By Habibat Aliu
In this 21st century economy, every nation is either developed or undergoing development. A country like Nigeria has been facing different challenges from every aspect of economic growth and our leaders are in no way utilizing opportunities that abound to improve the economy.
Many citizens have either been frustrated one way or the other while many are struggling to make a better living through the bad situation. for instance, citizens whose earnings are not enough to make ends meet have decided to engage in dubious acts so as to get more income by end of the months while those who don’t have any means of income have engaged themselves in terrible ways of surviving, in a country like Nigeria you hardly see a better sector of the economy that has not been affected especially with the ways of leaders control or make policies that may plunder the economy into damage.
The youths of this country either for greed or as means to survive have engaged themselves in fast ways of making money and have been involved in different criminal offences like the cybercrime known as (yahoo), kidnapping (which is one of the fastest ways of making money now), robbery etc. it is also heart-rending that our so-called leaders have been able to embezzle money from the economy and got away with it. there was an incident about a citizen of Mali who climbed a four-storey building to rescue a toddler in France, when the president of France heard about the news he automatically gave the fellow permanent citizenship and also offered him a job in the firefighting department. This is just an embarrassment to the Malian president so he quickly called the fellow back to come and work in the army.
The president of Mali should have made a better hope for its citizens before that incident because we all know that it is only when a nation is not benefitting its citizens that a fellow will decide to leave his/her country for another. Before that happened I believed similar cases have actually happened in Nigeria. During the time it was all over in the news that citizens of Nigerians were travelling to Europe by land and the majority ended up losing their lives on the road. While some on getting to Libya were sold into slavery and majority of the women and children ended up as sex slaves.
But what most citizens don’t realise is that no matter how bad the economy of a country is, it is possible for some people to make something out of whatever, they do to provide for their family, while some choose to leave the country and ended up either as a slave in another country or better still get a better standard of living. All this determines what the leaders of a nation have reduced the economy too.
We know that the leaders cannot fix every challenge at once or perform magic to provide a better living for their citizens with the pick of an eye but if the leaders have determined that whichever area of the economy they want to improve upon that it’s a matter of time. If there’s purposeful leadership, the citizens can stay in their country whether there are challenges in the economy or not and they will still survive looking forward to tomorrow with optimism to a country everyone will be glad to be a citizen with no one wanting to leave the country.
Unfortunately, for the past few years, Nigeria has not been a country where a large family with low income can survive and this inflation rate is becoming worse. Most leaders only care about their own well-being and that of their family members or cronies; you can never see the leader’s children in public school.
Why would they provide an educational sector where they intend not to send their children the worst part is that there’s no improvement on the basic need to provide a standard education system in the country not even in the health system. instead of improving the health sector by equipping the hospitals, they will rather go abroad and spend the money in hard currency in order to get better treatment leaving the hospitals in their own nation with poor infrastructure.
Tell me, how can a family that has been struggling for decades be able to raise millions of naira just to treat a sickness since the government has failed to provide standard hospitals with facilities which are at the same time affordable to the citizens? Even in some countries, the government pays the hospital bills for its people but in Nigeria, it’s the other way round and that is why the mortality rate has become astonishingly high what we could ever imagine.
There are different ways in which the government can make its citizens be valuable citizens of a nation if the government can follow the way the western government treats their citizens. They make them believe that the people are their priority.
