Opinion: 7 reasons to dump government

1. Government has always been lazy
Though John Kennedy’s magnus opus statement: “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was intended to redefine government as a national exchange of ideas, it has inadvertently become the ground on which lazy politicians stand.Today, Government is ready to wash her hands off every duty. Name it: NITEL, PHCN, Nigerian Railway Corporation, NTA, Nigerian Airways, Nigerian Paper Mills, NNPC, NIPOST, Unity Schools and perhaps the Nigerian Police Force; at which point they will be in charge of nothing but collect taxes.

2. We found alternatives for Government since 1976
When Murtala Mohammed carried out the mass civil service purge of ’76, we learnt to always have an alternative for everything. Those who had 9–5 jobs, reared side businesses. For every government house we were allocated, we built ours. When water supply failed, we dug boreholes. When power supply became epileptic, we installed generators and when rail projects derailed, ‘luxurious’ buses came to our rescue. In short, we found ways to be resilient, to be adaptable and to be our own government. We gradually became Government.

3. Government is now broke
Now that 28 State Governments cannot afford to pay salaries and the Federal Government is set to run a huge budget deficit of N2.2 trillion, we have reasons to look in other directions: Bill Gates funding the eradication of polio, Dangote and Co. bankrolling the Private Sector Health Alliance because NHIS has failed, and PPP becoming the go-to model for financing a chunk of public projects in Lagos. Government can no longer cater to all our needs. They always need to borrow or partner with the private sector.

4. Nigeria can’t afford Government
We elect President and Vice President to: feed them with N500million, buy them BMW cars worth N3.63billion, take care of their health with N3.87billion and fund their air fleet with N5billion. We hand N24 million monthly to 469 parliamentarians only for them to pass less than 100? bills per year. They seek our votes in exchange for privacy in tinted bulletproof cars, leaving us in traffic and unleashing the Police (which we also fund) on us. We replicate this madness at the center by voting across 36 states and 774 local governments: Governors with commissioners and State Houses of assembly, local government chairs with councillors and supervisors. All of their salaries run non-stop while the average worker is unpaid.

Worse still, because we badly want to be like America, we elect one party to make policies for four years only to have same thwarted by another for the next 4 years. We lose time, we lose money and we never meet up with the pace of those we copy: America, Britain or China.

5. Government will never love us more than us
As Wikileaks and Panama Papers have shown us, people in Government will look out for themselves and only we can look out for ourselves. They are never in traffic, we are! They are never in darkness, we are! They don’t use general hospitals, we do!
So lets build our alternatives: our private governments. Let’s focus less on their frailties and build our strengths. Let’s design, fund and produce our own projects. Let’s find opportunities in our communities, add value, make impact and perhaps monetize this impact; because no government and no one can love us more than us.

6. We have dumped many public services, Let’s do it again
We dumped public schools for private ones, rail for ‘luxurious’ buses, water corporations for boreholes. Now we can dump Government for private governments. If America had a collective resolve to be free from British imperialism and Britain chose to be a welfare state, we should explore our collective resilience and adaptability in running robust private governments as an alternative to Government at all levels. Since we have no precedents to follow, let us pursue this with pride knowing our unique potential as a nation.

7. Looking at our reality, it is not time to ask what you can do for your country but to do what you can do for your country

Written by:
Baba Oladeji. He studied architecture in Nigeria and England before deciding to explore architecture as methodology for politics. His latest work: Fela Memorial Force HQ, is the first product of this exploration.

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