It used to be called ‘African Time,’ but most African peoples have largely given it up. Nigerians, largely, have not.
I call it Nigerian Time: We organize a conference, and it begins two hours late. We schedule wedding, but two years we are still not ready, and it begins three hours late. The governor is an hour late to an event he personally determined.
For some reason, we have developed debilitating relationship with promptitude. We wear expensive watches, but we are never in tune with what they counsel.
Oh: we have explanations and excuses and blames for Monday, only to repeat the same practice and pattern on Tuesday. If we travel at all, it is in circles.
But the patient is not improving, the disease getting worse: there are Nigerians who now have three schedules for the same event. The first is the one told invitees or stated on the invitation document, but which is just a ruse to assemble the congregation; the second is known only to an inner circle, and is perhaps an hour after the first; but the third, which is completely happenstance, is when the president or the governor or the bride or the celebrant strolls in.
If you respected the hour on your invitation, arriving 10 or 15 minutes ahead of it, what the actual start time means is that you may have waited for at least one hour.
Despite being thus compromised, your hosts express outrage when you suggest you are departing at the ‘start’ of their programme. And on your way out, you meet people who are just arriving, no apologies necessary.
How has Nigerian Time left Nigeria spinning its wheels? In public life, a habit of starting official dinner engagements may seem delightful because Oga is so powerful he can choose who lives or who dies, not to mention who eats and when. It also implies Oga does not care-or perhaps even notice-when projects commence late or are undelivered, or are of atrocious quality when completed. All over Nigeria, examples of each category abound.
It might mean that despite billions of Naira being spent on it, the Aso Rock Clinic is unbefitting of the president and that when he is ill, the only option is a hospital abroad those nationals chose to maintain. It might mean airports being consistently listed among the worst in the world. It might mean federal and state roads painted with blood. It means that while the rest of the world is planning for tomorrow, we are just trying to cope with yesterday, and it means the contempt of the rest of the world.
Think about it: in six months, Nigeria will be participating in the World Cup. But the Super Eagles cannot play in Lagos, the nation’s economic capital where it has its largest gathering of fans. Why? The National Stadium has not been maintained for decades!
And no, the team cannot play in Abuja either because, the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) explained recently, the stadium there is undergoing renovation and lacks ‘facilities.’
“We have our technical centre here, but there are no dressing rooms,” NFF Secretary-General Mohammed Sanusi said with no trace of irony, “So we are making efforts to see if the dressing rooms can be provided.”
This is a true story, in a country where contracted new projects hardly ever start, and others undergo daily ‘renovations’ which are never concluded.
Why has the new terminal building of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja not been completed?
Minister of State for Aviation Hadi Sirika clarified that one last week following an inspection, describing the problem as a ‘foundational issue’ that has altered the airport masterplan.
Mr. Sirika ‘explained,’ and these are his words, that it was discovered that the new building would block both the control and fire towers which would then require relocation, leaving you to wonder whether the project was planned by a carpenter. Of course, further work is needed to link the terminal with the existing terminal and to expand the aprons as well as power and water supply. Cost: an additional $400 to $500 million.
Nigerian Time.
And if you were to turn your attention in the same airport from terminal buildings to the runway, you might remember that only last year, the airport needed to be completely shut down for six weeks for some sort of upgrade. It is the same airport which, a few years earlier, was probed by the Committee on Aviation of the House of Representatives for the N64 billion ($96,970 per metre) Second Runway contract approved in curious circumstances by the Federal Executive Council.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s New Year message, for instance, included several instances of projects to be completed in 2019, an election year, with nothing completed in 2017 or scheduled for completion in 2018.
To be fair, at “98%”, the Abuja Light Rail appears set for completion in 2018. “…Progress has reached 98% completion, as at 64% completion when we assumed office,” Mr. Buhari said.
This ought to be of considerable interest to Nigerians: In 2012, when the Goodluck Jonathan government negotiated a related $3bn loan Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said were for “people-oriented projects,” one of them was the Abuja rail, for $500 million.
The Buhari government then budgeted $1.6bn for “Phase II” of the same project. In effect, while the entire project was supposed to have cost $500m, it seems that only covered 64%, with the remaining 36% somehow costing $1.6bn.
Total: $2.1bn. Nigerian Time.
In the same speech, I find it also to be highly curious that President Buhari said only 23 words about the Lagos-Calabar coastline railway. Originally negotiated with China’s CCECC in November 2014 for $11.917bn, the current government renegotiated it in 2016 to $11.1bn, which is good news.
“My expectation is that the project can be completed in two years since funding won’t be a problem,” Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi said in July of that year, adding that the project was in the budget and was at the point of execution.
Nearly two years later, when we should therefore be talking about completion, nothing in the New Year statement suggested any importance, let alone urgency. It is Nigerian Time.
In Nigerian Time, project-construction is perpetual. One of the key disclosures in President Buhari’s address is of nine roads to receive “special attention” in a scheme in which “each geopolitical zone will benefit by an equal amount of N16.67b.” In Nigerian Time, under which there is no hurry, most of these roads have been under permanent construction and reconstruction.
But other countries proceed with great despatch, and hurry to complete projects because it is a matter of honour and of national interest. It is because of Nigerian Time that contract projects of governments curiously have a start date, but no end-date. The question is why, as a people, we choose the path we know to lead to nowhere.
In official terms, while other countries are sprinting into the future, Nigerian Time expands the time required to fulfil a project until more money can be obtained to justify more work-real or imagined-while the officials are still in office, or to engage in work previously budgeted for, or undertaken by a predecessor.
It is a key reason why we lie prostrate.
• Twitter: @SonalaOlumhense
