Category: Friday

More than the conceptualisation of the idea of progress, the practical implementation of the idea and the fulfillment of its promise in the lives of citizens is the distinguishing mark of a progressive party. While it is true that practice without a thoughtful conceptualisation is blind; it is also true that thoughtful conceptualisation without practice is empty.

The purpose of governance, its raison d’etre is first and foremost the security of the lives and property of citizens. Next in the order of importance is the enhancement of their freedom and liberty; and finally, there is the welfare function of promoting equal opportunities and happiness for all.

In these areas to which a purposive government is required to pay attention and work effectively, Nigerians have been shortchanged in the last 15 years. Surely, some very important personalities have fared a lot better than the majority of ordinary citizens. Some others have taken advantage of and exploited the atmosphere of lawlessness and gross indiscipline to make way for their interests. Those at the short end of the stick of insecurity and unfreedom are the hoi polloi of society; the helpless and hapless masses that a progressive government cannot ignore.

The starting point is the understanding that if an enabling environment is provided for them, our people are resourceful and ingenious. This is why the present syndrome of dependency is distressing because it misrepresents who we are as a people. It’s doubly sad that the syndrome is encouraged, indeed canvassed, by politicians who should know better. The syndrome is at the institutional and individual levels, with states dependent on the federal government, while individuals are dependent on both state and federal governments.

Where does a progressive government begin? What practical actions must it take to procure for the people the goods of security, freedom, equal opportunity and happiness? If security is a foremost item in the contract between the governed and the government, how does the latter deliver on its side of the contract?

No citizen, including those that find themselves in the highest echelon of leadership, can sincerely negate the verdict that Nigeria has been playing an unfair game with the lives of its citizens for many decades. We tend to blame colonialism for everything even more than half a century after independence. But I am not sure that we saw our current level of insecurity in our colonial past. At least I have not come across a documented record of the loss of more than 200 innocent school girls to terrorists between 1900 and 1960. That is not to diminish the evil that colonialism represented. It’s simply to observe that while we have it in our power to make progress in the matter of the security of the lives and properties of citizens, we chose to retrogress.

Progress requires that we move with the times. In the matter of crime prevention and detection, to move with the time is to dismantle the anachronistic system of policing that has proved embarrassingly ineffectual. Before 1966, the crime bursting function of the police was adversely impacted by the politicisation of the force. Party leaders, government officials and traditional rulers abused their positions of authority and used the police against their political enemies.

The military took this aberration as the norm and, since it is unacceptable in a civilised society, the reaction of the armed forces was to centralise the police ostensibly to avoid the evils of politicisation and abuse. This would be a valid argument and a logically sound approach if the new system was an effective and better alternative. But it wasn’t and it still isn’t. Politicisation is still the bane of the Nigeria Police. Ask Governor Amaechi and ordinary citizens who crossed the path of officer Mbu.

A progressive government in a federal system will seek the benefit of community and municipal policing as practiced in the United States. It is baffling to common sense that we consider the American constitution ideal for our situation but judge ourselves immature relative to its approach to law and order.

Assume, however, that immaturity truly describes our condition. A progressive government will lead the inquiry into why this malaise is our lot and design a plan of action to confront it. We came out of colonial rule as a dehumanised lot. It required the foresight of one of the visionaries of our time to proffer a solution with his insistence that human capital development was the indispensable key to the development of a nation.

Chief Awolowo introduced the first universal free primary education system in the nation. Other regions soon followed. Those who still engage in disparaging and badmouthing that singular achievement cannot truthfully identify what else was responsible for the advancement of the region in the late fifties and up to the early eighties when there began a deliberate policy of reversal supervised by the military.

The regional governments of the 1st Republic, in spite of their known deficiencies, ensured that government was responsible to the people. Members of the various regional Houses had their regular jobs for which they were accountable. My first employer in 1961 was Chief I. A. Adelodun, a school Headmaster who was also an elected member of the Western House of Assembly. I just got out of Secondary Modern School. As the Headmaster, he also had his own class, and since his membership of the House affected his ability to regularly attend to his teaching responsibilities, he hired me to teach his class and he paid me from his pocket. No, he had no special constituency allowance. He was paid as a member of the House. It was his sense of responsibility that led him to do the right thing.

An educated citizenry is a vital bulwark against an uncaring and contemptuous government, the kind that we have been forced to endure in the last 15 years. Without a good education, a citizen is at the mercy of those who see him or her as dispensable and exploitable. Ignorant of their rights and ill-equipped for decent jobs, the uneducated become puns on the chessboard of the powerful and wicked. A human being with a good education doesn’t volunteer to become the thug of another. And a caring and compassionate politician with a sense of justice and fairness must feel the pinch of conscience when he or she exploits and takes undue advantage of fellow human beings.

For the foregoing reasons of ethics and social responsibility, a progressive government must initiate a complete reform of our system of public education. Private institutions are not a morally justifiable substitute for public education. Besides the fact that proprietors of private institutions are generally motivated by private profit, a nation that cedes the education of its citizens to private enterprise cannot complain if those citizens end up without a sense of common nationality or patriotic citizenship. A situation in which every other living room has been turned into a private school is an indication of national decline. A party that identifies as progressive and a government that represents it must lead the charge against this embarrassing decline.

The ever-present obstacle to national advancement that a progressive government must confront head-on is the hydra-headed monster of corruption. A major failure of the present administration is its evident shameless rapport with corruption. It appears content with a comatose EFCC and accusation of corruption is a badge of honor which qualifies individuals for leadership of presidential initiatives. Private jets and helicopters deliver campaign dollars to supporters while deals are made with rulers of dark places.

A serious progressive government will confront corruption at its root. It will make the center less attractive and make government accountable to the people. In doing so, it will create the possibility of its own weakness. But, indeed, that is the virtue and strength of progressivism. As a progressive party, the APC must enter into a binding contract with Nigeria to eradicate corruption, invest in the education of the young, create an enabling environment that fosters job creation and entrepreneurship, and restore the confidence of citizens in the nation without abetting religious fanaticism and ethnic jingoism.

Human beings are thinking animals. This is what separates us from other animal species. This is the reason we make progress at various levels and other animals don’t. Between humans and other mammals, there is a huge difference in the thinking capability of humans. Thinking is the activity of the mind; through which it weighs issues, considers the pros and cons, and determines the rightness or wrongness of a particular policy or action.

What issues present themselves to the mind of the progressive? What challenges agitate their mind? In the circumstance of a nation to which they express unflinching loyalty and express an unparalleled affection, what keeps them awake at night? When the morale of the nation is at the lowest, it can be before despair gives way to anarchy, when the level of corruption is sky-high and neck-deep, in an environment of thick social dysfunction occasioned by joblessness and hopelessness on the part of the youth, progressive thinking cannot just be reactive, it must be proactive and deep.

Deep progressive thinking is not new to our clime. It predated the beginning of the republic even in its precolonial monarchical and imperial form. Individuals and tribal groups within each nationality raised questions bordering on the good of the people vis-à-vis the powerful forces that held them hostage. The fundamental issue of communal liberty versus imperial authority was at the basis of the civil wars that ravaged Yorubaland in the 19th century.

It was however in the anti-colonial struggle that progressivism found its clearest expression among the political elite, who had taken advantage of Western education and were exposed to its ideals of liberty, equality and the common good. The buzzword of the era was self-determination and political independence, and the progressive movement was a coalition of forces across the nation. The nationalist leaders of the era focused on self-determination because freedom of the individual in mind, thought and action was considered the most priceless possession. To be denied this vital ingredient of our humanity is to be treated as a slave, a nonentity. This cannot but be embarrassing to the colonisers who had themselves been responsible for the popularisation of the concept of liberty and self-determination.

As volatile as the 1st Republic was, progressive thinking prevailed and triumphed in the various regions, starting, no doubt, with the Western Region. The Action Group (AG) famously made progressivism its ideological fulcrum. Freedom for All, Life More Abundant, was its motto and it got expression in the many actions and policies of the government, including free universal primary education, integrated agricultural development and especially the establishment of the Marketing Board, aggressive housing scheme for the middle class, and higher education scholarship for talented children.

The collapse of the 1st Republic and the horror of the civil war led to a sense of despair and despondency because political degeneration and high level of corruption were the outcomes of these catastrophic events. Of course, progressivism is never out of tune or without a cause. And even in these periods of extraordinary repression, progressives did not relent. And so, in the wake of a brazen militarisation of the nation, the struggle for the ideals of democracy and true federalism did not wane. Indeed, this struggle was responsible for the final death of militarism in the country.

We have now reached another landmark in the journey of the nation. Since 1999, we have been wandering in the wilderness of confusion. Are we going to have one nation, three or six nations (a.k.a. regions) or 36  (nay 57) nations (a.k.a. states)? The unity of the nation is at stake. Besides the usual platitudes and sweet tongues, there has been a lack of leadership from the ruling party. Action speaks louder than words, as the saying goes. But we have only been treated to words, and more words. The body language speaks eloquently in the opposite direction. Progressive thinking is needed and a self-defined progressive party must lead the charge: What must be our understanding of national unity?

Secondly, there is the need for a redefinition of work and industry. My generation grew up learning the popular Yoruba rhyme which has expression in other national languages: work is the cure for poverty. Do we still believe in this? Or does the current environment of wealth without work render that believe false and useless? This is what generations after mine appear to now believe. I was once made to walk more than nine miles to my post-primary school entrance examination because I missed the only lorry that was available in my town. I was only 12. We are now procreating without the responsibility for the upbringing of those children. Rather we depend on stomach infrastructure from government. And the response of one government is to appoint an official for stomach infrastructure! With that imprimatur of His Excellency, why would citizens need to be responsible for their action or inaction?

Thirdly, a progressive party must lead the effort in the renewal of respect for the rule of law. We got rid of the military as a force in national politics. However, there are lingering effects of its bad influence on the respect of the authority for the rule of law. This is why the federal government and the president who swore to protect the constitution and the rule of law can be so contemptuous of the judiciary and the courts. It didn’t start with this government; it is a carry- over from the first administration in the Third Republic. For how else are we to explain the way that the President of the Federal Court of Appeal, Justice Salami, was treated? And how are we to account for the impunity with which judges were treated in Ekiti State and the courts closed to avoid the hearing of the suit against the newly elected governor? What is the thinking of the progressive party on the matter of the rule of law?

I only have space for one more issue: liberty, equality and the common good. This is the traditional focus of all progressives. Freedom under the law is the natural right of every human being. Therefore no one must be rendered unfree without a proper judicial injunction to that effect. However, many are currently rendered unfree simply because of the conditions of their existence. They are not in jail; but they are unable to function as decent human beings due to the precariousness of their condition. The young ones graduated from college as we expect. But they cannot find jobs, and we know the consequence of joblessness. If they are not to become thugs and miscreants, society has a responsibility to create the conditions for their emancipation and genuine freedom.

The common good of all as opposed to the special interest of a few must be the battle cry of a progressive party. In the wake of the political tension in the horizon, in the face of economic inequality, in the climate of religious bigotry and educational decline, this is an opportune time for progressive thinking and action. There are opportunities for national rebirth which only a progressive party can initiate and sustain. The nation cannot wait any longer. But to paraphrase one of my favourite philosophers, action without thought is blind and thought without action is empty. We have dealt here with the thought of progressives. We are going to deal next with the action that must follow the thought.

In the next three weeks my focus is on progress, hoping to pry a little into the foundations of progressivism as an ideology. I focus today on “imagining progress”. Next week I hope to focus on “thinking progress”, and the following week on “practicing progress”.

That there is an embarrassing poverty of ideological orientation in our national politics is no news to its theorists and practitioners. While the former lament the situation, the latter could care less. In this group, we may also identify two sub-groups.

First, there are those who don’t care about political ideologies because they rightly or wrongly see them as distractions from the practical objective of getting things done for the people and the nation. I think that they are wrong but I will not argue the point if, in fact, what they see as the important task of getting things done is actually achieved. The second sub-group is not bothered about ideology because for them, politics is not as much about getting things done for the people as it is about self-help and ideological niceties can get in the way of good self-promotion.

Neither sub-group has a good case. With respect to the first, a good response is that getting things done requires a clear vision of what must be done and why it must be done. That is what a clear ideological standpoint does. For the second, even a focus on self-help lends itself perfectly to an ideological grounding. Ayn Rand wasn’t bashful about developing and defending an egoistic orientation to politics and ethics and with a deliberate and deliberative ploy, this has been packaged and glorified as the ideology of the right.

In the absence of clearly identifiable distinction between political associations or parties, all pretending allegiance to the good of the people, the people blindly follow and make uninformed choices. Our political history has been a blend of personality and ethnic politics. Lately, religion has been put in the mix so that we now tend to throw our support for candidates for the very wrong reasons. While one cannot deny the right of a mature citizen to support and vote for a candidate of his or her choice for any reason or no reason, there is no doubt that if we all throw rationality to the dustbin, we are going to suffer the consequences of our embrace of its opposite.

To his credit, General Ibrahim Babangida had the insight with his introduction of a two-party system for the Third Republic. But apart from the indecency of an imposition, he failed the ultimate test of an investment of the political will to see it through.

There is a silver lining and the cloud is disappearing gradually. The merger of splinter opposition parties into one All Progressives Congress (APC) is a grand move that promises great dividends for our democracy, if not for particular individuals. But the will that brought it on must be complemented with a clear vision to guide it. The difference must be made clear for all to see. Without pretending to be an insider, I can at least pretend to suggest what the difference looks like to them going by their adopted nomenclature. It would appear that the ideal of progress appealed to them and they envision a progressive nation.

How did this come about? The status quo ante is unacceptable and we all have the ability to imagine things that are not real. This is the dictionary definition of imagination: the ability to think new things. Without that ability no change can be experienced, and no progress can be envisioned. The question for the typical imagining person is “what if?” It was Robert F. Kennedy’s question: ‘There were those who look at things the way they are and ask “why?” I dream of things that never were and ask “why not?”’

Why not? That is the question that must have motivated the initiators of the merger. Why not a single formidable opposition to give electorates a good basis for comparison and choice?

Since 1999, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has taken the nation for a ride. Its leaders once boasted that it would rule for not less than 60 years. It would be alright if Nigerians were dummies since they would have no reasoning capacity to question the actions and policies that have been clearly against their interests. But tension has heightened. Questions have been asked—in the matter of declining education, increasing insecurity, politicised religion, runaway corruption and executive impunity. And answers have been scarce or inadequate.

In the midst of the cloud of despair, we are asked to imagine progress. It’s not that difficult to imagine, as John Lennon once reminded us: “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man (and sisterhood of woman)/Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world/.

Imagine progress then. Place before your mind’s eyes the prospect of progress from your present reality. Better yet, consider a baby born on this day. The happy parents look at her tiny fingers and toes, her small limbs and tender eyes. What do the parents see? What do they imagine? A beautiful girl in five years ready for pre-school, in 12 years ready for high school and in 18 years or less ready for college. They imagine a young woman ready to wed in 25-30 years. The parents imagine progress.

In imagining progress for their infant baby, the parents also imagine, contrary to their present reality, a political system that guarantees or, at least, takes seriously the security of the life of their girl, protecting her from sectarian violence and sadist rapists. It is not hard to imagine what progress looks like for a doting parent.

What is or ought to be in the imagination of a progressive party? When the leadership and rank and file of a progressive party form a mental image of the future of the nation, what do they contemplate? The answer to this question is what marks the difference between it and its rival.

Consider this. PDP cannot absolve itself of the present reality of the nation and its slide, at least, since 1999. That reality unfortunately includes a dismal public educational system, which appears to have been condemned to oblivion by its keepers; a dangerously sliding security system; and an economic system that features mass youth unemployment. In the midst of this calamitous reality that it has presided over for 15 years, the ruling party cannot conjure up an imagination of progress that has eluded the nation under its watch.

The message of a progressive party such as the APC is simple and concise. It stakes a claim in the arena of the progressive development of every citizen. It does not exist for the 10 per cent. The present reality has shown that where the fortune of the 10 per cent is the objective, there is no guarantee of peace and stability. Besides this instrumental and prudential reasoning, however, the progressive party’s rationale is substantive. The right policy is one that promotes the progressive development of all without bias or discrimination on any ground. It is an obligation which a government must discharge faithfully.

In the foregoing, I have discussed in general terms what it means to imagine progress, and what is in the imagination of a political party that is committed to progress. I have not discussed individuals because it is my considered view that the collective imagination of the whole is or ought to be the driving force and guide for individuals. In common parlance, the party is bigger than the individual.

Of course, individuals, especially leaders, not only have a role to play in shaping and crystalising collective imagination, they also have a responsibility to guide the party towards bringing it to fruition. The best guide to a good answer to the question whether individual leaders of APC are up to the task of imagining progress is to look at the reality they have presided over in their states since 1999. Lagos is the proverbial shining city on the hill. The imagination that brought it to light cannot be anything but progressive.