'Africans going Dutch' - Part Eight: Dutch vanity projects
In my last piece, I celebrated Dutch simplicity, as opposed to the Nigerians’ vulgar display of wealth and affluence. My focus was on the Dutch person - not on the Dutch government. From what I have seen, the Dutch government, like other governments, also takes vainglorious decisions. In this column, I will focus on two vanity projects of the Dutch government.
The first is the Rotating House in Tilburg. It is five metres wide and ten metres tall. The house has four wheels and the whole structure has been put on rails on the Hasselt Roundabout. It takes the house 20 hours to make a complete circle. There’s nobody living in the house. It wouldn’t be possible anyway, since it has not been decorated and furnished.
The Rotating House was said to have cost €400,000.00 excluding VAT. The flowers in the garden surrounding the house were dead when I passed it by. The garden itself and its dead flowers cost a few thousand euros. Maintaining the House costs about 13,000 euros annually. If you add up all these figures, you come close to the cost of a whole school complete with boarding facilities in some African countries. Just so you know: the Rotating House is an art project.
Project number two. You probably have heard of the North/South underground railway line in Amsterdam. That project has become a scandal in Holland. Although Amsterdam is a relatively small capital, with a very reliable transport system, the Dutch government thought the city needed underground lines — to be able to compete with Paris and London, maybe! The underground project began in 1970 and is yet to be completed. All the four lines are up and running except for the North/South line.
The construction of this prestigious seven-kilometre line was estimated to cost €1.4 billion euros in 2002. But as the tunnels were being dug, surrounding houses began to crack and cave in. This led to loud protests and condemnation. Work was temporarily suspended. Then the project was re-estimated. The new cost? €3.1 billion! A newspaper described the Amsterdam underground project as a “bottomless pit”. Pity the taxpayers whose earnings are dumped into this pit.
These two projects are some of the obvious proofs of the prodigal tendencies of the Dutch government. The Dutch people (as well as Wikileaks) surely know many more.
Vanity projects fuel popular anger against the government. Is it any wonder that the Occupy Amsterdam movement is waxing rather than waning? I do not fully understand all the demands of the Occupy-ers. I do know, however, that if the government would adhere to the same principles the Dutch are famous for – frugality, fiscal discipline - the thousands of unemployed Occupy-ers would have a decent job.
White, black or of mixed race, all politicians are the same. The only difference may be that in Holland, the citizen has at least the vanity projects point at. In Nigeria, we hear of the billions of naira being spent, but hardly ever see any projects.
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