discipline on CBN; and too wicked to perpetually subjugate the SEC. But between these extremes, a balance must be created to make for uniformity of standards. Put differently, what is good for CBN must also be good for SEC?

In March this year, Nigeria witnessed the Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS, debacle in which 19 unsuspecting young job-seeking Nigerians, including a pregnant woman, were carelessly dispatched to their early graves. An equally gory incident occurred in July 2008 when a recruitment exercise by the same NIS produced a grim toll of 17 lives throughout the country. Still more annoying, those who presided over these disasters have gone scot free, which lends credence to the belief that it is folly to be wise where ignorance is bliss.

In the NIS debacle, we saw a situation where Nigerians were being asked to pay for jobs that were not in existence; and that’s exactly what has now been transferred to the National Youth Service Corp, NYSC, where graduating students must now pay through the nose to access their postings. There is the callous argument that it costs more for the students to travel from their towns to the schools to get their postings. But we ask: Why should the onus of getting their places of assignment be on the poor students who have no job, in the first place? Why shouldn’t the institutions publish the list in national newspapers? Our government has virtually become a gaming machine, which no amount of money can ever satisfy.

Nigeria’s hollowed-out state is reflected in the impotent institutions that run the country: the army Generals have sometimes taken to swindling entire military budgets, with the result that Nigerian soldiers faced with ruthless insurgency in the North, who are unable to fight, are deserting the army in droves.

Thievery has become a way of life in our public service to the extent that President Goodluck Jonathan recently proclaimed that: “Stealing public money is not corruption”. It is even worse that he did not say what it is.

Yet, on the issue of profligacy, the Finance Minister and the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, only points accusing fingers at state governors while insisting that we must “leave Jonathan alone”. This holier than thou attitude also deserves to be buried in the outgoing year!