When many Nigerians thought that the country’s leaders must have learnt lessons from the outrage that greeted former President Muhammadu Buhari’s description of the Nigerian youths as lazy, the Director-General of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, again sparked a fresh controversy by making a similar comment.
Yari recently claimed that Nigerians who were not lazy would have enough food on their tables, which implied that the current hunger caused by economic hardship affected only lazy Nigerians.
Yari spoke during the APC presidential campaign rally in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital. He said food items were readily available in markets.
The former Zamfara governor asked residents of Akwa Ibom State if they had been unable to buy foodstuffs despite soaring prices.
Many viewed Yari’s comment as not only insensitive and unfortunate but completely misplaced. Nigeria has one of the most hardworking populations in the world.
To show how hardworking Nigerians are, some Nigerians who travelled abroad to countries that have basic infrastructure that creates good working environments do up to three jobs to make ends meet.
A government that has failed to provide its citizens with electricity, security, education, healthcare, standard infrastructure, and job opportunities has no moral standing to label its people as lazy. In the North where Yari comes from, he knows the extent of damage insecurity has caused his people due to the government’s failure to make the country safe for hard working farmers and other people to go about their daily life of providing for themselves and their families.
Politics is about accountability but in Nigeria, it is all about trading accusations.
Yari should be reminded that unlike ordinary Nigerians who work hard to earn a living, politicians feed on public treasury without doing any commensurate job to justify their huge earnings.
A significant number of politicians have no professional career outside politics. Even those who once had thriving careers have abandoned them because politics has become the most attractive and most lucrative business in Nigeria.
Nigerian leaders should learn how not to rub their failures on the faces of the people they govern because it amounts to rubbing salts on an injury. Yari’s comment was simply insensitive.