By David-Chyddy Eleke
Last Saturday, I had an appointment to meet in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, but it was a day set aside for environmental sanitation in most states.
I was impatient to wait until 10am before I commenced the journey as I had the intention to attend church service in Port Harcourt at same 10am. So, I moved to Onitsha from Awka to board a PH bound bus. The bus driver drove as fast as he could to get to Onitsha before the start of sanitation exercise, but even though he did, military personnel stationed at a checkpoint at Awkuzu Junction had already blocked the road as early as 6:30am. Their reason was that there was no movement on sanitation day.
But if you paid, you could move. For every car to passed by the checkpoint, it must pay N500, and for buses and bigger vehicles, the bill is N1,000, and those who were unwilling to pay were held down with the ‘no movement’s law. I was surprised that military personnel could be so brazen with issues about bribe. A blue barrel constituted part of objects used in forming the road block, and the barrel besides that had another function. All monies collected were simply dumped in the barrel.
One passengers sitting besides me could not help but marvel aloud; “do you know the kind of money these people will cart home today?” He said. My own line of thinking was not about how much they will take home, I was rather thinking when Nigeria got so bad that soldiers are so brazen with bribe, including putting a price tag to it. Meanwhile, I later learnt that Prof Chukwuma Soludo has abolished the environmental sanitation thing. His reason was that sanitation was an everyday thing, but here are military boys making a hell of money from an abolished exercise. Pathetic.
All through the journey to PH, I noticed that police is truly our friend. At police checkpoints, we dropped N100 as bribe, and they always saluted us, but military checkpoint took nothing less than N200, and in most cases you had to park and trek to them to deliver the bribe. Even when you don’t have balance, police can take N1,000 and deliver a balance of N900 to you, but not the military. Indeed, police is your friend.
The journey opened my eyes to the level of bad roads Nigerians deal with everyday. From Onitsha to Owerri and to PH, the story is the same. After doing a to and fro journey, I became so confused why President Bola Tinubu-led government should be spending trillions to build Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, when existing roads are almost impassable. I think there is something about Aso Rock. Once you enter, reasoning takes flight.
Back to security checkpoints. In Omerelu, Rivers State, I noticed that between every two electric poles, two checkpoints existed. I was so pissed with the policing model used by Nigeria security agencies. Can’t we ever think up a better policing model than blocking the roads and collecting money? Must motorists always be the ones to bear the brunt of the establishment of checkpoints on the road, as if they are the cause of insecurity? Nigeria security chiefs should sit up and think harder.
But in truth, who noticed that in the entire Port Harcourt City, you can hardly see any standing billboards with the image of the former governor of the state, Barr Nyesom Wike.
Even though there were not much political billboards in the state like what I saw two weeks ago in Ebonyi, but it was a good thing that Governor Siminalayi Fubara’s billboards stood in strategic places in the state, while those of Wike who left office just last year, and still occupying a plum office can not be seen anywhere.
On its own, this tells the story of the ephemerality of power. There must be one governor at a time, and Fubara is the man for now. Soldier go, soldier come, barrack remains.
