Today, I’d like to reflect on what I consider the biggest issues currently facing the country, and on how they might possibly play out in the critical election season months ahead. I’ve got five things on my list: Boko Haram, Ebola, 2015 elections, national infrastructure, and foreign affairs.

But just before I launch into them, I’d like to preface today’s article with a paraphrasing of Dickens, which I think nicely sums up the contemporary Nigerian condition:

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of potential; it was the age of squandered opportunity; it was the season of Ebola and Boko Haram, it was the season of economic triumph; it was the epoch of citizen-empowering social media; it was the epoch of official nonchalance; it was the spring of oil prices; it was the winter of corruption.

Even as it appears Ebola is succeeding in hounding Boko Haram off the headlines, it is imperative that we do not allow the insurgency to slip into a contrived obscurity.

Earlier this year, the National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress, Lai Mohammed, interestingly described the state of affairs in the North-East as a “strategic stalemate”. Not much appears to have changed. The pattern now is that Boko Haram and the Nigerian military appear to be exchanging villages. Boko Haram seizes, the military regains. Repeat.

Properly motivating and leading the military to rout Boko Haram and to earn the trust of local communities will be the biggest challenge facing the government in the months ahead.

Like Boko Haram, like Ebola. During the week, a doctor at the Lagos Mainland Hospital (site of Nigeria’s first Ebola isolation facility) told me, regarding the prospects of being summoned to fight Ebola without adequate preparation or compensation: “Now, I understand how the soldiers in Sambisa Forest feel.”

The biggest lesson to be learnt from the ongoing crisis is the importance of preparation. Doctors at the Mainland Hospital speak of a facility long neglected by the government, a Siberia of sorts for doctors. One told me if you’re posted to the hospital, you generally get people asking: ‘who did you offend?’

I decided to see for myself, and paid a quick visit there last Thursday. I met a hospital almost in ruins. Dilapidated, forgotten, depressing. Governor Babatunde Fashola visited Friday morning, to see the Ebola isolation facility under construction. That’s good news. I hope that he will urgently kick-start the resurrection of that facility.

Complete article here » http://speshsworld.com/2014/08/best-worst-times-tolu-ogunlesi/