A reader of Africanews.it has sent us an email with this open letter to the president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan. We publish it here below. These are his own views and we have no responibility in it.
Dear Mr President,
after a period of hesitation, I decide to write you for an important issue that disturbs every responsible Nigerian. I am sorry if you would have wanted it to be a private letter but I think that since it represents the preoccupation of many Nigerians, I should make it known to all. I must commence by saying that the situation of my dear country Nigeria does not surprise me. For instance, already during the electoral campaign that brought you to power, I foresaw the impasse in which we were heading to and I started expressing my doubt on your capacity of running this complicated country. Mr President, from all indication, you could be a good candidate for a country, but I am afraid, it is not for a country like Nigeria. It might sound hard to hear but your two great errors are hunting you and your regime. Firstly, you had always counted on your good luck forgetting you do not run a county by luck. Though your good luck helped you to have a weak opposition and indecisive electorates who out of frustration and poverty went for any laudable candidate who you were it does not also permit to be more realistic and quick in action taking. Your second and most important error is that you counted on the help of the party under which you ran your election but unfortunately the party has neither reputation nor scope. My dear President, your downfall started just when you accepted to run for such a vital post under a political party without a determined manifesto and plan of action. When you accepted to run for such a post under a party that for more than a decade has ran Nigeria under a day to day planning, I knew the tenure was to be a moon dance like tenure.
Mr President, when you won this honourable post, I was among those who wanted to sit back and see where you will leading this country to, but seeing the pandemonium that is reigning in my beloved country; seeing that the labour of our heroes pas are trying to be in vain, I decided to write you as a loyal and humble citizen of one Republic of Nigeria. I know that you might be more preoccupied than every other citizen of this country but I am thinking you are yet to understand well the situation of things in the nation. And what pains me most is that your Excellency has very few members of your crew who really are ready to help out matters in the present circumstance. However, I must state that you are not the cause of the Nigerian problem, but the right heir of a disorganized system.
His Excellency, I will not only blame you for your errors but I will also propose what could make your tenure a successful one. As you rightly know that the major problem of Nigeria is security, I must then say that there are situations that only when they are resolved the nation will know peace. However, I would not want to advice you on the matters of policy keeping and employment creation for you are surely aware they are necessities that every nation must redress.
Permit me to say that the techniques applied till now on the matters of crime fighting in Nigeria have not yielded enough fruit for reasons that are very simple. In one of our last article, “Why neither FBI nor CIA might be able to help Nigeria resolve her security problem” We were trying to show why the differences in the duration of time necessary for the discovery of an author of a terrorist attack from one country to the other. His Excellence, it occurs to me very often to ask myself why we spend huge amount of money buying helicopters and arms to fight those we do not know their identity? Do your security advisers ask themselves why proves of robbery and other crimes serve less in the identification of their perpetrators? How can one prove that a man whose birth was not registered and who has no electoral card exist? What does a finger print left on a dead body serve to the police who have no digital record of the citizens? How do you determine that a man declared death is dead in a country where there is no death registration? How can you know a citizen in a country where there is till now no National Identification Card? Does it occur to His Excellency that these are the secrets behind crime fighting? How many telephone numbers has an average Nigerian? How could the police trace a caller in a country where millions of telephone numbers are not registered and are changed as clothes? Mr President, should I continue to mention the irregularities that mar the work of security agencies in Nigeria, it will never be exhausted.
All these and other related problems are the reasons that permit all sorts of evil in Nigeria, ranging from robbery, kidnapping, bombing and so on. And as long as there is no new redress of the system, there will be no progress in crime fighting.
Though I know it will take much to change the mentality of the people; though it might need many years of sensitization, I think it is a sin non qua non to crime fighting. Mr President, you might not be understood as you start this crusade but I think the nation need to be identified. We need to register all new born babies obligatorily, we need to declare every death that occur in the nation, we need to have citizens that move about with their identity cards; citizens that identify themselves to the police at necessary checking points. We need a country where the security agencies have dignity, a place where they know their duties and rights.
Finally, I would advise you, as a loyal and humble citizen of Nigeria, to be man enough to assume your office as the President elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. You should forget some of your friend who are not helping out matters in the building of the nation; you should abandon some outdated individuals who continue hunting your tenure. Call it your duty to make a history or tarnish the image of the nation by remaining inactive and insensible to the national plight. Thanks Mr President as you make the best decision of your tenure in listening or not listening to this plea.
Yours faithful and humble citizen
ALI NNAEMEKA CORNELIUS
ALI NNAEMEKA CORNELIUS
Published in: http://www.africanews.it/english/nigerian-sends-open-letter-to-his-president/AFRICANEWS
”The truth might be hard to say, painful to bear or even drastic for the truth sayer but still needed to be said”. ALISON.
