SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
This article is dedicated to Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, who is quietly delivering a miracle as Nigeria’s Interior Minister.
No, I have never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I am happy to take this microphone and warmly applaud him.
If you have applied for a passport at any point in the past 40 years, including a renewal, or experienced the application of a relative or a friend at home or abroad, you know how horrendous an experience it is.
You need a lot of money. And time. And boatloads of patience. When you are done spending each of those, you are often required to find more, sometimes even when your document is declared to be ‘ready’.
Abroad, the situation is worse, as a quick consultation of Google and YouTube would confirm. As our consulates often mirror the domestic civil service, those offices deliver the same kind of misery.
In each of the past four decades, leaderships of the Ministry – or Internal Affairs, as it used to be – would again and again announce that they were undertaking herculean efforts to improve the system, only to complete their terms of office with the place worse than when they arrived.
Tunji-Ojo appears to have broken the jinx, and according to Vanguard, clearing a backlog of 204,332 passports in less than one month in office.
The minister, who gives a lot of the credit to Mrs. Wura-Ola Adepoju, the acting Comptroller-General, used a mechanism in which the Nigeria Immigration Service officials worked around the clock, in three shifts, including weekends. I am sure it was more complicated than that, in terms of managing a regime to which civil servants may even have been resistant, but he got the job done.
Congratulations, sir. Hopefully, your colleagues in the government, including Humanitarian minister, Betta Edu, learn from you about putting in the work, not the words.
“Nigerians can trust me,” she was saying on television last week. “Not just me, the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” adding that their watchword(s) is “transparency, accountability and integrity.”
No, Ms. Edu. The watchwords are work and service. The dogged, sweaty stuff – just like Tunji-Ojo – not preachment. Nigerians can recognise the two-faced and the forked-tongue miles away.
On the question of recognition, Seyi Tinubu, the Nigeria leader’s son, is reported to be enjoying life on the presidential jet, recently travelling to a polo game in one.
It must be a wonderful life to sit in one and breathe presidential air, knowing that down below or for hundreds of miles in every direction, millions of people are dying in poverty. That’s not integrity.
But have you ever wondered, dear Nigerian, where the Nigeria Air Force finds parking for all these machines in the air?
To go back just about 10 years: in mid-2014, the government of Mr. Goodluck Jonathan ordered 40 attack and transportation helicopters for the NAF from the United States and Russia, towards routing Boko Haram insurgents in parts of the North “once and for all.” They were all to arrive within weeks.
That was two months before a Nigerian delegation was caught trying to smuggle into South Africa, allegedly to buy arms, $9.3m in cash. They were also shopping for a helicopter. In cash!
