-Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By Austen AKHAGBEME:

The euphoria that greeted the return of the abducted students of the Government science secondary school, Kankara, Katsina state, was palpable. It was a thorough relief from the usual double speak and empty yarns that the government spews freely any time there’s a national emergency that bothers on insecurity.

Kudos to the President for a prompt and decisive response this time around. All thanks, too, to governor Masari and his strange contacts, used to negotiate the deal.

While we’re basking in the euphoria of their safe return, the Kankara boys have become a metaphor of some sort; depicting the neglect, hardship, innocence, hopelessness and the near dangerously insecured life the average Nigerian is living.

Everyday as we wake up from sleep, just like the Kankara boys, we are awakened to the reality of a false freedom, where our very existence is threatened, if not by physical means, but by the vagaries of harsh economic reality pervading our land.

As the Naira takes a free fall and journeys southward without restraint, the purchasing power of the average citizen diminishes in obeyance to the prevailing economic reality. The unknown but forlorn future, has become the familiar as everyone seems to come to term with the need for a change, a new driver or a new way of piloting our collective affair.

Without offense to modesty, the release of the Kankara boys have become a palliative, a temporary relief from the overdose of executive lukewarmness, foot-dragging and ill-preparedness in carrying out weightier matters of State by our present drivers.

When are we also going to enjoy a swift response (just like we’re witnessing with the Kankara fiasco) on the economy , having ran into recession twice in recent time? When are we going to wake up one morning to the euphoria of the news that our Refineries have started working and that the pump price of petrol is reversed to an affordable rate?

Just as the Kankara boys were kept in hunger, darkness and under the harsh elements, the Nigerian people have never experienced anything less, figuratively speaking. My prayer is that the joy of a peaceful return, being experienced by the captured Kankara boys as at today, should be our collective experience very soon, when our leaders gets it right.

• Austen AKHAGBEBE is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online