Public Opinion

In a democracy, public policies are supposed to reflect public opinion. Public opinion is what the public thinks on a variety of issues and, more importantly, it is what the public thinks that their government should do on specific issues facing the polity.

What should the government do regarding mass transportation: should it build roads, railways, fund light rails, fund city buses, build canals, airports, seaports etc, or should it not do any of those?

What should the government do in regards to industrialization in Nigeria: should it play a key role in getting the nation industrialized or should it allow the nation to remain agriculture based, a rural economy?  Assuming that it should encourage industrialization, should it engage in partnership with industrialists and establish industries or should it stay on the side and merely encourage private enterprises to be the ones establishing industries? Should the government merely create an atmosphere that is favorable to industries, such as have a policy of lower taxes, less rigorous environmental impact studies requirements, allow labor to be cheap, not implement quality work place requirements, thus permitting employers to work their labor hard, produce and not worry about the human cost of it all?  What exactly should government do?

When people gather they talk about politics. Generally, they proffer their opinions on what they think that their governments ought to be doing on this or that issue. That is what public opinion is all about.

Newspapers write about the opinions of opinion makers in society. Mayors, governors, presidents, members of parliament and local council offer opinions and the mass media report on those opinions.  Powerful citizens offer opinions and reporters write about them, too. In the opinion pages of newspapers, columnists write opinions on assorted issues before the polity.

Many people read these opinions and think about them. People discuss with their friends what they read in newspapers, what they heard on the radio, what they heard from the television news broadcasters and more recently what they read on the internet.

Opinion makers, be they public servants, powerful citizens, newspaper columnists etc influence public opinion. These opinion makers shape the ideas most people in a polity talk about and certainly determine the ones they consider to be important and warrant public action.

Opinion Surveys

How do we know what the people's opinions on specific issues are?  In the West, the primary method of finding out is conducting opinion polls.   Specialized opinion gathering outfits like Gallop, Harris etc have developed surveying methodologies that they tell us are accurate in ascertaining what the people think on specific issues.  Surveying, say 1500 people in a polity the size of Nigeria (120 million?), these polling companies tell us is sufficient to get an idea on what the entire nation thinks on specific issues.

These polling companies have criteria for selecting the persons whose opinions they seek, such as income level, education level, type of work they do, where they live, their gender and so on. The idea is that if you randomly select a certain number of people across the nation and ask them about their opinions on certain subjects that what those people say is representative of what the entire nation says on those issues.

Let us say that the question is whether Nigeria should have a presidential system of government (like the United States of America) or a parliamentary system of government (like Britain). Asking a carefully selected 1500 group of Nigerians this question is said able to tell us where most Nigerians stand on the issue.  If 65% of the respondents to the Poll say that Nigeria should revert to British like Parliamentary system of government and 25% say that Nigeria should retain the current America style presidential government, the conductors of such a survey tell us that their result represents what Nigerians think on the subject. They tell us that they choose their samples, those they ask questions, so carefully that the result they obtain is statistically, plus or minus a few standard deviation points, accurate.

These opinion polling firms seem to accurately predict where people stand on political candidates. Generally, those they predict will win elections tend to do so, often by the percentage of votes they predict, with the margin of error being less than five points. Simply stated, there seems credible evidence that opinion surveying firms have figured out a way to find out what the public opinion on specified issues are. Their results seem valid and reliable. They seem to meet validity and reliability standards, critical standards in statistics.

On the other hand, are those who question the trustworthiness of these firms and their predictions? These people point out that the manner in which questions are asked affect the responses obtained. Indeed, some go as far as to say that the opinion firms lead their respondents on and get them to respond as they want them to respond on specific issues.  The same question can be asked in many ways and the manner in which it is asked determines how folks answer it.

Consider these two questions.  Should Nigerians modernize their agriculture by employing tractors, chemical fertilizers and other chemical products on their farms?  High tech equipments like tractors and certain chemical materials tend to erode tropical soils, so much so that the quality of agricultural yield become less than when farmed in the old traditional low tech method.

Providing the additional information on the effects of high tech methods in agriculture may influence people's response to the question on whether Nigeria should go modern on farming. If the people are given negative information on a proposed issue, they are likely going to express negative opinion on that issue than if they are given positive information on the issue. If you merely say that there is a correlation between using tractors on farms and high yields (which is generally true during the first few years in tropical countries) and then proceed to ask the question on whether agriculture should be mechanized, the chances are that the respondents would be more favorable in their responses. (Advocates of sustainable growth, who tend to be liberals, tend to discourage mechanization of agriculture in third world countries, whereas conservative thinkers tend to want the market to decide, if the market favors mechanization so is it.)

The point is that there are those who criticize polling companies and assert that they tend to skew questions in such a manner that pollsters obtain the results that they want to obtain.

There is no doubt that there are inherent problems with polling opinions. We can always improve our methodologies over any activities human beings engage in. However, the current issue is public opinion.  It is a fact that individuals do have different opinions on issues and that in a democracy that the preponderance of public opinion ought to determine public policy.

However, one must observe that if the majority of the people are ignorant of facts their majority opinion, if used as the basis for propagating certain public policies, amounts to foolish public policy. For example, in the 1950s, the majority of Southern (USA) white persons opposed integration. If their opinions were used as determiner of racist public policies, America would experience international opprobrium and suffer. Thus, sometimes, public opinion should not always be the criterion for public policy.

Statesmen, sometimes, must overrule the opinion of their constituents and implement public policies that, in their judgments, are more prudent for the polity to have. John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke addressed these issues in their various writings on the problems of democracy. Majority rule, if the majority is uninformed, can be dangerous. Sometimes the minority has the correct view on issues calling for public policy. But then again who determines what the truth is?  This is dangerous ground, so leaders must walk very carefully here: balancing public opinion and the leaders' conception of the truth.

Public Policies

Public policies are what governments do.  They include the laws made by the governments, the economic policies engaged by the government or their lack of.  Everything done by a government is public policy.  If the Nigerian government decides to provide electricity to the entire country, to give pipe borne water to all villages and towns in the country, to provide publicly paid medical services to all Nigerians, to provide publicly paid education, from primary school to secondary school, technical school and university, those are public policies.

Public policies have costs attached to them. Where will the money to fund them come from?  Would they come from taxes?  Are there enough taxation bases to collect sufficient money from the people to fund those policies?  If not, will the revenue to fund them come from petroleum products, revenue from corporate taxes, revenue from sales taxes, and revenue from income taxes?

And when implemented, are these policies working as they were designed to work?  If you embark on providing publicly funded medical services to all Nigerians, how is the program working out in real life?  Are all Nigerians provided with medical services whenever they want it or do they have to wait for years to have simple surgeries?  How responsive are medical personnel?  Are hospitals more like hospices where people go to die rather than recover from illnesses? Do doctors and nurses provide high quality services to their patients?

How about the costs of these services?  Are there built in mechanisms to make sure that costs are within budgets, avoiding cost over runs?  There is a tendency for public services to not be mindful of costs and what would have cost a few dollars ends up costing several dollars. Government workers tend to take their sweet time in doing something. What could be done in a few hours' takes days to be done by civil (in Nigeria, evil) servants.

We know that whereas it takes only one person to change a light bulb in his home that it takes ten bureaucrats to change the same light bulb for the public.  Ten bureaucrats are rather an expensive deal compared to one person doing the same amount of work.

Policy studies monitor the operation and costs of public policies, providing the public with information on how public policies are working out in the real world; whether they are accomplishing what they were designed to accomplish and how, and if not, what can be done to correct them.  If publicly funded medical services are eating up most of the national budget, what can be done to reduce the costs?  Where are cost cutting appropriate?

Or may be free enterprise delivery of medical services is the most effective way to provide medical services in a polity?  If so, how about the poor and others who do not have money to buy private medical insurance?

There are no simple answers and solutions to human issues. Indeed, whatever solutions we come up with eventually create their own problems.  There are no permanent solutions to human problems. As they say, death is probably the only permanent solution to our problems. Until we die and rest in peace we shall always have problems to deal with, and such is life.

Embracing problems and seeing them as opportunities to do our best is a positive way of living. Desiring to live a life devoid of problems is a wish to live a dull life. First of all, it is impossible to have such a problem free existence. It is a waste of time and energy to desire such a life; it is escapist from life as we know it on planet earth. We shall always have problems and must always seek ways to solve them.

Thus, society continues to design one policy after another to deal with its infinite problems. There is never going to be a time when society would run out of problems and out of policies. Policy making is an ongoing part of the political process. Indeed, governments exist to solve problems through public policies. The legislature, the presidency and the judiciary, even the bureaucracy are always making new policies.

Whereas in the West opinion surveys are conducted trying to ascertain what the people think on issues, the practice is absent from Nigeria. The Nigerian government does not have the resources to find out what the people are thinking on specific issues.  This may seem bad but when we realize that what really needs done in Nigeria are known to every Nigerian, it seems a waste of time and energy conducting frivolous surveys trying to ascertain what the people want. Opinion surveys after all are recent phenomenon in the West.

In the past, the leaders in the West somehow figured out what their people wanted and did it without conducting opinion polls. (Bill Clinton reportedly over relied on focus groups and polling to find out what the people wanted and did it; this sometimes lead to lack of initiating trail blazing, bold public policies by his administration.) Past American leaders did not conduct opinion polls to recognize that their people needed rural electrification and water. In the 1930s America provided rural America with electricity and water.

An argument can be made that if opinion surveys were made in those days that since some people would have opposed rural electrification that the government may not have engaged in the policy of rural electrification. See, today, opinion surveys are often used to avoid giving people publicly funded medical services. These surveys tell us that publicly funded medical services would be too costly, or that it would be too bureaucratic, or too socialistic and so on. In the meantime, 45 million Americans have no medical insurance coverage, an outrage to human decency. If Americans had to conduct opinion surveys perhaps they would not have initiated free K through 12 schooling in the land. At least, 33% of the population, free enterprise diehards, would have opposed such an educational policy because, to them, it is socialistic, or because liberal teachers would be given the opportunity to teach students, their children, liberal ideas and in the process destroy the nation's moral fabric.

The point is that we do not always have to wait to hear from all people to know what ought to be done. Good leaders sometimes have to bite the bullet and risk rejection in the next election and just go ahead and do what in their judgments are good for their nation.

In the context of Nigeria every body desires electricity, water, medical health, and schooling. We do not need fancy opinion surveys to confirm the obvious. If a Nigerian leader does not know that his people need those things and sets about converting their wishes to public policy, he is not a leader.

We Nigerians know what we want from our governments. If that is the case then the politicians can engage in public policies that provide us with what we desire. They do not need sophist opinion surveying firms in New York to tell them what everybody already knows to be the people's wishes. The leaders should just do it and do it now. Do what?  Give all the people electricity, water, medical insurance, free education at all levels, subsidized public transportation, and then leave the free market to take care of the rest of the economy. (This is called mixed economy, not socialism or laissez faire economy.)

Let public administration professors, accountants and think tank egg heads have something to do studying the costs of those public policies and helping society operate them efficiently.

Most Nigerians want paved roads, paved streets, affordable housing, good jobs, good food, good clothing and so on. Public policies ought to be made to provide the people with what they need without haggling over how we come by the information on what the people need. We know what we need. It is not difficult to know about basic human needs, where differences lie are in figuring out extraneous needs.

So what is the government in Nigeria doing to meet the people's needs?  How responsive are the governments in Nigeria to public opinion?  The answer is that the governments are not at all responsive to the peoples needs. We do not have governments that see themselves as existing to meet the people's needs.

The process of making public policies in Nigeria is as in everywhere else. Politicians are elected to office. They are supposed to know what their people want.

Leaders are supposed to articulate the aspirations of those they lead and find ways to satisfy them.

The people do not elect politicians to go be their bosses, to sit at Abuja doing nothing. Nigerian politicians, in fact, seem to believe that they are placed in political offices to be godlike and have the people adore them, even as they do nothing for the people. Being in office makes these people feel like very important persons, VIPs, and that is just about all they seek public offices for.  Apparently, Nigerian politicians do not construe their jobs as from which they serve the people.

Ordinarily, people elect members of parliament to go enact public policies. Parliaments are supposed to be arenas where members articulate their policy preferences and introduce Bills on what policies they want funded and debate with their fellow parliamentarians, bargain with them and make compromises and the result is some policies that all members can live with.  But the Nigerian National Assembly can go for years without actually passing any Bill that substantially creates a new policy that serves the people's interests. Their first order of business is to pass resolutions giving themselves millions of dollars to spend.

The presidency is supposed to represent the entire country. As such, he is supposed to look after the entire nation's interests. He is expected to introduce Bills in the National Assembly that serves the entire nation, not just certain constituencies, as members of the House are expected to do.  The question then is what policies have Obasanjo introduced and seen through the National Assembly and implemented?  What exactly is the man doing for the nation?

Has the life of the average Nigerian improved in the six years that Obasanjo is president?  Is that even a right question to ask, as folks do in America, where they evaluate what their presidents have done for them? Is it not part of the job of the Nigerian President to create jobs for Nigerians, and, if so, how come unemployment in Nigeria is over 50%?  Did Nigerians elect Obasanjo to merely dress in flowing robes, jet around the world and be a perpetual tourist?

Does the man have a job description other than to be the oga pata pata of Nigeria?  Does he, in fact, have something to do in a typical eight hour work day?  We know that he is politically astute and figures out a way to disgrace his opponents, but that is not all there is to governing, is it?  Do we need a manikin in Aso Rock and that is all? An expensive manikin indeed.

The judiciary is supposed to be an independent umpire, a watch dog making sure that every one plays by the rules of the game. The rules are embodied in the country's constitution, such as it is, and the statutory laws of the land. Judges are supposed to make sure that we all obey the laws of the land and punish those who choose not to play by the rules.

If a law is bad, a citizen's sole right is fighting to change it, but as long as it is still the law of the land he must obey it.  (This is the whole point of Socrates drinking hemlock and dying, even though the law under which he was killed was unjust; he spoke out against that unjust law but obeyed it to death, anyway. See Plato's writings on Socrates death.)

Failing to obey the laws of the land one must go to jail. There should be no exception to this fact. The rule of law is what keeps society going. Without laws we are wild animals and might as well live in the jungle.  Without draconian obedience of the law,   chaos and anarchy replace civilization.

How are Nigerian judges umpiring the laws, making sure that all play by the rules and that the game is fair and that those who disobey the rules are punished?  How many crooked politicians have the law put away?  If the law is applied correctly, just about all Nigerian politicians would be in jail.

How about the judges themselves?  They too seem to have a price for their services. A few dollars and they rule in favor of the briber and against the person without money to bribe them.  Is this how courts and judges are supposed to behave in any polity, democratic or not?

At the state and local levels of governing in Nigeria, the governors, legislatures and courts are supposed to formulate policies and use their bureaucracies to implement them.  State legislatures do exist alright and seem to be doing something: sharing the little money the governors give to them, among themselves.   State governors, too, seem to be doing something: they go to Abuja, collect their state's share of federal revenue and take much of that money right out of the country? They take it overseas and buy mansions. These governors spend as much time overseas as they spend in their states.

State judges are no different from other politicians; they, too, are part of the racket and look away as folks loot the treasury.

Local governments are supposed to have councils and chair persons.  The councils are supposed to act as legislatures making laws (ordinances) and initiating policies that positively benefit the local council area. The chair of the council is supposed to be the executive arm of the council. The char is supposed to work with the local government's bureaucracy in implementing the policies made by his council.

The local courts are supposed to make sure that all play by the rules of the game. On paper, Nigeria has an excellent constitution and governmental structure.  But what are the personnel in that structure actually doing?

At the town and city levels we have similar structures, city council and council chair and municipal courts (magistrate courts).  They are supposed to perform city and town governance.

Are Nigerian towns governed?  Take a trip to Aba or Onitsha and notice what the devil has wrought: the roads have not been paved and or maintained since the 1960s; trash is dumped on the streets.  What we have here is not government by caring human beings but government by anti social personalities.

Mental Health Policy

Nigeria does not have a well delineated policy towards mental health issues. Nigeria inherited some mental health service delivery structure from her colonial master, Britain, and that structure is what still obtains in Nigeria. That structure consists of a few asylums for the chronically mentally ill. A few mentally ill persons are locked up in these facilities but by far most mentally ill persons roam the streets and byways of Nigeria without medical intervention. No one does anything to help these folks.

Traditionally, no one knew what to do with the mentally ill. Indeed, no one even understood the nature of mental illness. Some said that the mentally ill were possessed by the devil. In the Bible, Jesus was said to have cast off evil spirits from the mentally ill.

In the 19th century Psychiatry, as a profession, came into being and society began to study the mentally ill. For a while, Sigmund Freud diverted attention from the serious study of psychosis with his voodoo conjectures. Emil Kraepelin, on the other hand, focused on the biology of mental illness. He speculated that mental disorder may have something to do with the brain chemistry of the persons involved.

Recent studies have correlated psychosis with brain chemistry. Neuroscientists tell us that in schizophrenia that there is elevated dopamine, that in mania that there is elevated norepinephrine, that in depression there is low serotonin and that in anxiety disorders that there is low GABA.

Whether these chemical imbalances cause mental disorders or not is debatable. What is self evident is that certain types of thinking can affect the individual's biochemical status. If one is grandiose in ones thinking ones dopamine, a neurotransmitter, tends to be elevated, if one is negative in ones thinking ones brain serotonin tends to be lowered and if one is fearful in ones thinking ones excitatory neurochemicals like adrenalin tends to be elevated whereas ones inhibitory neurochemicals like GABA tends to be lowered. In other words, there are biochemical correlates with mental disorders but whether the disorders are caused by preexisting biochemical imbalances or that the biochemical imbalances are the result of disordered thinking is not proven yet.

In the 19th century Western world, the mentally ill were housed in psychiatric hospitals, State hospitals, they were called. All sorts' experimentations were done on these unfortunate people, including administration of electro shuck treatment on the clinically depressed. Nothing seemed to work and the mentally ill languished at state hospitals.

In 1952, by accident, it was discovered that Thorazine had some calming effect on schizophrenics. Psychiatrists began using that medication in treating schizophrenics.  No one knows exactly how it works but it does seem to reduce the gross symptoms of schizophrenia. (Schizophrenia is characterized by the presence of hallucinations and delusions. Hallucinations can occur in any and all of the five senses: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory and feeling; delusions: believing what is not true as true).  Eventually other medications were synthesized, such as Haldol, Prolixine, Navene, Milaril etc. These medications have terrible side effects, so researchers kept searching for cure for psychosis. Lithium was found useful in reducing the gross symptoms of mania.euphoria, poor judgment etc. Lithium has been joined by other medications, such as Depakote, Tegretol etc.

Because of the reduction in the symptoms of psychosis made possible by anti psychotic medications, anti mania medication and anti depression medications, there was no longer any need to keep psychotics at asylums for the rest of their lives. Thus, they were deinstitutionalized. They were given medications and discharged from hospitals.

But they were not really cured for the residual symptoms of psychosis still remain in them. They still hear voices and see what other people do not see. Moreover, they could not hold down jobs, do not get along with other people and tend to live isolated lives.

They are unable to support themselves and some of them roamed the streets and or lived at homeless shelters or wound up in jails.  It is said that a third of those in jails and prisons have some kind of mental disorder.

In 1963, President Kennedy and Congress passed the community mental health centers Act. Communities were given federal funds to start out-patient treatment centers where the chronically mentally ill could come and receive their medications and have them monitored. Some of their medications require close physician monitoring. Lithium, for example, requires that the manic person who takes it have his blood drawn regularly and tested for lithium levels in it.  Too much lithium in the body apparently damages the kidney and liver.

Community mental health centers eventually were funded to add other components to their array of treatment regime, such as provide day activities for the mentally ill, and provide recreational programs for them. Eventually alcohol and drug treatment was added to these centers.

The mentally ill tend to be unable to take good care of themselves and needed to be case managed, so case management as a profession came into being.

Since these people were unable to work and make money to pay for their own housing, they had to be given supported housing.  All told, a lot is done to help the mentally ill and to maintain them in the community. It is cost saving to have them in the community rather than to keep them at expensive state hospitals.

Society has not yet found a cure for mental disorder but until it does so the palliative measures taken to help these people seem all that can be done at the present.

What is being done to help the mentally ill in Nigeria? There is no comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria.

In a few big cities, the asylums built by the colonial administration exist in dilapidated condition.  If even government ministries are housed in run down shacks you can only imagine what the housing of the mentally ill looks like: gross.  Nevertheless, a few city mentally ill persons are consigned to these dreadful asylums.  They are not properly treated.  Who cares for them?

If the country does not care for its productive normal citizens how can it care for its unproductive mentally ill citizens? Uncared for, psychotics leave their asylums and wander our city streets.  The streets of our cities are filled with insane persons talking to themselves while eating from garbage cans.

Is it possible to have a comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria?  Of course the answer is affirmative. All we have to do is understudy what other countries do.  We can study how Americans, Britons, Germans and Frenchmen approach this problem and modify their policies to suit our impoverished situation.  Clearly, Nigeria is too poor to provide the type of sophisticated services provided the mentally ill in North America. Some of the more recent neuroleptic medications like Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seraqual are so expensive that they could break the budget if Nigeria were to give them to her schizophrenics.

It is simply impossible to provide the type of comprehensive treatment offered the mentally ill in America, to the mentally ill in Africa. But there is something we can do.  We can, at least, have a well thought out mental health intervention policy that specifies what we are going to do for the mentally ill.

There are all kinds of mental illness. There is psychosis, the type treated by psychiatrists. Then there is neurosis, the type found in most human beings. Indeed, there are personality disorders.  As many observers have pointed out, there seems a higher level of antisocial personality disordered persons in Nigeria.

Whereas, world wide about two percent of the population tends to engage in criminal activities, clearly a large proportion of Nigerians engage in criminal activities.

What are our corrupt leaders but anti social personalities without social conscience, persons with no sense of guilt and shame; persons who hurt their fellow country men by stealing their moneys and seem to enjoy doing so?

I would imagine that upwards of ten percent of Nigerians have antisocial personality disorders. (There are other types of personality disorders such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, dependent, passive aggressive etc). This is not the place to talk about these mental disorders.

What is critical is that we could have a policy on how to help people with mental health issues. Perhaps, we could establish community clinics and train psychologists to provide psychotherapy to the normal neurotic citizen?  Perhaps these clinics could do didactic training, teach people to behave ethically and morally? Perhaps doing so could reduce Nigerians tendency to criminal activities?  I do not know what we should do, but we ought to do something before the entire country becomes composed of criminals and the rest of the world writes us off as criminals.

Indeed some racist psychologists already suspect that there is such a thing as criminal genes and that it exists at a higher level in Africans and that it accounts for Africans tendency to criminality.

(This view is not true. At any rate, if there is such a thing as criminal genes, it exists in white folks, after all, they were the ones who stole on a grand scale; they killed Indians and took over their lands and enslaved Africans. Let us not divert our attention by talking about the frivolities of genetic influence on human behavior. Human beings are affected by their environment and do make choices; sometimes they learn to make bad choices and develop a culture of making bad choices. Criminals make bad choices; we can teach them to make pro-social choices and those that insist on being anti social should be jailed.)

There ought to be a comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria that delineates how to approach not only the seriously mentally ill but also the mildly mentally ill, the personality disordered Nigerians.  Doing nothing, as is currently the case, is not the best option to pursue. We cannot not do something to reduce the incredible high level of anti social behaviors among Nigerians.

Conclusion

Public opinion has to do with what the people think on the issues of their times, particularly what they would like to see become public policies.

Methodologies exist, albeit that they are imperfect, for ascertaining what public opinion on key social issues is.

Public policy is translation of public opinion into action. Governments listen to the people, hear them, know what they want done and go about doing them. Public policies actualize the people's opinions, their aspirations, what they would like to see done in their world.

Once public policies are legislated into law the bureaucracy is charged with implementing them.  The bureaucracy is supposed to be an impersonal mechanism for carrying out public policies and enforcing the laws of the land.

Public policy experts, mainly college professors, and experts at think tanks, study whether these policies are properly carried out or not, and make recommendations on how to correct faulty actions plans that do not seem to be working out well.

In the context of Nigeria, folks seldom bother finding out what the people desire and even if they found out seldom implement them into public policies.

Who does not know that all Nigerians want to go for a full day without interruption of their electricity? Sound public policy should have figured out a way to fix that problem.  But in Nigeria, folks talk about problems and talk and talk and talk them to death but do nothing to fix them.  Indeed, attempts to fix problems become opportunities for financial self enrichment and for other corrupt practices.  The result is that the half-hearted efforts at public policy making in Nigeria exacerbate the problems.

Nigeria is a mad house, bedlam, pure and simple. The leaders have gone bananas, bunkers; there is no other generous way of putting it.

Does this mean that all hope is lost?   If there is no hope one would not bother writing this material. There is always a glimmer of hope, even in the worst situation.  Hope springs eternal in the human heart. When hope dies the man dies.

We must keep harping away at what needs to be done to fix Nigeria's problems, even if our voices are not listened to. By and by, a generation of Nigerians will rise to the challenge and decide to listen to their people's opinions and translate them into public policies that serve the polity well.

Robot  Villager

# 1 Public OpinionIn a democracy, public policies are supposed to reflect pub...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 25.04.2008 13:30