MOTOR parks ought to be among the most organised places in the country. Astiful and imitable, because of the impression it will give a first time visitor about us. Unfortunately, the parks as they are at present do not convey the jingle made famous by Professor Dora Akunyili that Nigeria is made up of good people.Virtually, all our motor parks and airports, particularly the former are anything but orderly. A typical Nigerian garage, as most Nigerians are wont to call a motor park, is a den of lions and lionesses, and home for predators and vultures in human skin. Illicit drug dealers abound there. The activities of 'money changers' are pronounced. Sex workers, who masquerade as street hawkers, are partners in crimes with bullies, who parade themselves as union chiefs with all of them treating passengers with scorn.Hordes of able-bodied young men and adults, who ought to be engaged in decent, well-defined productive ventures, have chosen to be canon fodders in the hands of a few who often pretend to have the monopoly of violence because their principals superintend the affairs of the state.The typical Nigerian motor park is currently, where law enforcement agents maintain routine patrol. Yet, there is a police station or post located within a less than 200 metres away. Nonetheless, the rate of crime within that radius is worse, just because general security is all about the naira and kobo business.While operators of the ubiquitous make-shift shops around the parks will not display lethal weapons, you will be awed to see men with unnaturally red eyes dangling menacingly guns, razor-sharp cutlasses, axes and other deadly articles of death within a second when the landlords and other untouchables go berserk.In these parks, it is a crime for any law-abiding citizen to claim any constitutional rights. He might be playing with the head of a cobra. Those anointed kings and queens of the parks could get angry and order their boys to deal with you summarily. So, all decent people must have their hearts in their mouth for the short period they have to wait before their commercial vehicle departs a park.The motor park boys' mentality cuts across cuts across all aspects of the nation's life. The media is not excluded, where the end now justifies the means. Apart from the menace of fake newshounds, the syndrome of yellow journalism is giving the famed journalism profession a bad name. Many men of the pen profession are today willing to perform a hatchet job for any numskull once the price is right.The wig profession is also awash with people of questionable characters such that a teenager from one of the elite colleges in Lagos recently told his parents that nothing could attract him to becoming a lawyer or a police officer. He wondered why a lawyer would collect a huge sum of money from a prospective client after accepting his brief only to leave him in the cold.The vestiges of the motor park boy's mentality are discernible in the medical field. Touts, even in the mortuaries are to use a common parlance, making cool monies in concert with [mortuary] attendants, some doctors divert passengers to their private clinics too. With your money, anything can be done for you in the private hospitals, hence the high rate of avoidable calamities in the health sectors.You visit a local market to purchase a couple of items. You leave with those items hoping you had been fairly and honestly treated by traders just for you to discover so soon that you were seriously cheated and shortchanged by perhaps an illiterate, whereas as you approached the market square, a band of young girls came by with toothy smiles, which you had assumed to be genuine because you are a prospective customer.You veer onto a street ridden with pot holes in an attempt to beat hours of traffic bottlenecks while driving on the highway. But as you meander on the street, some fierce-looking, unkempt boys accost you, demanding a monetary ransom before you could secure an illegal pass on a public road. You either comply with their request or your car is vandalised after they would have tortured you mentally if they were kind enough not to assault you physically during the nightmarish counter.In politics, haba! The motor park mentality is demonstrably worse because of the activities of a few desperados. The capacity to display raw power, unleash terror and engage in raw deals determines your clout and pedigree as a political leader. Coupled with this is your ability to showcase profligacy and subterfuge.There is no place you go that you are not cut in the motor park boy's mentality. Sometimes, civil servants would make you a prisoner since they are actually merchants and big time contractors in borrowed robes. If you are not careful, your life could become miserable because of their antics, if you have a legitimate business to transact with government. The offices of such few public servants bear a semblance to the typical police station, where everything, including bail conditions, must be negotiated in monetary terms.Admission into many of Nigerian universities has become a jamboree. Syndicates dictate the pace within and outside campuses and examination bodies. The chances of your child or ward to secure a place in the institution are premised on whom you know in many universities and how much you can afford.All the nation's borders appeared to be under threats from the motor park mentality. Those, whose duties are to oversee the land, sea and airports so as to make sure contrabands do not get into the country, only go after those items in shops and markets located in the hinterland. Imported goods are more in number in most shelves in shops, forcing local industries to either close shop, reduce production drastically or even compelled to convert their factories into warehouse for imported goods that could be produced locally. So, unemployment has continued to soar in the country.Can we think of any section of the Nigerian life that such motor park mentality has not eaten deep' Not even in the spiritual realm, where deceit, greed, undue rivalry and intolerance are the norms. The country seems to have gone gaga. Just under 50 years! Despite assurances from certain quarters of hope for the country in the nearest future, there is increasing public skepticism, because of the pervasive motor park culture of mentality with all its huge security implications and consequences. You ask yourself, if there is still any relevance for some organisations like the National Orientation Agency [NOA] when many parents have abdicated their core responsibility of sound parenting. But, what kind of a society do Nigerians hope to bequeath posterity after a system they inherited from the past with relative pride and honour is collapsing with an alarming rapidity'Food for thought, I would say!Oderemi, 08023501874 (sms only pls)
Click here to read full news..
