My boss, Vice-Chancellor Mobolaji Aluko, always apothegmatically quips: "the best way to know how an organization is run is to visit its toilet". I had to sleep at MMA on Monday night to be able to catch my early morning London-bound flight. At a point, in the middle of the night, I needed to obey the call of nature by crucially visiting the toilet to do "business". Apart from the toilet not having tissue paper and its obvious shambles and uncleaniless, I had to hold my breath throughout my sojourn there! The stench oozing out of the place is capable of infecting one with acute nausea! Fast forward to the next few hours, my flight (Royal Air Maroc) had a brief stop-over in Casablanca, Morocco. At this point, I had to locate the toilet to quickly brush my teeth, as I was unable to do that in Lagos due to the timing of our departure. The cleaniless and neatness of the toilet were immaculate! Unlike MMA, Lagos, where the stench almost made me throw up, the distilled-like purity of the water and scent in the toilet almost tempted me to drink the water from the tap! Of course, the toilets at Heathrow, London, are cleaner and neater than the kitchens of most five-star hotels in Nigeria! Just wondering: Apart from corruption, terrorism and multiplicity of other maladies that have continued to bedevil us, if we cannot maintain and clean the toilet(s) of an important place like our international airport in Nigeria, are we not actually romanticizing fantasy and being plainly stupid to expect the rest of the world to take us seriously? Like Professor Farooq Kperogi once famously wrote, with the current situation of Nigeria, "only three kinds of foreigners can be persuaded to come and invest here: a naïve person, a criminally-minded investor, or a masochist with an exuberant taste for self-violence."
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:56:37 +0000
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