Let us Zone Poverty
Let us zone poverty. Let us build it a tent and fasten it to the loose earth of the North West. Let us make the rest of the country poverty free and confine poverty to the North West alone. Have they not produced the most of our leaders since independence? They have enjoyed enough; it’s their turn to be poor. Poverty to the North West.
Let us buy hunger a new cloak and zone it to the South West. All those pot bellied men and women with oversized torsos need to slim down. It’s not even good for their health you know and liposuction is damn expensive. So let us do them a huge favour and slim them down for free. No more owambe parties and endless aso-ebi. It’s poverty to the South West for keeps.
Aha, these South East people, they are too wealthy, talking containers and consignments all the time. They don’t need all that money you know. Let us zone armed robbery to the South East. Let us get arms for the youth to help us reclaim some of the excess money. Perhaps we could add kidnapping to it. Yes, armed robbery and kidnapping go down well like beer and pepper soup. They will find a good home in the South East for sure. And yes, we must disarm the police and keep them underpaid.
The North Central, who are they sef? Sometimes they prefer to be called “Middle Belt” as if the word “North” is a curse. Well, we are not bothered by that. We will zone power outage to them. Let us declare darkness in their land. Let us import candles for them and banish Mikano and John Holt from Abuja. The toy “i-big-pass” generators must go as well. We shall establish a bush lamp factory to augment the candles. Black is beautiful they say. Black out is even more beautiful.
South South – the oil people; let us zone unemployment to them. What do they need jobs for? They already have oil. Let their youths lie about idle. Let them drink raw crude from the plentiful wells until they are drunk.
Perhaps they might decide to go fishing. That would be good. Time we freed our waters of sharks and whales. They don’t even have enough land for schools so we shouldn’t be bothered. The South South
must remain unemployed. Jobs shouldn’t be for everybody after all.
The North East would look good with bad roads, don’t you agree? Let us zone crater infested roads to the North East. Let us break the bridges and turn the expressways into single lanes. Let us remove the drainage canals, so that the roads will spoil faster. While doing that we must ensure we build across rail lines and make sure the airports are death traps. The North East will enjoy this I imagine. It would be good to see people staying at home more.
Perhaps when we are done with attempting to zone these conditions that plague us as a nation and find that they can not be zoned, we will end all this noise on zoning or not zoning the presidency. Our problems have no ethnic, tribal or religious identity; neither are they confined to one particular part of the country. The man in Maiduguri suffers bad roads as much as the man in Umuahia. There is kidnapping in Kano just as there is in Port Harcourt.
Unemployed youth are a legion in Lagos just as they also walk the streets of Abuja. And who in this country does not experience power outage? And yes, the hunger is nationwide and poverty is like a national identity.
When we go abroad do they ask what zone of Nigeria we come from before asking us to step aside as they poke fingers into our private areas just to be sure we are not smuggling drugs? After the Abdulmutallab incident, did they not put the whole of Nigeria on the terrorist list? When our name tops the chart of corrupt nations, is there a zoning of the ranking?
Since our problems cannot be zoned, there is no way zoning shall solve them. We waste time and energy bickering over the ethnic identity of our leaders as if when our ‘brother’ is in power any thing changes for us.
It irks even more when I listen to persons who suffer most from bad leadership we have had to endure all these years, stand around newspaper stands and in the public buses arguing about zoning. It doesn’t matter who is in the saddle. The language he speaks isn’t worth a thing.
What matters is, is he speaking the language of development? That should be our concern at this time.
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