On Monday night, terrorists attacked a Kaduna-bound passenger train that left from Abuja. They ambushed the train by detonating some explosives laid on the railway tracks. The violent implosion that followed not only stopped the train in its tracks but also imploded the myth of the progress Nigeria has made under the present regime. So far, eight people are reportedly dead, an undetermined number abducted and others still missing. Considering that there was also an attack on the Kaduna airport on Saturday and a siege laid on Abuja-Kaduna Road on Tuesday, a lot going on now is deeply depressing.
The Monday train bombing has been demoralising. It is a most unfortunate incident and we have been Nigerians long enough to know what such an incident portends. Having witnessed how Boko Haram progressed in its attacks, you sense that the train bombing must have inspired some other criminals as to the kind of evil they can carry out to undermine the public spirit.
If there is a major lesson the regrettable attack should teach our leaders, it is that building infrastructure such as establishing a railway system can only go so far in a country where other elementals of human development remain missing. The trains are, perhaps, the most visible symbol of the social advancement made under the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), since 2015. Given how poorly Nigeria fares in terms of infrastructure, the appearance of those old trains on our landscape has been treated as a phenomenal achievement, a redemption of the otherwise abjectly mediocre Buhari regime. For a route like Kaduna to Abuja, long imperilled by criminals, the train system was also a major reprieve for travellers. After Monday, that is no longer guaranteed. People who can no longer be abducted on the roads or in their houses will now be serially waylaid in the trains as they pass through the territories where the arm of the Nigerian government cannot reach.
Ironically, mere hours before the Kaduna terrorist attack, Information Minister Lai Mohammed had addressed a media briefing where he boasted that “We are proud that in our time, Nigerians are once again able to travel by rail, this time in total comfort and safety.” With the recent attack, can they now finally see that the country’s structural defects cannot be merely fixed by procuring certain items of public facilities? This is not the progress we needed to make all along. The mess Nigeria is wallowing in is far murkier than what “infrastructure” can refurbish, at least from the narrow way Buhari’s government has defined it. Our problems are much deeper and our institutions far too degraded for things like the trains to matter. Let us not forget that before the Monday bombing, Nigeria has been dealing with vandalism of railway metals for years. From vandalism to bombing, the series of setbacks show the reality of the progress that railway infrastructure was supposed to exemplify.
While inaugurating the Lagos-Ibadan railway project in June in Lagos last year, Buhari promised “his administration would continue to prioritise the railway system as a transportation backbone that can transform industrial and economic activity in the country.” Last month, when Buhari hosted a delegation from Kaduna State, he doubled down on his vision of trains as the ultimate development when he stated, “We should look at advancement in terms of infrastructure. No country can advance without infrastructure. There used to be railways, especially people from Southern Kaduna will remember this. Which country can really advance without road, rail and power? That’s why I wanted to sort out infrastructure.”
First, railways on their own cannot transform a nation’s industrial and economic activity. They are crucial in the agenda of development but are not a standalone achievement. They cannot make up for the basics of human development, political and social organisation, and moral and purposeful leadership that the country lacks. The hyper-focus on trains overlooks other facilities that make up the totality of a country’s infrastructure system such as energy supply and transmission, water supply, waste management, transport systems, schools, hospitals and so on. While the government thumps its chest over the provision of trains along a few routes, virtually everything else is lacking. Second, while trains are desirable to enhance the potential of a modernising nation, they are not the progress Nigeria needs to make moves to advance beyond its present state. Societies we call “advanced” did not get to where they are today merely because their leaders built them train tracks.
Trains are credited with developing the West insofar as they connected rural areas, where goods were being produced, with markets in cities. The development of the railway system also helped the mobility of people and goods across vast terrains that humans and their horse-drawn carriages would never have successfully navigated. The key point of the train’s usefulness in the matrix of the activities that made for social development was the distribution of goods and services from one region to another. Without that concomitant national productivity, the massive expense of building and sustaining the railway system will weigh down the society in many ways. Nigeria, unfortunately, is a country that lacks the means to productivity. Without industrial activities to keep people engaged, trains have only gone so far. The concerted efforts to keep the trains going have sapped resources while virtually other infrastructural systems have been going to rot. Just a couple of weeks ago, the bread makers’ union announced they might shut down production over the skyrocketing costs of diesel. If we can no longer even produce something as basic as bread, a food staple that transcends social class, what else can be done?
Unfortunately, the harsher the economy has become, the bigger and more resolute the army of its unemployed and unemployable youths, who perpetrate the spate of terrorism and banditry attacks that bedevil the country and who also run the abduction industry, have also grown. They are the proverbial child the parents failed to build and who has now grown up and is selling off the house the family built at their expense. The trouble is, this group of unbuilt children keeps widening, their resentment more toxic and their capacity for destruction is relenting and seemingly infinite. They carried out Monday’s attacks and the last has not been heard of them. There are many more of them out there, carrying out one destructive activity or the other at the expense of a nation that hardly reckoned with their existence.
They are people whose lives have never been shown to matter and they care less about others’ lives. They will take your life without feeling even a pang of conscience. Things like the train system that the government sees as means of social advancement exist for them to destroy to drive home their point about their capacity to ruin what the rest of us might want to call “beauty.” A while ago, a lawmaker who had grown frustrated with the vandalisation of railway metal wrote an article lamenting that the thieves could not see how much resources like the train would beautify the society and dignify them. But that observation itself is part of the problem. If people do not see how certain facilities are relevant to them, there is a possibility that the notion of development that birthed the idea was poorly defined and its ultimate execution unrelatable. No matter how much we invest in facilities like the train, there will be no economic or industrial transformation for our society. The progress we need is an agenda of human flourishing, a plan for nurturing the humans of our society and re-channeling their restless energies into productive activities.
It is probably too late for the Buhari regime to do anything differently now. Their constricted definition of social advancement not only misdiagnosed the complexity of Nigeria’s problems, but they also reached the end of their wits a while ago. Our hope of redemption now is how much astuteness we the people can muster to select a leadership that understands what really ails the country and sets about confronting it. That is why, for 2023, we cannot afford to throw away another chance to seek a leader with wisdom, understanding and enough stamina. We need someone who can look beyond the superficial to discern how Nigeria’s many problems connect and offer overarching solutions that resolve many things simultaneously.
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