It’s the year 2020! (Part 1)

I just woke up and it’s the first day of the year 2020. I am happy to be alive to see the reality of the vision our servant-leader president had over ten years ago.

The nay-sayers had a field day then and said it was not possible. They said we could not be one of the world’s 20 leading nations without any real planning, but our servant leader knew what he was doing, as he loaded his cabinet with visionaries who could turn water into wine.

In his first two years in office, his detractors compared his achievements to that of one small boy who became the American president then, and they joked that in two years, our servant leader had achieved less than what the small boy from Chicago had done in 100 days. What they never realized was that Servant-Leader was studying the huge problems we had (as if he had actually been living outside the country before then). The detractors failed to realize that slow and steady wins the race (after Fast & Consistent is long done!)

I remember how back then, Servant-Leader was not invited to the G-20 meetings, but surely now in 2020, we will do the invitation to the meetings of the G-10 nations.

In our neighborhood, we have had stable electricity for the last nine years, and my 8-year old daughter does not even know what it means to say ‘Up Nepa’! Now I do not have to rush to iron my clothes for the next two weeks as I used to do then. Servant-Leader declared an emergency in the power sector and it was as if God said ‘Let there be light, and there was light’!

These days if you see several cars at a petrol station, then they must be giving out free petrol, as fuelling up our several cars now actually costs less that N100, and the last time my wife saw a queue at a petrol station, was when she visited a neighboring country.

Now we have so much food that we actually export food to the Americas. I cannot remember when last we had 3-square meals in this house, as these days, we have 5-round meals.

I have a faint memory of back in the days, when graduates would leave the university and find no jobs, and there used to be long lines at every employment aptitude test. These days, foreigners are jostling to get our ‘Blue Card’ just to fill the several available employments that have been created, and there are American doctors here in Nigeria who now have to work as nurses, just as we used to do back in those days. Just the other day, a British lady came in to wash the toilets at our office in Ikeja. Every street corner you turn to, you now find modern industries, where in those days the warehouses were converted into worship centers. How the times have changed.

The wife and I took the kids on a nationwide tour just the other day. We got on the light train in Yaba, and in a few hours, we were already in Kaduna, from where we drove along the 14-lane roads to Yobe, before taking a lovely bus ride to the East. At night we slept at the hospitable inns all scattered over, and our only fear was that we would get arrested by the police for over-speeding, and they would refuse to take a bribe just to let us go. Our 7 year old son would not believe me when I told him that just ten years ago, we would never have dared to take this kind of journey, that the roads were really bad back then, and that the fear of armed robbers was the beginning of wisdom, especially on the way to the East.

He said my stories reminded him of his scary cartoons.

To be continued...