Let all those who think that they hold public office to promote the interest of their vernacular constituencies, rather than take an active part in ensuring national equity and cohesion begin to realise the folly of such endeavor.
They must begin to hold themselves responsible for what will happen to this country as a result of their myopic exertions.
Many examples exist of countries which disintegrated (often violently) because their leaders believed in high handed subjugation of other component parts percived by them to be either weak, docile or even different rather than engage in equitable management of resources and expectations.
If this does not serve as a timely warning to us, then obviously there are a people who do not want Nigeria to exist as one and they are not just IPOB or Odua freedom fighters who have made logical cases for their disagreements with continuing as components of an oppressive Nigerian State which blindly refuses to engage with tested methods of leading a multi cultural and multi ethnic nation to survive the multifarious challenges of their peculiar order.
If the result of the SSS recruitment exercise is indeed as exposed in the article below, and in the event, it should be safe to assume that this is not an isolated incidence, then there is serious cause for deep concern for the future of Nigeria.
It only means that those who engage in such destructive endeavours are engaged in a deliberate effort to destroy Nigeria.
They are consciously setting up Nigeria to fail under the weight of their deliberate and mischievous actions aimed at subjugating parts of the union. They have learnt nothing.
As usual the perpetrators of this shamefully lopsided exercise pretend they do not read the constitution which, even in its overwhelming shortcoming as a schedule of engagement of a federal structure, still manages to emphasize balanced distribution as a key principle.
They depend on the short memory of the heavily oppressed Nigerian people and on what they see as the muscularity of their section in the power equation to perpetuate their infamous activities against the survival of our Nation.
This has been going on in every administration. The result: this stunted _"giant in the sun"_ called Nigeria which continues to grow backwards in a world ordered by knowledge and efficiency.
And is an international poster boy for an enclave where the inmates are doing everything to bleed her and her resources dry.
Have we not lied to ourselves enough? Where have all the lies and corruption led us? Other _"smaller"_ countries are moving up and leaving us to stew in our folly as a country while a kleptocratic and insensitive elite merrily and literally bury our growth in mass graves of looted patrimony.
Painfully cheered on by misinformed masses bent on protecting their own native kleptocrats and mal administrators who have found themselves in office without a clue on nation building.
The Premium Times and a few other newspapers have lately reported on the official SSS response to this scandal.
The department has not disputed the figures but claims that the glaring lopsidedness was a result of their attempts to balance the staff roll.
Now that's s pretty nationalistic thing to do and in order to earn the acclaim it deserves, the nation expects full disclosure on how it is that Mr. Daura, a long serving, two time boss of the DSS allowed things to deteriorate to levels in which his Katsina State needed to fill in more people than everyone of the three Southern zones of the country to arrive at the balance he craves.
It must mean that Mr. Daura who has been a major influence in the department for over ten years just watched while Katsina State was being shortchanged to the advantage of the southern states.
Thankfully he has, by their admission, had the opportunity to correct this imbalance by recruiting the 51 cadets from Katsina while Lagos State with over 20 million residents and the nation's busiest and highest non oil contributor to the revenue pool had 7 cadets and Akwa Ibom State, the nations highest revenue earner had 5.
Of the 479 cadets employed, 331 are from the North and 148 from the south. This telling statistics need further comments to point out its arrogantly unfair disposition.
To reclaim any level of credibility, the department needs to publish for all to see the situation which necessitated this sort of recalibration of Staff strength. Mere press statements with puerile justifications just won't cut it.
Sadly, public officers have developed the habit of routinely lying to Nigerians, even on issues with visibly contradictory evidence, that it has become the responsibility of government officials to provide proof of authenticity to their statements before the citizens accept them as true presentations.
Unfortunately that is the inevitable result of long years of deception on matters of public interest. It is time to save this country from itself.
While we commend the SSS for its prompt balancing act, the nation looks now in the direction of other government agencies like the Armed Forces, Police, Customs, Immigration and other disciplined services as well as other parastatals, most of which are recruiting at this time to do the same.
The nation is awash with stories of illegal lopsided appointments and placements going on in Government.
It is rather unsettling for instance, that other than the Navy, all other services and forces within the nation's security architecture, are headed by someone from the North. Now, that there is a balancing act awaiting the urgent pleasure of the President.
Other strategic national offices need to also be sensibly distributed in accordance with the federal character (balance) provisions of the nation's constitution.
At one point in our lives we must resolve and start to doing the right things.
The very Nigerian logic that a wrong must be tolerated because it has been committed earlier by someone else is an exercise in self destruction.
That was one of the promises which led many people in the country to vote for PMB and change.
We must rise now to stop the cancer eating up the trust factor of this fragile nation or pay for it.
There is an urgent need for this conscious generation to restructure the nation for continued and mutually sustained conditions which will lead to genuine unity or wait for the inevitably explosive disintegration.
No group in Nigeria or indeed the world today can be forced into a union which has consistently been rigged against it.
If this report of this SSS recruitment exercise represents the current Nigerian situation, it is a national scandal of almost treasonable proportions and the future stability of this already fragile union is being undermine by the actions of unpatriotic government officials. It is the stuff which future disaffection will feed upon.
All those responsible for this rape of the national effort to build a United country must be excused from office upon discovery. It is clear they do not have the interest of Nigeria at heart. This is still the era of change, or is it still?
Otu Ita Toyo wrote
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