Your speech with MFCT Staff that was widely televised and circulated nationwide, are words spiced with verbose arrogance and boisterous claims. It smack of one, who is filled with resentful anger, bottled-up malice and intense need for retaliation.
BY DR NELSON OGBEMUDIA
His Excellency;
Nyesom Wike!
Sir, you have got to put your best feet forward. Threat don’t work here!
Abuja is a collegiate of mix urban professionals, it has more of intellectuals than commoners, e.g. retirees, civil servants, and politicians etc.
What works here, is communicative appeal, cordial understanding, cooperative platform and collaborative synergy.
Threats can only work in riverine areas, where the people see less, e.g exposure, education, experience, expertise
May I remind you sir, that, Abuja is an elitist society, absolutely devoid of sarcasm and archaism. You need to adopt, adept and adapt into the mainstreams narrative of its people.
You need a quick retrogression, in the immediate, as you proceed furthermore. Do a self-awareness, self-development and self-assessment and an appraisal and see what works here; and focus on these factors: Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reformation.
Retreating now is self-help, tailored to proffer adjustable solutions: self-adjustment, self-adaptation and pay attention deeply to details subsequently.
A ministerial retreat and tutelage may not court it, it can only serve as a refresher course, and may likely not address the salient behavioural dysfunctionalities apparent.
Your success and drive depend largely on your self- management and leadership competencies.
Your speech with MFCT Staff that was widely televised and circulated nationwide, are words spiced with verbose arrogance and boisterous claims.
It smack of one, who is filled with resentful anger, bottled-up malice and intense need for retaliation.
This will not in anyway impact us.
Here, the law courts are final arbiter. There are killjoy who can render you and your office incapacitated as a puppetry workshop and ensure it’s so; legally speaking, not sneaking now. They will make it inactive for the next 8yrs, until you pack up and leave the scene, with your head bowed.
Countless court summons will flood your office, it will be, the new norm, dropping in through various courtrooms, with all parties ask to maintain status quo, until the determination of the cases.
Your boss Mr. President, his attention when fully drawn-out, will sacrifice you as a scapegoat, a necessary evil!
Let us cut the chase and go deeper into my submissions and likely solutions!
Can we deepen slightly into the narratives?
Some basic functionalities of MFCT are cited below; we expect you to abreast and concern yourself with these; consider them first, before actions or activism ruins our expectations.
Namely; the expectation, is that:
- You concern yourself first to the basic & fundamental needs of your host communities, and their ageing facilities in FCT, (these are facilities that support lives), and the residents of FCT.
- You make available to us, a consistent supply of clean, healthy, drinkable and affordable pipe borne water across the city centres and the various area municipalities.
- You ensure durable, accessible & functioning road networks within the main city centres and the suburbs of each municipalities.
- You foster, promote and domesticate the SDGs targets and contents, e.g. accessible, affordable, conducive and modern learning centres that are considered available educational institutions to our wards and in the same expectations employ qualified and professionally trained teachers
- You replicate, a spread in all communities of FCT, an adequately well-equipped healthcare centres, furnished with advanced medical facilities
- You deepen the concepts of clean environment, interactive, non-threatening, and safer neighbourhoods, why projecting an all inclusiveness.
- You facilitate the development of sporting activities and facilities, with model recreational parks and relaxation centers across the nooks and crannies of the city.
- You Build-up with your team a total linkages of all municipal roads, provide affordable transport services; with intra and inter-state transport systems.
- You continue the installations of CCTVs, Street lights, and Road markings within the City Centres and the Suburbs
- This is very key; you put a stop, and completely eradicate open grazing, open defecation, unauthorised street markets, street hawking, and help us curb the infiltration of shanties in suburbs and their criminal activities
- You rejig as you reform the MFCT operations and the staff recruitment processes. Stem out all forms of criminal activities on-going in MFCT & the Area Municipality offices. e.g. the continous stealing to resell, forgery, falsification, counterfeiting and duplication of land documents. The case of double allocation, dual certifications and multiplicity.
- You ensure proper policing and adequate provisions of well-equipped security agents in MFCT. (Just take a weekend tour, from 2pm and drive through some of the Divisional Police Station, go with the FCT Commissioner of Police, your findings will be good help)
- You put in place a watertight safety measure, security architecture that ensures security of lives and properties. Recently, Insurgency, kidnapping and armed-robbery have grown rampant and malignant in FCT becoming a safe heaven for criminals, its gradually taking a centre stage.
- You develop and encourage a conducive work environment, promote work culture, and project work ethics as a motivational strategy that enables deployment of their Presence, Participation and Productiveness of MFCT staff.
- You take a holistic review, and re-look into the management and operational framework of FCT road traffic management, with an intent to overhaul the Traffic service and logistical Department.
- You upgrade, update and upload facilities of some of the layout that are ageing out, seeking a need for decongest, because the layout is overly populated, currently depleting, as a result of overpopulation. Some places, some of these facilities are non-existent, or they are fast fading off; ailing socio-infrastructural facilities
- You do a proper documentation, management and coordination of all existing markets, insist on precautionary measures, identify those that are daily contributing and promoting the unhealthily pollution we now face in FCT.
- You deepen the concepts and policies of Building Plan: ‘No Plan, no Building Policy.
Enforcing Building plan, ensuring proper conceptualization and compliance and committing to a total supervision of all on-going projects considered as major construction and their sites.
- You pay close attention to the ecosystems of the city, the impact analysis. Today, many of the drainages are collapsing, because they are overwhelmed and it’s creating gullies. Nigeria is one of the Sahel countries, we cannot shy away from its realities. And Abuja is fast failing and falling steadily, tilting and snowballing into an ecological disaster, with floods increasing with new channels and paths eroding lands, and land tremors are recurring, etc.
- You facilitate loans for mass housing, mortgages for middle class housing and establishing low cost housing estate for the masses.
There are some of the intervention strategies one expect you to employ and deploy, as a humanitarian agent, a Catalyst and a Colossus that you are, than, the administrative echoes that gave us a negative direction, misrepresenting this APC government as insensitive, grossly and intensely nonchalant.
To this end!
A militarised mindset, bullish mentality and vendetta spirit, arching to ventilate, while breathing down fire and brimstone, as echoes that itches for demolition, destructive disposition and revocation of landed titled documents, is rather unfortunate and impracticable.
A bad taste.
Abuja is not a replication of Port Harcourt.
Be humane and diplomatic; see more than you talk.
Here, chaos is our energy and fuel, in this city ministers don’t call the shots, the bulk stops on the desk of Mr. President, who ultimately, may likely trade you in for a compromise deal.
Definitely, this will be done to facilitate the guarantees of his political interests.
Your job here should begin with harmonious, convivial, courtesy, courting for a support platform from your host communities. Be humane, with a friendly posture and be relational in your public engagement.
You will succeed if you coach your words and season it with grace and class. Many have come and gone, in this same vein, you have come, and you will also go
Its a matter of time.
Thanks
My2kobo
…Dr. Nelson Ogbemudia is based in Abuja-FCT
