By Umar Saleh Burra
As Nigeria marks sixty–three year of Independence day amid economic death, insurgency, banditry, herder-farmer clashes, kidnapping, money ritual, poor infrastructure, mass migration, collapsed educational system, harsh business environment, hunger, ethnic, religious and regional sentiments and bias, hate speech, oppression, and other vices, I was asserted that injustice remains root cause of Nigeria’s problem.
Democracy in Nigeria has been entangled by many political challenges. Madness is the best name to label Nigerian democracy. It’s mad, of course. However, those who have made this democracy mad are the elites in one hand, and the common men in the other.
The elites have money, power, and connections. They use them effectively to remain in the corridor of power and continuously satisfy their greed by madly enriching their families and leave poor in a sorry state. In other way, the common men are happy with the status quo. They celebrate corruption, injustice and impunity.
Injustice is a fundamental challenge that is affecting everything in the country. As a result of injustice, there is inequality, grand corruption, conflict and violence, many Nigerians are in absolute poverty, many Nigerians have no job, children of people cannot go to school, hospitals and medical care is not affordable.
“So injustice is a word that is surrounded with problems that we are facing because if there is justice and fairness, things will be resolved amicably and everyone will have his or her right being protected but injustice means that you have no right; somebody can brutalize a citizen and if he or she goes to police station, he or she is being extorted and if he or her says no to corruption the person is shot. Someone just abused their right and if he or she protests against it the person is bundled into a cell or prison, or if he or she simply criticizes wrong policies somebody will bundle him or her into prison.”
Then, l also pointed out that injustice if left unaddressed will affect human rights, “So injustice is a major fundamental problem that we are facing in Nigeria, and we have to address it because without addressing injustice you cannot address issues of human rights.
However, injustice in Nigeria has continued to be a major dominant feature of human rights abuses or violation. Therefore, in Nigeria, as a result of the social injustice, all those problems that we have enumerated continue to manifest, dominate governance, and even relationship between individual and community, groups and government.
So until we are able to deal with issues of injustice in this country, it will be difficult for Nigerians to realize their potential to compete favourably, participate in governance process in Nigeria because as a lot of injustice some Nigerians cannot even contest election, peacefully go out and vote because some people who want to terminate their lives as they threaten them.
May Nigeria succeed.
