Apart from Nigeria, is there anywhere else in the world where foreign agencies and businesses treat the locals with disrespect in their own country and get away with it? This is one issue we have complained about severally in the past. Some years ago, an expose was made on the attitude of construction companies, especially those operating in Abuja who used trucks to convey their workers to and from construction sites, with attendant accidents and injuries. Those trucks (often called trailers) were designed for haulage. It was considered very inhuman and disrespectful of citizens for the construction companies to use such for transportation of their workers.
By Obo Effanga
As we are wont to do in such circumstance, we condemned the actions and government typically threatened the firms. It seemed the practice was suspended for a while, but soon enough it was back in full swing. This past week, I sighted one of the ubiquitous long trucks operated by Julius Berger, a construction company of German origin but almost synonymous with federal government construction contracts. As a matter of fact, the truck had a bold inscription which said, ‘Workers Container’! I considered that a grave insult, knowing that no management staff could possibly be ‘contained’ in that truck.
But while I was angry with Julius Berger, my anger and disappointment were more with the Nigerian government, many of whose officials suck up to the multi-national companies and would gladly trade away the rights of citizens on the altar of pecuniary interests. Whose responsibility is it to set and enforce standards related to transportation modes in the country? How come our road safety enforcers would happily run (commercial) motorbikes off the roads, but would not do anything about those who convey humans in trucks meant for goods? The truth is that the motorbikes are operated by the poor and ordinary citizens.
Another annoying treatment of Nigerians is by many of the foreign missions in the country. Take a look at any of the visa application processes and centres in Nigeria and you would be shocked at how our government would allow foreign countries to treat Nigerians as sub-humans. Too often, applicants line up in the sun or sun outside the embassies/visa offices while waiting to be attended to.
That is aside the sometimes unreasonably high non-refundable visa fees. This certainly cannot be the same standard used by those countries elsewhere in the world. Could our governments pretend not to know of this dehumanising treatment of its citizens? While we may not demand that our foreign missions treat visa applicants in the same way, we can at least insist on minimum standards of respect to be accorded our citizens, especially in our country.
Unfortunately, it is difficult for the government to set high standard of expectations from the foreign agencies when it cannot meet such standards itself. Virtually every public service-provider in Nigeria operates as though it was doing the customers a favour. This explains why the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) would make motorists pay for vehicle licence, and a few years after, it decides to tweak with the arrangement of numbers and letters on the licence plate and then surcharge motorists to have the previous numbers replaced. It is this lack of respect for citizens that would make government agencies charge a fee to applicants for jobs, treat them with levity, get some killed in the process and life goes on.
So how do we get our sensibilities back by putting the people first? We need re-orientation to realise that the basis of the state is to guarantee the welfare of citizens. If the officials of government fail to realise that, it behoves us, the citizens who know, to remind them.