Abuses Everywhere, By Gabriel Amalu
POLITICS DIGEST – While private individuals are running rehabilitation homes as torture centres for young persons, officials of state are running organs of government as torture labs for adults. Head or tail, the citizens are at the receiving end of the trying times. To the detriment of the citizens, it appears governments and their collaborators in the corporate world are competing in imposing unconscionable taxes on the people. In a country supposedly under the rule of law, rogue communication companies and banks are unilaterally extorting citizens, while the apex bank and the communication regulatory commission are acting lame.
On their part, in the name of seeking new sources of revenue, everyday our incompetent fiscal managers, instead of introducing measures to deepen national productivity, lazily sit in air-conditioned offices to introduce one Ponzi scheme after another in the name of new taxes. And when you ask why these inhuman extortion, they will reel out some meaningless statistics that Nigerians are under-taxed. Yet, they fail to see the statistics that says that unemployment and underemployment is exponentially high in the country.
Those in charge of introducing one new tax after another don’t tell the rest of the citizens what they take home as earnings, from the taxes they impose on them. They don’t also consider it unconscionable that our federal legislators are amongst the best paid in the world, while other federal and state workers are amongst the most poorly paid even by African standards. In the midst of the so-called under-taxation, most of the sub-national states are technically failed states.
So, because majority of the states and their citizens are so pauperized, they truck large number of their indigenes to Lagos State, which has become a concentration camp of sort, just to escape the economic quagmire. Instead of concentrating on extorting citizens through phoney taxes, the federal government should relinquish control of some of the items in the exclusive legislative list, to gift states economic activities that can sustain them. Under the present arrangement, the main responsibility of the federal government is to collect petroleum and other taxes, and preside over the sharing in Abuja.
If the federal government must however remain only a tax collector, it should consider implementing a new revenue formula in favour of the states. That is hoping that some of the governors who run their states like the Russian czars would make better use of the increased resources. There is also the urgent need to encourage regional economic activities so that states can pull resources together to solve basic existential problems, like the production and distribution of electricity.
Even security challenges can also be tackled by cluster of states like the southeast and southwest are trying to implement. The regions can also be encouraged to organise and fund inter-state railways, highways, water transportation and similar beneficial activities. The potentials in inter-regional activities, is exemplified by some of the ambitious projects planned by Cross River State government. If the federal government is mindful, it will support the trans-regional highway and the deep sea port planned by the state, which can open the eastern flank of the country, from south-south to the northeast.
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Unless there is a change in tactics, states would continue to stymie in basic challenges, more so as they are asked to pay a new minimum wage. Take for example, Kaduna State, which recently received positive attention after the governor, Nasir El Rufai, enlisted his six-year old son in a public school. It quickly swung into disrepute following the discovery of ‘centres of welfare’ for the torture of citizens, albeit masquerading as Islamic centres for knowledge.
Should the government of the state have statutory control of police in the state, Governor El Rufai can choose to wipe out such criminality at his own pace. Shockingly, similar centres have been discovered in other states and many more may be discovered in that part of our country. In an environment of monumental failures by parents, failure is hidden in religious disguise. So, parents who are unable to provide for their children pass them off as delinquents, and so they ‘proudly’ send them to ‘religious centres’ where they would learn ‘morals’.
Poverty and ignorance, of course, is at the root of the crisis. For reasons best known to the northern elites, they have failed to give western education the deserved attention and the result is abject poverty and ignorance plaguing the region. Of note, but for the fact that the discovery of the torture centres were under the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, religious bigots would have termed the exposition a form of religious persecution, for which innocent Nigerians would have paid with their lives.
With the discovery of similar torture centres in other states, the governors in the region surely have to worry about the types of educational institutions that exist in the states they are leading. But it is heart-warming that El Rufai has promised to fight one of the root causes of such fake religious piety. If he can enforce his promise of free and compulsory basic education, he would have dealt the abuses masquerading as religious training a heavy blow. His approach will also eradicate challenges associated with early marriage like VVF, Almajiri children and similar vices plaguing the region.
Like a nation under spell, the states in the southern part of the country, apart from their fair share in incidents of kidnapping and other violent crimes, especially amongst the youths, are plagued by what is commonly referred to as baby factories. Young women, some even supposedly in higher institutions of learning, get conned into giving birth to children which are sold off, while they earn few pieces of naira. There is also high incidence of yahoo-yahoo boys, who live off fleecing Nigerians and foreigners of their hard earned monies.
So, the nation is in a state of anomie. While the poor hook up to delinquent behaviours to survive the economic crisis facing the country, the politically connected hook their children, to the few jobs available, without merit. Recently, it was reported that the leadership of the senate cornered the few job opening in the Federal Inland Revenue Services, for their wards. Because the unearned privilege could not go round, the leadership shut out the wards of their colleagues. Of course, the bad behaviour is a reflection of the dwindling opportunities available in the society.
Another form of abuse that has become rampant in our country is what is referred to as sex-for-marks, mainly in higher institutions of learning. It is good that President Buhari has spoken up against it. Strangely, there is claim that such delinquency is also happening in private faith-based universities, but it is all hush
