SAPELE: REJECTED AND ABANDONED

 BOBSON GBINIJE argues for development in Sapele

“The Comrades Of Ulysses Loved Their Slavish Conditions And Perpetually Luxuriated In Them”– Homer’s Iliad(Greek mythology)

Concrete growth and development are the fundamental fulcrums upon which the transformational potency of any individual, state, town and nation must rotate to produce better life for the people. This is achieved through phenomenal socio-economic, political and educational programmes and developmental projects executed sincerely within responsible and definite time frames. But the way projects in Sapele, Delta State are abandoned and haphazardly executed smacks of mesozoic regression.

Sapele is a globally ubiquitous name because of its past glory. It was one of the Ordinance Towns alongside Calabar, Kano and Abeokuta statutorily recognised by the colonial masters in 1946. But today, Sapele is like a deserted village and a landlocked dungeon forgotten by the march of civilisation.

Ever since the creation of Delta State (The Big Heart/Finger of God) on August 27, 1991, very few development projects have come to Sapele. The very few ones that came are either abandoned halfway or are not started at all. We are waiting to see the commencement of work on the 15 or 16 roads promised by the Governor Sheriff Oborevwori’s administration. The Sapele Township Stadium project has become an embodiment of official gobbledegook as all kinds of explanations have been given on why a project awarded and re-awarded several times cannot be completed.

The Sapele Main Market got burnt some years ago and up till this year, the market is yet to be completed. The socio-economic consequences on the traders and people of Sapele town are too gruesomely ghoulish to be recounted here. The traders have resolved to pitching their shops on the Main Market Road, Hausa Road and McPherson Road, blocking half the road. The result is a terrible traffic situation. It is a pity that one of the largest towns in Delta State remains without a market for so many years.

The so-called Urban Area and Uguaja have become concrete jungles, quintessential ghettos and shanty towns with no motorable roads, no light (Sapele harbours two power generating plants), no water, dilapidated hovels and rickety school structures. It is frightening to see new colleges of education, new polytechnics and new universities springing up in Sapele’s neighbourhoods, but nothing in Sapele. They even refused to upgrade the Sapele Technical College to a University of Technology or a Polytechnic. The Sapele Port is a rebarbative marine and nautical terra firma. The roads are unspeakably bad and they adorn all the nooks and crannies of Sapele Town.

We call on the Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori and others, to please rise to deliver Sapele from the asphyxiating hold of these Methuselah projects and crass underdevelopment. After all, the prime purpose of any sincere government is the pursuit of the greatest good for the largest number and our elected and appointed leaders in Sapele continue to theartricalise the Emperor Nero’s idiosyncratic attitude: he slept whilst Rome burnt.

Where are our Safarians and our political leaders and traditional rulers?

Truly,we are like the comrades of Ulysses who loved their slavish conditions. we are indeed hungry for development, but lack the courage to pragmatize our convictions.

Sapele must rise again and all hands must be on deck. Enough is enough!

The crassly sordid situation is captured in this poem written with Poetic License:

“With her baby Strapped to her back, A bowl of pure water On her head, adorned In tattered clothes And feet sunken in Shredded slippers.

She shouted: ‘Buy your pure water here’ As she hawks and Plies her trade, Trekking from Adeola/ Reclamation And Olympia Cinema Junction to Okirigwre. Barely earning Enough to eke out a Living.

His son passed his Common Entrance Examination, but Cannot resume at St Malachy’s College Sapele. Having met all admission requirements for a university education, She cannot resume.

He is sick and cannot Go for treatment, the Landlord has thrown Out his belongings Because of his inability to pay his Rents.

Sapele and 99.9% of Safarians are luxuriating and steeplechasing in abjectly suffocating poverty.

No jobs, no light, no food, no houses, no medicare, no roads,no industries, no water and no viable tertiary institutions, etc.

Sapele and Safarians are stewing in the irreverent cesspit of troglodyte underdevelopment and cocooned by the octopoidal tentacles of cacophonously grandiloquent poverty.

Can diasporic safarians, safarians at home, local government administration, state governments and the federal government salvage sapele and safarians from these tenebrous, labyrinthined and serpentined convolutions?

Gbinije, Mandate Against Poverty, (MAP), writes from Sapele, Delta State

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