USA Africa Dialogue Series - PROF ASIWAJU'S REPLY— NA ROAD BE THIS: THE DECAY OF OTA ROADS AS METAPHOR

Many thanks for your piece last week, Na Road Be This?

I, however, would have wished for it to be subtitled 'Decay of Ota Roads as Metaphor for Nigeria Border Governance Deficit, more specifically! 

As you very well know, I have done a lot of writing on this subject with particular reference to the Ogun West Senatorial District of which Ota is the most exposed part. See, eg, our BORDER REGIONS IN AFRICA: HISTORY OF POLITICAL MARGINALISATION AND INFRASTRUCTURAL DEPRIVATION IN OGUN STATE OF SOUTHWEST NIGERIA (Ibadan: University Press, Plc, 2018)

The publication nicely connects the borderlands situation in Ogun State with those of the identically limitrophe Lagos and Oyo States. 

The direct implications, not just for development but, perhaps, even more significantly, issues of security and organized crimes(terrorism, banditry, human and drug trafficking, smuggling, and so on, all of which thrive in conditions of utter and even culpable infrastructural neglect and abandonment by governments and politicians, including the elected and appointed from the area) was x-rayed in the 2014 SIRA(Society for International Relations Awareness) Annual Lecture, 'Terrorism and African Border Governance', published along with other related articles in the Society's occasional publication series, REFLECTIONS ON NIGERIA'S FOREIGN POLICY, VOL.IV - THE CHALLENGES OF INSURGENCY, 2015.

 The EndSARS-like protest by local transporters and other stakeholders in Ota, in reference in your characteristically brilliant column last Thursday, had been preceded not just by an earlier one also in Ota but, as well, similar demonstrations in Atan-Ota, kilometers west of Ota on the famous, or shall we say notorious, Ota-idiroko-border highway, at the junction of the long-abandoned Atan-Lusada- Igbesa- Agbara motor road that connects with the famous Agbara Industrial Estate and the relatively recently established Chinese Free Trade/Industrial Zone, Igbesa, from which Ogun State derives its mainstream internal revenue. In the December 2019 University of Lagos Faculty of Arts Lecture, 'Unilateral Border Closures: Thirty-Five Year Retrospection on Nigeria and Africa', which critiqued the obsolete and completely counterproductive practice resumed in August of that year by the present reactionary presidency, I have suggested that the kind of protest by stakeholders in Ota stands in dire need of being broadened into a nationwide political pressure-group organization, a league of African border or cross- border communities, beginning with the one for Nigeria, akin in power and influence to the Association of European Border Regions, a European federation of local, regional and sectoral initiatives, which arose in the immediate post-War years out of more or less issues of insensitivity to plights of populations in the peripheries of the European state territories, taking full advantage of the embrace with democratic governance and a new approach to regional integration where the new emphasis had to shift from the sovereign member States and power centres to the people in regions and localities.

Such policy paradigmatic the shift is demanded if the Nigerian and other African border regions is to experience improvement in governance ; and the onus is on the people to ask and insist on it.