Tinubu should go beyond hearing and do more for Nigerians – Okonkwo

Amid the #EndBadGovernance protests across the country, occasioned by massive hardships, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been advised to double down speedily with creative solutions that heals and restores if Nigeria must pull through this current nadir of despair.

 
A member of the House of Representatives, Uchenna Harris Okonkwo, gave this advice in a statement recently. Okonkwo, who represents Idemili North and South Federal Constituency of Anambra State in the National Assembly, spoke in reaction to the difficult challenges the nation is currently passing through.
 
In the statement from his Consultant Media Office, he said: “I appreciate his acknowledgement that he has heard Nigerians loud and clear. I reckon with his assertion that the buck stops at his table, because it should actually. He should proceed now to persuade Nigerians better by tested actions that will mitigate these afflictions decisively and sustainably.
  
“I endorse the irrepressible liberty of Nigerians to protest loudly but decently, just as I note with pride our youths’ restraints to act more maturely, especially in our southern landscape.
 
“This is because, as a representative of one of the largest and most populated Federal Constituencies in this country, I know firsthand how deep the pains are, and how severe the traumas are becoming.

“It’s been personally agonising to reconcile how a once ‘happiest people in Africa’ cascaded into this yoke we have been, simply on account of leadership failures and vision paralysis, over the last decade mostly. Such systemic leadership embarrassment which brought us this low remains the president’s biggest nut to crack by taking the hints of these protests to address, solve and reverse.

 
“I therefore sincerely urge and appeal to everyone of us either in government or in leadership, to get more real in our zeal to serve our citizens responsibly and sensitively, aware that since democracy is our deliberate choice of governance, it grows and thrives from the people and for the people. We must then adjust to the reality that our citizens are getting impatient with increasing resolve to tell us point blank, when we misgovern or misrepresent them.”
 
Okonkwo added that as tested and tolerant as Nigerians have endured in this decade of misery, it should not happen nor contemplated, by any act of arrogance or standard aloofness of the past, to suppress or deny them a let off for such high agony.
 
“I also call upon all security agencies and personnel mobilised to suppress and contain already depressed people, to rather protect and treat them with empathy, respect and love. It is a critical challenge to their call of duty and capacity for intelligence to skillfully sieve out the criminals and deal with them promptly, while they protect the legitimacy of citizens to show dissent or approval. They should note that these people protest for them too, since they are barred by law from expressing their own frustrations publicly.
 
“We know that the crown of every leader worthy of the name, comes with thorns, yet these thorns are the necessary tests for real praise when overcome, not before.
 
“Now that the President has spoken and confirmed his awareness of the dire situation, perhaps the urgency of now will be accelerated to truly make the people feel and see good governance louder and clearer. The hard truth is significant, that actions are the only wheels that bring results. He must absorb the heat as renewed strength to take actions to clean the stains of nepotism, reset the optics of palace grandeur and cut the costs of governance, and rein in the hordes of hate spinners pretending to love him more. Nigeria is his beat and every Nigerian, his employer.
 
“I salute all decent voices of dissent to bad governance, be it in local, state or federal governments, especially those that maintained law and order, because they are the true sanitizers for creative hope, that must evolve as a compelling scrutiny for collective prosperity and development to endure,” he added.
 
Commenting on the media exploitation by desperate malcontents to instigate ethnic attacks, especially against the people of the South East, he cautioned everyone to pause and reflect that, if development has eluded the country this much in peace time, prosperity would commit unfortunate suicide if that peace disappears.
 
“It’s a grave spectacle of history no sane person should romance, whether by mischief or poor sense,” he noted.