“CRIME explosion requires value reformation. To reform our values, we must revolutionize our politics.” That was the conclusion we reached last week from an appraisal of where we are as a people supposedly birthed in the cradle of positive values but now enmeshed in a web of crippling practices that negate our claim to humanity.
If the answer is to revolutionise our politics, what exactly does this imply? And how might it even achieve the desired objectives? Given the loaded nature of the concept of revolution, it is understandable why political leaders are usually on edge at its mention. But the idea of a violent take-over of government is not intrinsic to the concept. Revolutionizing the politics of a nation could be a collective effort.
Nation-states didn’t start as liberal democracies. Pre-democratic societies varied in form, shape and structure, from absolute monarchy claiming a divine right, to constitutional monarchy arising from landowners’ complaint against monarchical excesses, to constitutional democracy, an incremental progression, inspired by revolutionary ideas of natural and inalienable human rights to self-determination.
Surely, there were violent transitions, as in the French Revolution, and military dictatorships. However, violence isn’t a necessary condition for revolutionizing politics. The major political revolutions have been inspired by ideas of human dignity and human rights and what these require in terms of political structures. Historically, monarchies are products of sheer use of might but they are justified by appeal to divine authority until a superior argument successfully pooh-poohed that justification.
Against Sir Robert Filmer, John Locke observed that if we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, no human being has more right to his throne than any other. And for Rousseau, no one can alienate their God-given right to freedom only to become the subject of a king. While Locke’s argument inspired the American Revolution, Rousseau’s is credited with the onset of the French Revolution. But had reason prevailed, the violence wouldn’t have been necessary. Hence, the eternal truth in J.F. Kennedy’s famous quote: “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Indeed, should we need a good example of a successful nonviolent political revolution, we don’t have to go beyond our shores. Nigeria’s pre-colonial nationalities didn’t come together as a democratic republic of their free will. They were subject-peoples imposed upon by a colonial power without their consent. Through various machinations, the invading powers had subdued every kingdom, empire, and emirate, forcing them to sign dubious treaties and ultimately ending with the 1914 amalgamation.
But our nationalist forebears challenged the colonial powers with the logic of the invaders’ making, exposing the hypocrisy in their espousal of the inalienable rights of humans to self-determination in their homeland while practicing its very opposite in our land. The superiority of this argument was the weapon of choice against foreign domination. It revolutionised our politics without the use of guns and bullets.
The point of the above observations and illustrations is to suggest that the idea of revolutionising politics is not necessarily an encouragement of violence. It is call for a paradigm shift in thought and practice from a status quo that is not only not working but is also jeopardising the wellbeing of the nation and its people.
While we didn’t start as one people and one nation, our founding fathers fought as one people and attained independence as one nation. But each is now, for all practical purposes, in its own tent gnashing teeth and biting tongue in protest against marginalization. We started with a constitution that with all its defects worked to advance us educationally, economically, and socially, competing with our peer nations around the globe. We are now a subdued people with little to show for our individual efforts while fighting ourselves for access to the center where we perceive the goodies are.
The centralisation of power in the center in an otherwise federal polity has intensified and aggravated political competition to the extent that those who set their eyes on it will do whatever it takes, values be damned. But this mindset is not limited to competition for the presidency or National Assembly. Morally repugnant tactics have become synonymous with our elections from local government to state assemblies and beyond. And it is principally because of the material gain that has become equated with public service.
The making and execution of laws, the main responsibility respectively of legislators and executives at every level of government is doubtless a great task that deserves the dedication of competent hands, sound minds, and impeccable character. There is therefore a good argument for adequate compensation. But it is indefensible when that compensation is hugely disproportionate to the responsibility on the one hand, and when it fails to take cognizance of its dissonance with the paucity of financial resources available to the country on the other.
There is a third factor which has been contemptuously ignored in the calculation. It is mass poverty. Those who christened Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world are not involved in hyperbolic wordsmithing. They are objectively interpreting a reality that stares us all in the face. We see it daily in the throng of old and young begging for bread on our streets. Is it pardonable that public service attracts such humongous compensation in a country where many are compelled to search for food in dustbins?
Our approach to politics and public service is individualistic and possessive whereas our social orientation in our precolonial communities is community-focused. The moral values that we have abandoned were developed for communal living and they served us well even into the first republic. The communal orientation of children in good education, work ethics, and moderation motivated First Republic leaders toward the conceptualization and implementation of programs that focused on human development. It was why they came up with a part-time political appointment and parliamentary system that didn’t take funds away from the main goal of service to the people. We have callously abandoned that system for an ostentatious one that makes emergency billionaires of political office holders by systematically impoverishing the masses.
Revolutionizing politics in our clime, then, requires a paradigm shift in at least two areas. First is in the structure of governance. Second is in our outlook on public service. We justified shifting from a federal structure that prioritizes regionalism to a quasi-unitary system inspired by the military command system, by appeal to national unity. Yet, we are much more disunited today than we have ever been.
Worse, however, is that unitarism has led to national retrogression on every index of development—education, economy, social welfare, and Infrastructure. While we may possibly boast of progress in communication technology, the paralysis we experience in electricity supply is irredeemably retrogressive. If we have only a negative outcome in national unity and in development, what can justifiably continue to attract us to unitarism in place of federalism?
The answer lies in our newly-found individualistic orientation. We care less for the nation as an entity. We care even less for our subnational communities. Everyone is only looking for maximising personal interests. Controlling the center means cornering more than half the resources accruing to the country. For die-hard egoists, the attraction of that “achievement” is singularly satisfying. This doesn’t just refer to a president. Some ministers and lawmakers would gladly appropriate more responsibilities to their offices when these are much better discharged at state or local level.
The same individualistic orientation motivates many politicians toward a possessive accumulation of material wealth through the exploitation of state resources. Little minds get to office and they become tin gods publicly exhibiting gold watches and exotic vehicles unashamedly. Meanwhile impressionable young ones with no hope of such acquisition, see such display and wonder “why not me and why must I wait?” Instead of modeling virtuous character, our politicians end up as instigators to evil.
The way out of our present precarious situation is to revolutionize our politics. And it will take the collective efforts of politicians and political leaders to do it from within. Otherwise history will be very unkind to them.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!
