The vandalisation and looting of railway infrastructure has for some time morphed to an industrial scale in the Nasarawa State axis. In July this year, troops of four Special Forces rejected a bribe attempt by 12 suspects caught with stolen railway tracks and fittings.

Apart from the suspected existence of an insider syndicate, there is a general atmosphere of incompetence and negligent attitude to security, especially within the FAAN.

What it also means is that Organised Labour is becoming less relevant to the non-working classes because of its limited ability to force government to initiate all-inclusive palliative measures. Labour is very mindful of its own vulnerabilities, with the industrial court always deciding disputes in favour of government and threatening its leadership with contempt charges.

While our lawyers and judges have to stay back in Nigeria and practise their legal profession, the overwhelming caseloads arising from our flawed elections are creating another kind of manpower shortage. 

Labour is miffed that little is being practically seen of the Federal Government’s promises. It is also angry that the countless meetings it has been invited to by government have failed to shore up confidence.

Governments should enact policies and legislations that can guarantee universal access to information while investing in infrastructure, digital literacy programmes and manpower.

This visit was read in many quarters as NDLEA making Naira Marley their “ambassador”, and this got many right-thinking Nigerians scratching their heads. What was the most notorious musician who commands cult following for promoting drug use and gangsterism doing beside Marwa, one of the highly-respected public officers in Nigeria?

The first and most infamous school abduction was the Chibok Schoolgirls incident of April 14, 2014, when 276 students of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Borno State, were whisked off into Sambisa Forest by Boko Haram jihadist terrorists. Though some of them were recovered, more than 100 of them remain unaccounted for.

It turned out that the promise of the highway was a ploy to deflect attention and criticism from Buhari’s selfish and unpatriotic squandering of borrowed funds from China to build a railway from Kano to Maradi in his father’s native country, Niger Republic. Meanwhile, the Eastern railways network which were also begging for attention were ignored.

Akpabio’s “enjoyment” outlook, which the Executive seems eager to nurture ahead of the people’s welfare after the petrol subsidy full implementation, has not bolstered the people’s confidence in the 10th National Assembly.

Six years later in September 2021, Buhari again ordered all the identity collation agencies to ensure that a central biometric identity platform was established before he left office in 2023. 

The pathetic case of intending corps members from Akwa Ibom who were kidnapped by bandits in Zamfara State brings back the debate as to whether the scheme as it is has outlived its usefulness.

But in a country like Nigeria, which is mottled with large swathes of ungoverned spaces in its 10,000-kilometre waterways, avoidable river accidents are the sad experiences citizens are forced to put up with.

The most sinister part of this crisis is that, up until today, the Federal Government has even refused to officially situate the armed herdsmen militias and their sponsors as the terrorists that the world has classified them as.

It is high time we let countries like the UAE know that Nigeria has a whole lot more to offer than it had showcased before now.