DR. ALEX OTTI REPRESENTS PROSPERITY FOR ALL COME 2023
Speaking recently to newsmen and other experts, Dr. Alex Otti revealed his plan to create an independent ministry of Aba Mega-city Development which will be solely responsible to re-planning, reconstruction and repositioning of the famous Enyimba city of Nigeria in West Africa to a befitting status of a modern twenty-first century world class urban centre of reference if elected governor in the on-coming general elections in Nigeria.
Dr. Otti who promised Abians and other Nigerians to organize and run an all-inclusive government that will embrace all natives and other inhabitants in a modern day digital economy that will employ every micro and macro economic principles of developmental growth planning, will also concentrate critically on very vital sectors of the Abia State economic and social life of the people which will include the systematic eradication of thuggery and crime through a sophisticated economic cum social planning treatises that serves as a safely net for all persons who has anything to do with the state and its citizens.
Environmental sanitation and urban degradation according to his plan, will take top priorities alongside roads and electricity infrastructure, tenement and urban development, small and medium scale business entrepreneurship development, traffic and security enhancement etc.
The present Peoples Democratic Party (P.D.P) government which remorselessly ran the state into the gutters have by extension ran all of us dirty in the long range. But the only hope of economic and social respite rests in an Alex Otti government of reconciliation and reconstruction that sets a stage to correct the losses of the years consumed by the locusts through a waste-pipe of vandals and vagabonds who never saw anything noble in public good and progress.
The Abia State Environmental Protection Agency (ASEPA), which is saddled with the huge responsibility of collecting and carting away refuse and other forms of waste generated in houses, shops, offices and industries did not help matters. These services are not subsidized by the government and are levied on residents and business owners in the form of environmental rate and sanitation taxes. These levies are collected by government appointed agents whose mandate includes the collection and carting away of refuse from specific residential or business areas pre-allocated to them. However, it has often being reported that these agents and contractors who usually brandish ASEPA authorization papers do not collect or cart away refuse and other waste from their designated areas but insist on payment of sanitation service fees by residents.
Reports emanating from various parts of the metropolis in recent times say that agents purportedly charged by government to collect this illegal environment sanitation levies have unleashed terror and mayhem on residents and business owners in the city. These agents, sometimes with the active connivance of some law enforcement agents and thugs invade residential and business premises, chasing and arresting individual alleged to have defaulted on payments. These individuals purportedly arrested on the order of a court are not brought to such courts but are taken straight into police custody and made to pay large sums of money to regain their freedom.
Inquiries made at the police zonal command indicated that law enforcement agents had been warned to desist from operating with the so called sanitation agents in the collection of this illegal sanitation levies indicating that policemen seen involved in such operation does so illegally. Equally, the administrative magistrate, Aba south local government pointed out that cases brought before it by dully registered sanitation agents are very often not concluded in the appropriate judicial manner by these agents making it difficult for the magistrates desk to exercise the full process of the law, leaving room for charlatans and brigands to obtain fake court documents often used in the extortion of various fees from residents and unsuspecting members of the public.
Reports have also shown that certain residents of some neighborhoods have been beaten up and maimed in the past while some sanitation agents who were not able to identify themselves properly were given a hot chase by vigilant citizens who stoutly resisted the brigands, forcing the so-called agents to take to there heels.
HEALTH AND MEDICARE
The world Health Organizations Definition of health is not merely the absence of disease but the attainment of a state of physical, mental emotional and social well-being. In Nigeria, Healthcare is influenced by different local and regional factors that impact on quality or quantity of lives on location. Health care provision is the responsibility of the three tiers of government in the country. The federal government is most limited to coordinating the affairs of the University teaching Hospitals, while the state manages general hospitals and the local government focus on health centers. HIV/AID, cancer, malaria, hypertension, cardiac disease, diabetes, mental illness, tuberculosis, kidney renal failure, cholera, diarrhea and road traffic injuries are seriously reducing the population of Nigeria and Abia State in particular.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds. There is an established fact that mental destitution in Aba receives minimal attention by the authorities, NGOs and even families. Chronic diseases such as cancer, kidney failure, etc have come with a force killing and debilitating large number of people. Then comes the big question, with these developments, what is the fate of Abia residents as the state lacks health care facilities and personnel?
The state of health care in the state has been worsened by shortage of doctors and nurses as a consequence of severe ”Brain Drain.” Many doctors have emigrated to North America and Europe. Retaining these expensively trained professionals have been identified as urgent.
Publicity is very is very important as people will only bring their children to be vaccinated if they know that the program exists that are funded managed and dependable which the present PDP government is not doing and have never cared.
Medical and health experts say that simply injecting more money in to the public health care system is not the only solution. Significant changes are required in health services before large scale capital investment can have the desired impact.
Research shows that lunacy stems from frustration, hunger, deprivation and other social and medical factors. These mental destitutes are homeless, stigmatized and without being catered for, constitute environmental hazards to the society thereby questioning the moral consciousness of the people. Some of these insane persons ironically have taken it out by being violent, occupying strategic location in the streets with junk and refuse.
The establishment of the fact that mental destitution in Aba, receives minimal attention from the authorities, Non-governmental organizations, NGOs and even families, it becomes more disheartening that psychiatric medicine is surprising being shunned in the medical profession. This situation would be reversed. Medical students should be encouraged to specialize in psychiatric medicine. The local and state government should as part of their responsibility to the citizen, provide mental facilities such as mobile clinics and rural based mental health care.
These are some of the issues an Alex Otti government will strive to address in the collective interest of all Abians and other Nigerians who aspire to experience a genuine society where morals, law and order will hold sway.
Dr. Charles Chinekezi is a chartered management professor (C.M.P.) of the Nigerian Institute of Management, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria.