While having functional firetrucks is great, that is just half the solution. We don’t have roads. Even with firetruck alarm, chances are that trucks will be stuck in traffic, arriving only after real damage. Road infrastructure is basic to all things; working societies recognize that all other things rest on it. Elementary as it is, we can’t fix that in nearly 60 years never mind the budgets.
More fundamental is water. Firetrucks in decent nations don’t need to fill up their tanks. There are fire hydrants every few meters of the road—water sources. The truck just arrives and connects its hose to the hydrant, and firefighting begins and ends in minutes. But you have to have water running underground in those pipes first. We have neither water nor pipework. Only budgets for water in 50 years. Even if we have firetrucks, water in their tanks may hardly be enough to combat big fires.
Which reminds me of the politics of water in Nigeria. Our parents recall something called waterboard, an agency in charge of water. Water was pumped into homes. In some cities, there were taps on the street, albeit often dry. I remember, as a child, a certain illiterate politician in my local government was said to have promised “to water” my community. A comedy material, but it showed water was a serious item of governance.
But only for a while. Gradually, the waterboards disappeared. Gradually, communities started sinking their own boreholes—boreholes replaced that strenuous one with a lever. Gradually, individuals started sinking their own boreholes when the communal ones caught the bug of Nigerian mismanagement. And finally, government relinquished its duty to provide water—in fact, the Lagos state government once planned to tax private individuals who, as own local governments, provided their own water sources!
The politics of water—the evolution of Nigerian power as an agency of the devil. The story of how a people have been conquered overtime by locusts. From water to roads to electricity to education to health to security. It was Fela who sang that water has no enemy, but he was wrong. Nigerian government is the enemy of water.
Source: Facebook
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