BEING PREPARED

Don’t let your lack of planning be my emergency. The “fire brigade approach” is synonymous with Nigeria. In fact, it is who we are and what we have come to stand for. There is nothing new about our laidback worry-about-the-consequences-later approach to problem solving or ignoring. We need to start doing things differently or the consequences will catch up with us and surely faster than we imagine.

After the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, was characterized by doping in the ranks of Team Nigeria, a wave of negative emotions ran through our sports administration and the Nigerian citizens alike. We were ashamed; our dear country was embarrassed.  We thought our sports authorities owed the nation the duty of ensuring that come Glasgow 2014, our athletes would come clean; win proudly or lose honourably. Signs of our fire brigade mentally began to tell when athletes could only camp for two weeks before the games. We spent weeks to prepare for an event others spent years to prepare for, yet we expect results! Team Nigeria was conveyed to Scotland in small batches, in one of the most bizarre travelling arrangements we can imagine. Then, we were queried concerning our lack of uniform team kits for our athletes; we couldn’t even get that right. When the curtains fell on Glasgow 2014, doping scandals marred the modest successes Nigeria recorded.

The story is similar as regards the outbreak of Ebola. When the virus was first announced in Guinea in March and started spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s minister of information, Labaran Maku, came out to say that there were measures already in place to prevent Ebola from entering the country. He even went further to state that even if the virus found its way into Nigeria, our health system had vaccines for treating it, as well as designated health facilities.  Five months later, we are a people in disarray over the virus. We even drink and bathe with salt.  It took the death of Patrick Sawyer, a visitor to Nigeria from Liberia, for us to wake up to the reality of a deadly disease.  Let us put this irony into perspective: a country with porous borders and poor medical facilities, with a population of over 170 million resides within a region where a deadly disease is spreading like wildfire and yet our doctors are on strike and the government thinks that that is OK. It speaks volumes about our psyche.

  

Our lack of preparedness and poor emergency response mechanisms are visible and equal in proportion in all ramifications. Whether in delivering social services, lawmaking, security, poverty eradication, job creation or politics, we just don’t tackle problems head on.

We have elections rapidly approaching, however, the election commission is never fully prepared and the country is always thrown into a state of insecurity. In both Ekiti and Osun where elections have just been concluded, many Nigerians were disenfranchised because INEC failed to provide them with permanent voter’s cards. The police force has been shown to be unprepared as the government had to draft in the army and the SSS in large numbers. One wonders who then is doing all the counter intelligence or fighting our war in the north east, when they are busy chaperoning election officials or keeping rival political parties at bay. Considering that these are just two out of 36 states of the federation, how do we expect free and fair 2015 general elections if the experiences in Ekiti and Osun have already proved less than salutary?

What happens in 2015? Already we put on the TV every morning and listen to various political parties making inarticulate sounds and drawing reactions from the security forces who only show their immaturity by reacting in public to the sad comedy show we see enacted on the news. It seems that our security chiefs cannot get enough of the spot light these days, whilst their operatives mask their faces in an apparent attempt to remain “under cover”!

We have 33 more states to conduct elections in. Where are we going to get the show of force that we have seen used in the last 2 elections? Will we revert to our usual practice of employing thugs to make up numbers and thereby create another copycat group like Boko Haram? It seems that we are making a habit of deploying soldiers, have we thought of its implication on the fight against terrorism?  Are we really prepared to withdraw troops from the battlefield and deploy them to secure ballot boxes, and what message are we sending to the military?

Eventually people must learn that mistakes are meant for learning and not repeating. We need to prepare or prepare to fail; this is remedy to our current state of unpreparedness.