Author: The Nation

Way out of the angst

Setting agenda often seems an easy task. We look around us, see anomie, scream at evil, squirm from poverty, howl at ignorance. We conclude and reel out the agenda. If we want to stop ignorance, fix education. If we want peace, abolish crime. To get rid of poverty, embrace prosperity.

Suddenly, paradise is not so far and difficult after all. We know at our fingertips the way out of the quagmire. We know the answer. So, we wonder, why is it that election cycle after election cycle, we still say the same thing, and then we come here again and say the same thing?

World peace is unattainable?  Some of us say, it is because the leaders are bad. Other says it is because the bad is too much for the leaders. In other words, they are naïve and incompetent. But naïve and incompetent were heroes in the past. Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkramah, Jomo Kenyatta, Jerry Rawlings.  Africa looks like a graveyard of the naïve and incompetent. Nor is the rest of the world without them. In the west, a raft of big names dwarfs the failures of the dwarfs like Trump, Boris Johnson, et al. In their pantheons are names like Disraeli, Churchill, Washington, Napoleon, De Gaulle. With these, the societies indulge the brats. We don’t have great geniuses on the throne whose virtues cover the sins of men of little faith.

Hence we crave idealists, and idealists fail not like regular leaders. In his memoirs, Richard Nixon – himself an incompetent – railed at some African nationalists like Nkrumah. He said they exhausted their revolutionary juices in the heady days of struggle. When they mounted the throne, they were like dancers who danced themselves lame at rehearsals before the main dance.

Yet we can say that, in spite of the woes of agenda setting, it is an important business. We can say it is not as simple as saying we want to fix the classrooms or get good teachers as cure for an age of darkness. Some will say, feed the poor kids in the class to fuel their brains. Others propagate new technology, a brave new world of software and artificial intelligence. Let’s forget the dark age and step into the light.

Not so easy, say others. Forget education. Build the infrastructure first. Roads, bridges. The first light is power. Get the DisCos working and the light that imitates the God’s illumination will explode in our minds.

A few theorists want good men. Just good men and women, and all the problems go away. It is not about things. They quote Burke and John Stuart Mill about the good men as guarantee against the triumph of evil. Where are the good men? Who are they? Square pegs in square holes. Yet who has ever seen a square hole that another person has not defined as round? There we go.

What then will work? It becomes not a matter of what we want but what comes first. Development becomes a matter of scales of preference. Shall we eat before we school? Or shall we have good roads before electric power. Or shall we have all at once? We suddenly face a puzzle. How do we marshal resources? Agenda setting is not just about what we want, since we know them. It is not about how we want them. It becomes where we want them and what comes first.

Nor are we always satisfied with that. In the end, we do not even agree about education even when we say it is priority. We do not agree on electoral process as tempers flare when ballots arrive our precincts.

Even in a matter as fraught as insecurity, we never are at one. First, we have to agree that it is a problem of faith. Is it my faith against yours, or is it a denial that it is even violence. Some call it pure criminality, others call it religious criminality. One thinks it is clear. The opposite thinks it is even clearer. They are looking at the same thing with the same eyes God gave them. But they don’t think it is the same God. So, there. Where one sees purity, another screams sacrilege. Clarity is one of the banes of society. Some ambiguity would humble us.

So, we might see, as we saw in the last election, that food on the table, brilliance in the classroom, hunger on the streets, the jailbird of innocence, were important, but they took back seat to the issue of whose tribe we gripe at and whose God you revile.

Francis Fukuyama lamented that 20th century politics looked at the wailings of the working class who wanted equality and the conservatives who craved liberty unlike today where identity politics takes the cudgel so one fellow can whip the other. Jean Paul Sartre said hell is other people. The French novelist and existential philosopher anticipated this age. In the west, it is about God and race. Here it is about God and tribe. No one is talking God and grace.

Marxists will disagree. They will say such issues are a smokescreen. They are masking humanity’s materialist yearnings and frustrations. Take, for instance, the Boko Haram scourge. Some have said it is all about a group of zealots who seek to clean the earth for Allah. But we know of their founder Mohammed Yusuf, who knew the bread-and-butter origins of any mass movement. He gave them bread when they were hungry. He gave them shelter against the fury of the northern sun and the flogging rains. To sate their loins and solitude, he gave them wives. Jesus even said that of his good disciples in Matthew 25.

There is a materialist underpinning to religious pining. But not so fast. The liberal theorist would say such materialist claims are not genuine. We have seen poor societies hold off fanaticism with aplomb. In ancient societies, they raided other societies like the Jukuns of present-day Taraba, or they begged their gods for better harvests. Today, God is the harvest. We saw churches and a candidate turn the last election into Armageddon.

Setting an agenda does not seem always easy, but it is a ritual we love. It is an affirmation of life, a new way to begin again. If things fell apart, it is time to put them together. We are happy for a new turn because hope beats despair.

We hope because when new leaders come, we dredge up the hidden impulse to believe again, to trust that one of us can rise to the occasion and lead, like Churchill when Hitler hectored, or Lincoln when brothers fumed, or Roosevelt when poverty drove men off skyscrapers in suicide jumps.

The same way many look to Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as history beckons at the door of the angst in the land.

Although the incoming Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has a lot of work to do to reposition the country – the economy, insecurity, social infrastructure, etc. – it also must focus attention on two critical areas that have a great role to play in restoring it to its glorious past. One is here talking about the youths and women.

But first, the youths, the acclaimed leaders of tomorrow.

Nigeria’s huge youthful population could either be functional or dysfunctional; a curse or a blessing. That is, they could either be an asset or liability. It would seem Nigeria has chosen to make this segment of its population the latter, given the high rate of unemployment, particularly of youths in the country. Many years ago, the youths that pursued university education had jobs waiting for them. As a matter of fact, as recently as the 1980’s, employers usually visited the universities to recruit them in their final year.

Today, the situation has changed. Years after graduation, many parents are still responsible for the upkeep of the youths who should be rewarding their parents’ sacrifice in sending them to school. The term, ‘the golden fleece’, no longer has meaning. Even youths who did not have the benefit of higher education too no longer have jobs to do. Most of them too, after their periods of apprenticeship, roam the streets in search of jobs that are just not there.

Because the country cannot find jobs for the youths, and since nature too abhors a vacuum, the devil comes to their rescue. As the saying goes, ‘an idle hand is the devil’s workshop’. Thus, we find a significant number of the youths engage in vices such as ‘Yahoo Yahoo’, ‘Yahoo Yahoo Plus’, drug trafficking, armed robbery, kidnapping, ritual killings and what have you. Many of the youths are ready to take any risk just to get out of the country which is choking them, including travelling thousands of kilometres in the desert, on the high seas through illegal routes. Many have indeed ended up being trafficked to some countries worse than Nigeria where they are used as modern slaves and even serve as sex toys in their employers’ homes. Many have died in the process even as many of those still surviving are desperately looking for ways to return home.

The few ‘Andrews’ that wanted to leave the country in the late ’80s would pale into insignificance considering the huge numbers that want to ‘Japa’ today.

The #EndSARS protest of October 2020 was also a product of the frustration of the youths with a country that seemed adrift and lost, and incapable of rediscovering itself. That was why what started as a rightful protest against police brutality, again skewed against largely the youths, ended up the monumental tragedy that it eventually became. To date, the country is yet to recover from the effects of the protests which led to loss of property, public and private, as well as some lives all over the country. Lagos State, the epicenter of the protest, reported a loss of over N700 billion.

Unfortunately, the youth discontent, rather than abate, has continued to swell. There is no concerted effort to bring about any significant change in the fortune of the youths. On the political plain, the Not Too Young to Run Bill sponsored by Tony Nwulu in the House of Representatives and AbdulAziz Nyako in the Senate was designed, ostensibly to give the youths an opportunity of climbing the political ladder to effect a change through democratic means, in the country’s leadership. The campaign that ultimately became a law brought down the age barrier for running for the office of president from 40 to 30, and from 30 to 25 for the House of Representatives and states’ houses of assembly imposed by the 1999 constitution. That of the governorship and senate however remained at 35 years. The bill was signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari on May 31, 2018.

Perhaps it is too early to conclude that the law has not brought about any significant change as nearly all the same known faces that have been running for political offices since 1999 remained the contestants to beat in the last general elections in February and March, 2023.

On the economic plain, the pain is getting worse. It does not seem as yet, the government has got the right answers to the challenges. At the last count in April, inflation peaked at about 22.2 per cent. Power supply is still erratic in many parts of the country, with the electricity distribution companies (DisCos) feasting on Nigerians by slamming them estimated bills that do not have bearing to their power consumption. Industries that left the country for more conducive environments are not returning because there are no incentives for them to do so. Even the ones in the country are not finding things funny. What with the high cost of fuelling their generators, insecurity, multiple taxation, including those imposed by ‘area boys’ and street urchins, among others, all of which have made their prices outrageous and thus uncompetitive, compared with imported ones.

The effect of all of these is that, rather than expanding, job opportunities have been contrasting. Resulting in the teeming number of idle youths who are joining the unemployment queues every year.

So, the incoming Federal Government already has its job cut out for it. If it ever said it would continue where the outgoing government stopped, suggesting there won’t  be any significant shift in the direction of the economy and perhaps other sectors as well, that should end as mere political talk. There has to be a paradigm shift in economic direction as well as other sectors because, largely, the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari administration failed in most of the sectors except infrastructure where it recorded some positives.

Power supply is key in the efforts to grow the economy. The incoming government must be ready to break the jinx impeding stable electricity supply. It must tackle more vigorously the remnants of the forces still giving insecurity life. The government must however carefully navigate its way through the fuel subsidy removal that it seemed determined to pursue. This, without doubt will add to the yoke of the average Nigerians, particularly the youths. There must be realistic palliative measures beyond the tokenism of the handouts that would be given to a few millions once-and-for-all to address a problem that is likely to linger for a while.

 The Tinubu administration must understand that things have to change for the better because the country with the kind of challenges facing our youths is sitting on a keg of gunpowder. The impressive showing of the neophyte Labour Party (LP) in the just-concluded elections, particularly the presidential election, is enough signal to the old political class to shape up or ship out.

That is why the incoming government must hit the ground running. It is good that the president-elect is not allowing himself to be weighed down by the court cases challenging his victory at the polls. Some of these are mere distractions to ensure he does not begin well and thus attract criticisms early in the day.

Interestingly, many Nigerian youths are not mere birds of passage in the foreign lands that they are; not a few of them have excelled, whether in academics or other spheres of life. So, it is not that they are not gifted, the problem is with the stifling environment at home. If they had not gone outside the country, many of them could have been interred with their glory. It is therefore incumbent on the government to give them a more conducive environment to unleash their potential even as it must ensure that they are fairly well represented in government. It must also make the Not Too Young to Run law take effect.

Another area of concern which the incoming government must give priority attention is the role or place of women in politics and governance. For now, their participation is too low for comfort. This is in spite of the 1995 Beijing Declaration on the 35 per cent affirmative action, which aims at allowing women of substance to take their deserving roles in nation-building.

Because politics is seen here as a dirty game, women seem to stay clear of it. There is also the challenge of the financial muscle that politicians require that most women cannot afford, even if they are interested in gunning for political offices.

Yet, it is not that the country is not blessed with knowledgeable women of substance that can hold their own even against their male counterparts in whatever area of influence they are in. We won’t forget the role played by Prof Dora Akunyili while she served as Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC); Ms. Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations and former Minister of Environment; Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the seventh director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and also former Minister of Finance as well as Former Minister of Foreign Affairs. She is the first African and first woman to lead the prestigious body.

Before the present day women achievers, we have had prominent women like Queen Amina of Zaria, Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the first Nigerian woman to drive a car as well as a prominent political campaigner and women’s rights activist; Margaret Ekpo was another prominent women’s rights crusader. She joined Ransome-Kuti to protest killings at Enugu Coal mine. We have had and still have women vice-chancellors, among several others, who have made and are still making their marks not only in the country but also at the global level.

We have a lot of their kind who have all it takes to take the country to greater heights. The government must look for them wherever they are in the country and bring them on board. The country needs their brains.

It is therefore important that factors hindering women from attaining their potential be given priority by the incoming administration. These include cultural or religious impediments which make the society to see women as mere baby factories or subjugate them to the menfolk. Since it is girls that ultimately become women, education of the girl-child should be encouraged nationwide. Women must be assisted financially and otherwise in their chosen vocations even as the government must increase their participation in politics by honouring the 1995 Beijing Declaration on the 35 per cent affirmative action.

We can only continue to relegate women to the country’s detriment. It has been proven that in terms of what makes a good leader – honesty, intelligence, compassion and innovation, essential characteristics of good leadership, women rank high on the rating scale. Meaning we can only continue to relegate our women to the background at Nigeria’s peril.

Sir Shina Peters said it all in one of his albums: African women get knowledge, African women wonderful. And what more, they are beautiful. Let’s give our women a chance.

“Restructuring”, as buzzword in the Nigerian polity, has acquired a rainbow of colours: much of this splash no more than fiery spectra that cloak naked fears against irrelevance.

So what, in real terms, would restructuring for national cohesion mean?  Perhaps as the many colours of the rainbow drive people, with their many diverse moods and diverse motives, selfish or selfless! That is a Babel no incoming order can risk. 

Yet, it is condemned to sorting out its “restructuring” priorities, if it were clear-eyed; and wished to clobber together a practical ruling legitimacy.

After a divisive election, the winning ticket gulped no more than 29 per cent of the total vote, in a first-to-breast-the-tape contest — replete with more than fair share of sore losers.

So, pragmatism: what basic “restructuring” can get the new government dashing after its goals but reduce the havoc of sore losers throwing spikes in its path?

But first, the many strains of “restructuring”.

One — and the most pristine of them all, birthed during spectacular military misrule under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and his Khalifa, Gen. Sani Abacha — was to determine the “National Question” by “ethnic nationalities”.

Its legislative factory was a “National Conference”.  Its constitutional lode and lodestar was the 1st Republic federal constitution, with powerful regions; which, the canvassers insist, did just fine by fierce but healthy regional competition — not altogether untrue.

But hinged on today’s 36-states-and-Abuja format, that would mean either to unscramble the 36 states into fewer regions; or re-arrange the states under ethnic regions; or under other criteria like contiguity, similarity of cultures, and the like.

This strain the Afenifere had vigorously pushed as near-South West dogma, before Afenifere broke into factions.  Thereafter, a rump — the Ayo Adebanjo faction — had pushed it as own tool for political relevance, milking base Yoruba pride. 

But even at its pristine format, some South West elements had rejected neo-regionalism of the six South West states, without kicking against regional integration.

Their dissenting whoop, especially from some Ekiti voices: “Too late to go back to Ibadan” — the old Western Region capital.  Some Lagos elements have also pushed the 1st Republic Eko insularity: “Gedegbe l’Eko wa” (Lagos is independent of the West).

This near-dogma, which not only flared old Western Region fault lines but also scared other parts of the country to their bones, inspired a less scary strain: fiscal federalism.

This strain, less dogmatic, more pragmatic; with little or no perceived ethnic jingoism, pushed for more resources from the central government to the federating states. 

With this new fiscal deal, the states would invest their newfound funds in new tasks on the expanded constitutional concurrent list: electricity and allied power, rail, security (read state police), solid mineral mining, etc — hitherto a federal exclusive.

But even “fiscal federalism” drew little or no traction with the central authorities, with the Federal Government headed by retired military generals for 16 out of the past 24 years: President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007), President Muhammadu Buhari (2015-2023), President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (2007-2010), President Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015).

Yet, the latest constitutional amendments have inched towards “fiscal federalism” by expanding the concurrent list: power and rail are now there.  All that is left is cash-backing from the federation till to do those extra tasks.

Still, state police is still not — but concerted efforts should be made it is, particularly when custodial correctional centres already nestle in the present concurrent list.  It makes little sense for states to operate own correctional centres, yet have no police to marshal their justice-criminal system.

Besides, the virulent challenge of diffused insecurity — kidnapping and banditry, mostly done by criminals with small arms, many of them fleeing from the Boko Haram vortex of the North East, to North West and North Central — pushes the imperative for state police. 

That will not only exponentially increase the number of (wo)men to police and secure Nigeria’s vast space, it should also boost intelligence — since state police cadres would be mainly natives intimate with their environment; thus helping to nip many crimes even before they are hatched.

There is also another strain of “restructuring”: resource control.  It’s the most radical of the strains, a version of it insisting every state — particularly the oil-bearing ones — should gross its full wealth from crude oil but pay royalties and taxes to the Federal Government.

That would be a classic re-federalization, if that were possible.  But it has drawn little sympathy beyond the oil-bearing South-South, and perhaps the grandstanding gadflies of the South West to whom it’s dogma — unadulterated — or nothing.

Somehow, however, “resource control” appears to have lost steam, after the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency.  Was that because the South-South elite themselves had tasted the intricacies and complexities of the Abuja federal pot?  It’s not easy to say.

So, forging restructuring for national cohesion needs a huge dose of pragmatism: solving pressing problems, while navigating the long, long continuum towards re-federalization.

Very pressing is security.  Right now, perhaps only the South West is relatively calm.  The North East still grapples with Boko Haram, though at a much reduced scale.

But North East gains are pains for North West and North Centre: new hubs for banditry and kidnapping that often wipe out an entire community.

In the South East, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB campaign is morphing into some near-constant anarchy, the states most hit being Anambra and Imo. 

Aside from crude oil theft, South-South would appear calmer — aside from occasional high-calibre kidnapping on the Edo front. 

Still, massive crude oil stealing aims at Nigeria’s economic jugular.  It is indeed the fundament of the security crisis: the more the crude oil stealing (common resources), the higher the mass poverty, the more the temptation to embrace crime.

So, the incoming order should give state police top priority on its “restructuring” chart.  Security drives everything: agriculture, commerce, industry, etc.  With everywhere much more secure, the Tinubu Presidency would be better placed to consolidate the food security programme of the Buhari era.

The legal framework would however be stiff, since state police wasn’t touched at the last constitutional amendment exercise.  Still, the political will should be easier, given the win-win for all, of securing every inch of Nigerian space. 

State police could, however come into life in phases: states that can afford own police could have the first run, with their powers and responsibilities carefully calibrated, vis-a-via the central police.  That should free up more personnel to man states yet to have own police.

Aside from security, another urgent “restructuring” is on the economic front — away from the SAP-driven import economy, embedded since 1986.  This “restructuring” across the many sectors would be driven with even more investment in general infrastructure — an area in which the Buhari government has done a lot.  But after decades of rot, it’s early days yet, on the infrastructure come-back front.

The Tinubu administration should, therefore, take off from where the Buhari government stopped, fasten the pace and deepen infrastructure the more.  Of special focus is electricity.  Sustainable electricity would give the economy a healthy jab. 

But again, the challenge is raising funding for those key drivers of the economy.  That would be a solid path to re-anchoring the Nigeria real sector, saving forex for only the most essential of imports and boosting the Naira’s parity to foreign currencies.

“Restructuring” won’t come with “my-way-or-no-way” dogma, fixated with the past.  But after the sterile military years and 24 years of democracy which has shown a glimpse of  promise from the collapse of the military years, but which can still do far better, re-federalization is the clear path to tread.

So, the Federal Government should forge a deliberate policy of pattering with geo-political zones in regional integration.  That should chart a new path from the hostility (at worst) or malign indifference (at best) of the past 24 years.  That path should make governance easier for all, other things being equal.

Restructuring for national cohesion also demands an urgent non-kinetic plan to help the South East.   The security agencies should go after the criminals out there wantonly taking lives — the latest victims being the doomed seven killed in the US Mission delegation, whose convoy was ambushed in Anambra State.

But there should also be an urgent non-kinetic plan to calm the majority in that region; on the imperative to reclaim their lives and living from creeping anarchy.  The new Tinubu government should partner Igbo elders and critical stakeholders to make such rapprochement a reality.