FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA: Professor Adeoye Lambo Was Right

Economic policies should always be people-focused, to promote their well-being, security, and economic status. Any policy you make that makes people poorer, hungrier, angrier, causes job losses and makes them more insecure is bestial without human sensibility. Such policies should be discarded forthwith, even if they have good intentions.

Anyway, no policy with good intentions will make people commit suicide, make students drop out of school, shops close down, children get famished, husbands abscond from home, wives forced to sell their bodies and children, and prices of goods and food in the market start to fly uncontrollably. Women, men, and youths start to protest with anger and rain curses on the policymakers for unleashing hardship on them while the policymakers live extravagant lives of opulence with an arrogant “I don’t care, citizens should go to hell” attitude.

It’s a symptom of insensitivity, crude arrogance, hangover, or insanity (or all) for any leader to insist that his pain-giving economic policies are the best to better their lives and he would not change them even when the adverse effects and popular outcry against the policies have shown the utter failure of the policies. In a democracy, feedback from the citizens on any government policy is essential that leaders cannot and should not ignore.

Prof. Lambo, the late renowned psychiatrist, was right when he suggested that political officeholders in Nigeria should be subjected to mental illness tests regularly.

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not represent the opinions or views of OSUN DEFENDER.