Menace Of Cholera In The North

NJOKU MACDONALD OBINNA

As at the last count of this newspaper, cholera has claimed over 400 lives, mostly in the Northern part of Nigeria.

Cholera is a disease of the poor, who live under unsanitary conditions and lack access to portable clean water. Ironically, while the Northern leaders and politicians remain overtly obsessed with holding on to power, ordinary northerners; poorest of the poor, remain in the firm grip of poverty and diseases with no end in sight.

Greed, amassing of the nation’s common patrimony among the northern oligarchy had been the pattern of these northern political state actors, yet their region remains the most underdeveloped.

What should power translate to in the end when the weak, defenseless, voiceless, poorest of the poor cannot breathe well in the country?  Funny enough, both Bayelsa and Delta States, two of Nigeria’s highly rated producers of oil and petrochemical also recorded cholera in that part of Niger-Delta region.

With the above, one may be tempted to also conclude that Nigeria’s major problem is not ethnicity or religion, but a general inept leadership across the geopolitical zones.