The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Future more uncertain than the troubled past

    Future more uncertain than the troubled past

    WERE Nigeria to be a man, he would have fewer years ahead of him than behind him. At 56, Nigeria has lived a very animated and turbulent life. Even by the world’s average life expectancy (68.5 years), not to talk of Nigeria’s embarrassingly smaller average (47.7 years), this big African country of about 180 million people should be frustrated and growing desperate with its advancing years. It is the largest concentration of black people in the world, but it has refused to appreciate the urgency of the plight of black people everywhere, and seems uninterested in giving them leadership in a world that is increasingly crueller to the race. It has great potentials in all fields of human endeavour, including the arts, music, sports, science and philosophy, but it has neither exploited them beyond occasional eruptions of creativity nor shown any indication it has the scientific competence to recognise and tackle its challenges in ways that transcend its naturally emotive, violent and short-sighted approach to conflict resolution.

    At 56, Nigeria is advanced in age and should by now have come into its own in the world. But it still reasons and acts like a child. Traumatised by its leaders, Nigeria blames every other person but itself for its woes. Thus, its British colonial overlords were and still are responsible for its misshapen economic and political structures. However, its leaders have not explained why for more than five decades they have taken no step whatsoever in breaking down and remoulding the fundamental underpinnings of their country’s existence, and delinking themselves from the (neo-colonial and neo-imperialist) apron strings of their pre-independence rulers. The colonialists expropriated their wealth and sucked them unfairly and unequally into the vortex of the world economic system, but Nigerian leaders have said, and thought, nothing of inheriting the abhorrent mantle of becoming the new exploitative and oppressive class to their own people.

    It took the colonialists about four key constitutional conferences to realise that for a modicum of stability to be established in Nigeria, a federal structure was indispensable in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Despite their tyrannously racial and condescending leadership style, the colonialists managed to bequeath a federalist structure to Nigeria, particularly along regionalist lines. They suspected nothing else would work. But after about six military coups, four (elected) republics, and a myriad of completed and uncompleted constitutional conferences, Nigeria’s governing elite have burrowed deeper into unitarianism, parochialism and hegemonism. They arrogantly and ignorantly insist nothing else would work even when the departing colonialists, in bequeathing a political system, thoughtfully acknowledged their bequests probably fell short of addressing the colony’s special and multifarious needs.

    In an orgy of buck-passing, Nigerians continue to blame their present woes on a vague and abstract past. They snort at white colonialists who built railway lines to link the country in a triangular arrangement that locked their big, colonial snout into raw materials centres. But apart from proving inept at maintaining that railway system, with consequent destruction of the poor network of roads, successive leaders and generations have had more than five decades to extend or build better railway systems to catalyse their own developmental efforts and new economies. Instead, huge resources have been voted and wasted, and Nigeria’s railway lines have remained either creaky and abandoned or operating fitfully. The colonial civil service was a foundation upon which independence leaders could remould a more committed and sophisticated independent civil service. Instead, Nigerian leaders, especially starting from the predatory military governments that ruled the country between the 1960s and 1990s, simply destroyed that anchor of statecraft thereby introducing lasting distortions into the concept of public service.

    The problems of today are much more a function of the ineptitude, poor vision and unpreparedness of Nigerian leaders than a function of colonial tyranny and structural distortions. Yes, the colonialists arrested nation-state formations and built a questionable and highly disputed and conflictual foundation for Nigeria, and have reprovingly stood as guarantors of that suspect edifice and inspirers of those who wear the leadership mantle from time to time; but Nigerian leaders have themselves underscored the race theory of development, especially the eurocentric perspective, by being unable five decades later to extricate themselves and their country from the stranglehold of external puppeteers. For now, there are no indications that the narrative will change, or that Nigerians can begin to look forward to a future that represents a clear break from the past.

    But if Nigeria is to survive, if the past five decades and more of independence are to serve as a lesson and springboard from which to rebuild, then the county must learn the great and delicate art of producing bright and visionary leaders. The country’s many unprepared leaders have tended to pass the buck to the people, insisting that the blame for failure should be shared equitably between the ruled and the rulers. But the situation, not to say the blame, is in fact not as ambiguous as they make it look. Immediately after independence, the ruling elite took the parliamentary system of government and dashed it into pieces, blaming it for their own failures and shortcomings. Successive military regimes, enamoured of the American presidential system, also opted, in their own transition arrangements, to discard parliamentarianism completely. Yet, barely four years of the presidential system, the ruling elite again boxed themselves into a cul-de-sac, frustrated with every political system and flirting dangerously with diarchy.

    First and Second Republics, and an aborted Third Republic, soon brought the country reeling, panting and unsure of itself to a Fourth Republic. The latest republic is a product not of careful planning and political evolution, but of desperation, haste and ad hocism. By 1998, it was impossible for the country’s military rulers to go forward without a change in the ruling paradigm, having tried unskilfully to abort the process midstream in 1993. And so, a managed change was midwifed by a desperate military elite that had emasculated itself. But rather than set a free and fair template for the new republic, and quite unable to learn from the depressing experiences of the past, the military midwives again exercised a close control of the process by foisting on the country recycled leaders devoid of deep convictions or even appreciation of democracy and its processes.

    In the midst of this unremitting gloom, the country managed in 2015 to achieve a successful transition of power from one party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to another, the All Progressives Congress (APC), a feat already surpassed by some African countries. It was unprecedented in Nigeria; it was pleasantly unique. How sustainable that change will be, however, may not be known in the short term. Indeed, what remains is how to ensure the emergence of the right calibre and temper of leaders. In a country riven by primordial ethnic sentiments and fierce religious loyalties, the yardsticks for producing such leaders are not always altruistic or meritorious. Overcoming such limiting behaviours is absolutely essential for national stability and progress. After frittering away more than five precious decades during which other countries caught up with Nigeria and overtook her, that task will not be easy.

    Nigeria needs a new ethos and a new political culture. To satisfy these needs and to break the mould, new leaders with fiery intellect, deep intuitive grasp of the complex issues shaping the 21st century, and instinctive feel of the yearnings and aspirations of the people whose disparate needs are sometimes too abstract and formless to put in words, must emerge. The new leaders, detribalised and large-hearted, are the ones to act on the demands of the moment. They are the ones to drive the great processes needed to tackle the present challenges as well as brilliantly anticipate the future challenges still embedded in the womb of time. Given the intensity of the problems and challenges facing the country, not to say their complexity and ossification over time, such leaders must emerge urgently if the country is not to sink under the weight of its own contradictions and fracture irredeemably along its deep fault lines.

  • Kogi election: Where are the dissenting judgements?

    Kogi election: Where are the dissenting judgements?

    IT is inconceivable that given the extreme controversiality of the Kogi election petition there was no dissenting judgement. Yet, in the past five years, it is doubtful whether a more difficult and controversial case existed, one that desperately yearned for a great jurist to leave an extraordinary judicial imprint on the practice of law in Nigeria. But in the past nine months or so, and in respect of the James Abiodun Faleke petition in particular, and at the three levels of the election petition tribunal, Appeal Court, and Supreme Court, the eminent justices were unanimous in their decisions. That unanimity is truly intriguing, for among legal professionals everywhere, the case was touted as a difficult and puzzling one. The conclusion many commentators will draw from the judges’ unanimity is that either the lawyers who scrutinised or argued the case were overrated or the judges who decided the case had become complacently uninterested in the many juridical and intellectual possibilities the case presented to the diligent and studious.

    The judiciary has come under harsh criticism in Nigeria, with sundry allegations of either incompetence or corruption. Judicial officers have sadly done little to dispel these allegations, and contradictory judgements and seemingly flagrant abuse of rules and procedures have worsened the matter. Even the presidency, probably for narrow reasons, has been unsparing of what it describes as the inimical role the judiciary is playing in the struggle to entrench transparency, democracy and the rule of law. Indeed, what these criticisms and allegations indicate is that something is seriously amiss in the judiciary. Whether the problem is corruption, as many critics allege, or poor quality of legal education and cowardice, as friends of the judiciary fear, remains to be seen.

    That the Hon Faleke petition can pass through three judicial layers, despite the novelty of its legal circumstances, without a single dissent from any judge in the fashion of Britain’s Lord Denning or Nigeria’s Kayode Esho is truly astounding. Have the appellate courts become a bastion of camaraderie, or a haven of cowards, or a citadel of unlearned and timid judges? Yes, Nigeria is embroiled in self-made crisis as it battles mediocrity in all sectors of national life, but the country’s appellate courts used to have a reputation for courageous and learned judgements exemplified by the golden age of the Supreme Court when Justices Esho, Chukwudifu Oputa, Anthony Aniagolu, Chukwunweike Idigbe, Mohammed Bello, Adolphus Karibi-Whyte etc. passed through the land with their giant footprints.

    This column may have taken a stand almost from the beginning against the All Progressives Congress’ decision to impose/substitute Yahaya Bello in the governorship poll extended by electoral sleight of hand from November 21 to December 5, 2015, and had thought the case would present little or no complications to the judges in ensuring that justice was served. But regardless of this column’s preferences, it was expected that even if the Faleke petition would fail, surely two or three judges at the appellate levels would satisfy the country’s hunger for erudite and considered dissenting judgements enough to constitute at a later stage the bases of new laws in the fashion of Lord Denning and Justice Esho.

    Who can forget the landmark Esho dissent in the famous case of Awolowo V Shagari [1979], wherein he took very strong exceptions to the majority decision? He was barely one year in the Supreme Court at the time. But in 2016, three Election Petition Tribunal judges, five Appeal Court judges and seven Supreme Court justices sat on the Faleke petition and none dissented nor felt inspired to engage in the intellectual leisure of dissenting. What has happened to the judiciary? It is shocking that none of the justices felt the need to summon the courage to break ranks with his colleagues in the service or defence of justice. If Lord Denning could accept a ‘step down’ from the House of Lords to return to the Court Appeal in order to seize the opportunity to make judgements that would transform the law and society, what has happened to the mettle of Nigerian judges that they do not feel inspired by a sense of history?

    The opportunity to give a dissenting judgement in the novel case indicated by the Faleke petition is now lost. The onus to offer a redress will perhaps now pass to the legislature. The country may be overtaken by unremitting mediocrity, but it is hoped that somehow, a new breed of courageous and brainy judges with an eye on the future can rise to the appellate courts and begin the arduous task of restoring the glory of the Bench. That new breed is desperately needed in a country where the executive and legislative branches have dedicated themselves to undermining the cause of justice and destroying the rule of law, and the judiciary itself is too enfeebled by its many distractions to promote justice or defend the rule of law.

  • Apocalypse – Nigerian presidential elections 2015 and American presidential elections 2016

    Apocalypse – Nigerian presidential elections 2015 and American presidential elections 2016

    Apocalypse: (1) an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale;
    (2) the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation
    Dictionary.com (online)

    It was in the early hours of Tuesday, September 27, that it dawned on me that the Americans were going through exactly the same feelings of being on the edge of an apocalypse that we had felt close to the end of the campaigns for our presidential elections of 2015. Because I am currently in a time zone that is six hours ahead of the eastern seaboard of the United States, I had to stay up past 4:30 am to watch the first of the televised presidential debates of the current electoral season in America. It was after the end of the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that I began to reflect on why this debate was so portentous that I had to stay up so late to watch it. It was then that it dawned on me that as in our own elections, the whole world is also awaiting the outcome of the American elections with far more than the usual global interest in American presidential elections. Of course, the interest of the rest of the world, though much more intense than usual, is not apocalyptic. But there is no doubt whatsoever that to the Americans, just as we in Nigeria felt last year in the electoral battle between Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, the apocalypse is about to descend on their country if the wrong candidate is eventually elected.

    Apocalypse involves great, widespread and perhaps even unimaginable feelings of fear and premonition. Thus, for an event, any event, to inspire apocalyptic dread, it has to strike deep into the foundations of things that make us feel safe and secure in who we are as a people, together with our sense of our place in the scheme of things in the world. In other words, while it is normal to occasionally have feelings of anxiety and malaise about things, the balance tips over to apocalypse when we feel that one particular event or happening goes far beyond normal or typical worries and anxieties.This is precisely what the presidential elections in Nigeria 2015 did and what the American elections 2016 is doing: going over and beyond the fears and anxieties that surrounded virtually all previous elections in the political history of each country, respectively Nigeria and the United States. In choosing to reflect on this uncanny similarity in this piece, I will focus on reasons why two countries that are so dissimilar in every way imaginable can yet present us with extraordinarily similar intimations of apocalypse in electoral cycles very close in time. But before getting to this matter of speculation and reflection, it is perhaps necessary to concretely highlight the similarities themselves.

    We can very briefly recount what these uncanny similarities are. Perhaps the most interesting or portentous are the striking similarities between the candidacies of Goodluck Jonathan and Donald Trump: each presented a profoundly troubling disquiet to their own political parties, respectively the PDP and the Republican Party. Remember the mass defections from the PDP when it became clear that Jonathan was going to be the party’s candidate? Remember the melodrama of Obasanjo publicly tearing up his membership card of the party? Well, compare this to the number of very influential members of the establishment of the Republican Party that have either publicly denounced the candidacy of Trump or as a matter of fact declared their support for Hillary Clinton. Interestingly, no two persons can be as different as Jonathan and Trump in their personalities. Jonathan is as colorless as Trump is fastidiously flamboyant; and Trump is as much a bully and a thug as Jonathan was very often the victim of bullying as much within his party as among the opposition parties. And yet, consider how very similar the two men are in the use of violence and fascist tactics in their campaigns. Indeed, every time I have seen scenes of the verbal and physical violence of Trump’s supporters in his mass rallies, my mind has always gone back to the hooded paramilitary thugs who were widely deployed by Jonathan and the PDP during the campaigns of 2015.

    For me, the most pertinent similarity between the Jonathan and Trump campaigns is the fact that against the undoubted crisis that their candidacies presented to their parties, there was/is the near fanatical support that they enjoyed among large and important demographic groups in the country. On any consideration, candidates who start out with significant disapproval within their own parties ought not to be of any threat to their opponents from other political parties. But this was not the case with Jonathan last year and it is not the case with Trump now. Definitely among his own “home” base in the South-south but also among very large and important pluralities in the Southeast and parts of the North, Jonathan enjoyed zealous support that almost neutralized the disaffection of influential elements with the PDP establishment. With Trump, this factor has been extremely fascinating in that as the election cycle has moved towards the finale, his support within the base of the Republican Party has solidified, so much so that many party heavyweights that had vociferously broken with him are now either slipping into silence and quietude or are actually coming out of their shells to endorse him. This presents us with a pattern that we also saw in Jonathan’s candidacy last year in the Nigerian elections: a man widely disliked and reviled as a moral leper, as a divisive force whose stock-in-trade is the bigotry and fanaticism of his supporters around whom has coalesced large pluralities around the country that nobody, least of all the opposition, can easily dismiss or even ignore.

    The similarity that seems the most facile is not without its own significance, this being the insistence of Jonathan and his supporters last year that nothing but victory was acceptable to them and of Trump in the idea that a loss in his present effort could only come about on the basis of rigged elections. This was probably why Lester Holt who compered the debate between Clinton and Trump last Monday formally ended the event with a demand that each candidate commit to acceptance of the results of the election regardless of who the victor is. Not surprisingly, before expressing his commitment, Trump rambled for close to a minute of the two minutes given him for the question before finally and rather tepidly declaring his commitment. Please remember that when Jonathan rather very loudly accepted his defeat even before the formal declaration of Buhari as the winner had been made, the whole world was struck by surprise and relief, the surprise but not the relief extending to his supporters. There are many among Trump’s supporters who cannot – and probably will never – accept his defeat, even if the candidate himself goes quietly back into the world of his allegedly tottering business empire. If that is what happens on November 9, the day after the American elections, it would mean that apocalypse has been averted, at least for the time being. This observation leads us back to the main issue for our reflections in this piece: what are the probable reasons for these remarkable similarities between Nigeria 2015 and America 2016 in the two countries’ presidential elections?

    In responding to this question, let me quickly state that I am completely uninterested in what might be the real or probable effects of the fact that from 1999 to the present, the Nigerian political system has been based on an assiduous and rather unimaginative copy of the American presidential system. True, a copycat usually reproduces not the finer features but the maladies and inanities of the object copied or imitated. But please note that Jonathan and the crisis that his candidacy presented to the PDP took place long before Donald Trump effected his coup against the elites in the establishment of the Republican Party. This rather adventitious fact imposes on us the obligation to look for our answers in the major structural features of economy, society and polity that Nigeria shares with the United States. If we do this, the two facts that immediately spring to mind are, first, the fact that both countries are awash with a wealth that is extremely unfairly distributed and, second, the fact that both countries are extremely diverse in their racial, ethnic and demographic communities. In our closing remarks and observations, let us juxtapose these two structural features to see what we get in relation to the specter of apocalypse in each country.

    Great wealth side by side with widening circles of poverty and desperation normally spells social malaise on a large scale. When this is compounded by racial, ethnic, religious and regional differences, the crisis deepens and magnifies immeasurably. There are few countries in the contemporary world where these factors have converged as powerfully as Nigeria and the United States. True, poverty is more widely and far more “democratically” distributed in Nigeria than in America. But that is or was, the historic pattern. The contemporary world presents us with something new and rather unprecedented: considerable levels of poverty and social and economic exclusion among previously relatively more privileged communities based on race, class and gender. This is why, racism, misogyny and bigotry have been so openly displayed and used by the Trump campaign: the candidate speaks from and to a base that feels that it has lost so much ground that it has nothing to more to lose by openly baring its fangs. Please remember that Jonathan and his supporters also felt and acted the same way: in last year’s elections, the appeal to primordial, revanchist sentiments were so loud, so uncompromising in the threat of Armageddon that it seemed that no healing across the real and manufactured divisions of ethnicity and regionalism could and would be effective after the last votes in the elections had been counted. Apocalypse is the product of the depth of this crisis in the domain of electoral politics. This leads to our concluding paragraph in this piece.

    I certainly hope that Clinton emerges the victor in the elections in November. But ‘apocalypse’ takes us far beyond any reforms, any cures that electoral politics can be expected to bring to countries like Nigeria and the United States with so much injustice, so much poverty and desperation in the midst of great wealth. Apocalypse is an abstract term, an effect of language, of discourse; its closeness or distance to real conditions has to be measured and gauged case by case, location by location. Buhari won in Nigeria in 2015 and thus we shall never know whether or not Armageddon would have descended on the country if Jonathan had been declared the victor. All we know, all we can go by is the fact that so far, Buhari’s victory has not brought the relief that his supporters and the rest of the world expected from his victory. Will this be the same scenario if Clinton wins? Is the aversion of apocalypse the same as the alleviation of great and wide suffering of the tens of millions of the dispossessed? Is it at least something to be grateful for that ‘apocalypse’ is averted and we have some room for some small, incremental reforms while the looting, the injustice goes on? So many unanswered questions, compatriot.

    • Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
  • Economy: time to avoid short-termism 2

    Economy: time to avoid short-termism 2

    Countries, like individuals, that fail to save in the years of plenty are bound to suffer in the years of scarcity 

    Although the joining of various groups of Nigeria’s elite in the debate about selling national assets to weather the storm of current recession has almost pre-empted most of the points delayed for today, it is still important to put a few issues about alternatives to sale of assets in the accessible language of the average mass reader.

    With various texts and counter-texts from government circles and other elite groups in the country on the logicality of selling what is already bringing you revenue to deal with a challenge that requires a new vision of governance, fiscal innovativeness, and re-inventing the polity to fight recession, it is not clear whether citizens will still be ignored at the end by those elected to govern the country. How nice would it have been for our country to have a people’s constitution which allows for referendum on issues with such divided positions on a matter of common interest to the nation at large. With the kind of constitution by which we are governed, what happens to Nigeria’s assets at the end of the current debate should not be what those in power prefer, but what majority of citizens can tolerate.

    Back to the core of today’s column, what should the government do to reduce the pain of recession without auctioning assets that are still largely geese that lay golden eggs? If those in government approach this matter with the subtext of a narrative to win 2019 election for the same group, it may not be able to stimulate the change and sacrifice that are required to take decisions that may not be palatable at the beginning but that is likely to taste like bitter leaf or bitter kola at the end. If the government of change is to have traction, it has to let Nigerians—elite and masses—know that a desperate problem requires a desperate solution. We cannot continue to do things the way(s) they have been done since 1975 without having to resort to selling whatever we have to feed ourselves. The fundamental question is what kind of parent will sell his farm or business in order to feed his/her children? This may be a right time for the elite in particular to cut down on their consumption patterns, especially the percentage of national wealth they consume in the name of governance and to in the process provide the power of example for the average citizen to accept austerity measures in the interest of economic recovery.

    Many countries all over the world have embarked in the last few years on austerity measures to meet their budgets. Such countries include Greece, Italy, Ireland, India, Portugal, Spain. Many of the measures to cut spending in these countries focused on reduction in recurrent spending. This has been characterised by reduction of salaries for top salary earners, cutting public servants’ pay; reduction in number of government seminars; increase in tax on big corporations; freezing of public sector workers’ salary; income tax hike for heavy earners; cut in child benefits or allowances; reduction of minimum wage; cut to regional subsidies; suspension of civil servants and putting many on partial pay, rise on VAT, etc.

    In an economy so quickly knocked down by recession and a polity in which all benefits are reserved for top individuals on political and bureaucratic appointments, Nigeria cannot afford to take many of the anti-people austerity measures of Greece and Spain in particular as most of them are likely to dampen our economy further. However, there are more socially equitable ways for our governments to cut recurrent expenditures more radically than what obtains at present, 15 months after the birth of a government of change. Nigeria cannot afford to reduce minimum wage that is already too low. But we can reduce the number of government seminars and retreats, especially those taken away from the secretariat provided for such events. We can further cut foreign travels for political appointees and civil servants, just as we can reduce the number of planes in the presidential fleet to one or two. There is no reason to have up to 11 planes for presidential trips. If we want to be prudent, there is no basis for a presidential plane at this point in our economic development. Even the British Prime Minister, the world’s fourth largest economy, travels on commercial flights most of the time.

    In addition, we can do away with outlandish perks for executive, legislative, and public service officers. For example, too many top officers are still receiving ridiculous allowances for ward-robes, domestic servants, generator and diesel, special cars, drivers, housing allowances that exceed annual salaries of recipients of such benefits, many police orderlies for elected and public servants and spouses, entertainment, etc. There are moments that call for celebration in the life of countries just as there are some that call for sacrifices on the part of those in leadership positions. Most potential investors, international donors, and loan agencies are likely to find it absurd to give loans to the country to be used for pampering a select class of political and public officers. We had engaged in such profligacy for long on the excuse that money from oil was not our problem but just how to spend it. Citizens are also likely to feel outraged if we sell state assets to service expensive habits of lawmakers, ministers, commissioners, and local government chairmen. This is the time to review the culture of security votes. Citizens view this as unnecessary pork in the budget for special citizens.

    If there is need for emergency powers in respect of the economy, such power should include declaration of a state of emergency in respect of federal transfers to subnational governments. For example, instead of pushing for autonomy to local governments in the guise of a third tier of government that does not exist in most countries, this may be a good time to use economic emergency measures to limit allocations from the federation account to just the 36 or 37 state structures. State governments should be charged under the emergency measure (pending amendment of the constitution to re-join states and local governments as subnational levels of government) to be responsible for local governments as it used to be before emergence of a government model driven by oil boom.

    Moreover, the over 100 Unity Schools should be privatised and money saved from allocations to these schools pumped to improving regular public education. Similarly, after over 40 years of NYSC programme, the country is not likely to lose anything if it chooses to phase out this money- guzzling programme. If Nigeria has not been able to achieve national unity after 40 years of NYSC, it may be that there are forces (other than ignorance of the culture of the other) for such failure. At present, there are too many police-related agencies that do or attempt to do virtually the same thing: Nigeria Police Force, Federal Road Safety Commission, Vehicle Inspection Office and Civil Defence. Having many such organisations doing more or less the same thing in an economy that is cash strapped is not logical.

    The moment calls for a return to Orosanye Report on MDAs. Cutting the number of agencies that perform similar services and re-deploying their workers may help to reduce waste. Just reading names of several agencies in the country suggests an unduly bloated public service sector that gulp funds that should have gone into development: Economic & Financial Crimes Commission versus Independent Corrupt Practices & Miscellaneous Crimes Commission; Nigeria Export Promotion Council versus Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority; Federal Environmental Protection Agency versus National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency; Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria versus Nigerian Television Authority; National Agency for Science & Engineering Infrastructure versus Office for Technology Acquisition & Promotion, etc.

    There is no better time to call for sacrifice on the part of those that have been over pampered during the decades of high rents from oil. Countries, like individuals, that fail to save in the years of plenty are bound to suffer in the years of scarcity. But innocent citizens need to be protected from sharing in the blame of decades of irresponsible governance.

    Concluded

  • Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    ( Anniversary ruminations on the state of the Nigerian state)

    As Nigeria celebrates its fifty sixth anniversary this weekend in dire economic and political circumstances, it is important once again to return to the foundational blocks of the nation to see where the rains started beating us. Apart from the plague of corruption and the crisis of knowledge production, the more fundamental problem facing Nigeria is the problem of aborted nationhood or what we may benignly describe as reverse nationalism.

    Indeed, there is a sense in which it can be argued that corruption and allied ailments are the mere superstructural offshoots of the foundational crisis of aborted nationhood. The nexus of this crisis is not hard to locate. It stares at us in every department of national endeavour, even as it hobbles every heroic attempt at national self-recovery. But a nation cannot continue to exist in perpetual deferral of organic nationhood. Something is bound to give eventually. It seems as if we may be approaching the dangerous frontiers.

    A simple and elementary test of this failure of nationhood will suffice. Why is it that despite the country’s globally acclaimed prowess in the realm of imaginative exertions, be it in literature, music, fashion or even misdirected ingenuity, Nigerians, a hundred years after amalgamation and fifty six years after independence, have so far been unable to come up with powerful, conjuring myths of nationhood and imaginative tropes of togetherness which will stand the text of time and resonate beyond these shores?

    Let us get this right. We cannot continue to blame our colonial creators. It is not the business or historical remit of our colonial conquerors having created Nigeria to supply Nigerians to fill the territorial vacuum. The Europeans are not Africans in the first instance. They were not in Africa to look in for Africans or to seek out their long lost continental cousins. They were in Africa to further their own economic and historical interests. Lord Fredrick Dealtry Lugard said that much. It is historically impossible to expect the colonial thesis to provide its own logical antithesis.

    To replace genuine and authentic nationalism, Nigerians have substituted a reverse nationalism, a situation in which the myths of constituting nationalities are more powerful and alluring than the myth of a new nation forged in the smithy of harsh colonial repression and biblical suffering. In such a fractious and combustible polity, the myths of ethnic Exceptionalism trump the myths of Nigerian Exceptionalism before cancelling out each other in a violent dialogue of the deaf.

    This problem dates all the way back to our founding fathers. If only they had devoted a fraction of the imaginative and intellectual powers they had use up in protecting and projecting ethnic supremacist myths, perhaps the story of modern Nigeria would have been different. One of them famously described Nigeria as his great grandfather’s empire, a feudal antinomy which makes it intellectually impossible to imagine or conceive a modern nation-state of free citizens.

    Another, just before wading into the deadly fray, noted that Nigeria was a mere geographical expression which makes it imperative to rally your own people before embarking on federal and federating negotiations. A third avers that Nigeria is made up of people with different cultures and histories without any unifying commonality.

    The fourth a global citizen in his own right, whose long sojourn in the United States weaned him on a transnational diet of the emancipation of the Black person the world over, had even attempted to settle in Ghana which at that point in time —and thanks to a radical leadership —was seen as the rallying Mecca for the total liberation of the Black people. But upon returning to the fierce maelstrom of Nigerian politics, he too was eventually overwhelmed by the reality of ethnic particularism. As he was to be reminded, the stark differences in political habitué cannot be forgotten but must be understood and negotiated.

    In the event, there is no point in continuing to blame our founding fathers for the plight of the nation. They were products of their time and children of the midnight of the colonial state in Africa. The post-colonial state that has evolved from this colonial incubation and conquest is a violent coliseum of contending, competing, countervailing and finally colliding political, economic, cultural and spiritual interests in which no hostages are taken. And this primitive warfare takes place under the veneer of modern governance.

    The colonial envisioning of Africa did not entail a healthy respect for the historical antecedents or socio-cultural potency of the forcibly co-opted nationalities. It did not occur to them that many of these constituting nationalities were empires in their own right or vestiges of older empires with distinct personalities and different modes of apprehending and making sense of reality.

    Long after the material basis of their existence has been liquidated, long after they have become historically superannuated, the ideological apparatuses of the ancient African states boast of a lingering efficacy which suborns extant consciousness. For example, it will be considered foolish and foolhardy of a Yoruba person not to obey the dictates of the Oro cult or for an Ibo native to disavow traditional rites of passage. It is like boxing the English, the French and the Germans into a colonial cage and expecting them to achieve organic coherence overnight.

    It is thus inevitable that political, economic, cultural and spiritual baggage from the old pre-colonial formations would be brought to play in the new nation-state, creating momentous contradictions of which reverse nationalism is arguably the most outstanding product. Without any guiding lodestar or fundamental amity among the constituting nationalities about the destiny of the new nation, it is inevitable that ascendant ethnic groups will try to impose their own solution to fill the yawning vacuum.

    Yet it should also be obvious that neither ad hoc restructuring and its military and colonial fiat or force, nor hegemonic aggression and spiritual blackmail by ascendant ethnic formations have been able to rein in the polarizing and divisive tendencies hobbling the Nigerian nation-state. As a matter of fact, history has taught us that any time a hegemonic nationality has tried to impose its own solution on the National Question, it has always suffered disproportionate retribution.

    Historians will continue to debate whether Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s precipitate and swaggering move to capture the centre in 1959 and rid the modern nation-state of what he himself had described as the incubus of feudalism was strategically well-timed or well-judged. The objective reality was that it panicked the north into a repressive ferocity and brutal intolerance of opposition which eventuated in the historic final solution of January 15, 1966 spearheaded in the main by mid-ranking military officers of Igbo extraction. This in turn led to the savage revenge coup of July 1966 and the civil war which has led to the virtual obliteration of the Igbo bloc and the old tripod arrangement which provided some measure of structural equilibrium for the nation in the run up to independence.

    Every nation that fails to learn and profit from its own history is condemned to repeat the same history.    It bears repeating that in the short history of Nigeria as a nation, every nationality that has tried to impose its own solution on the colonial conundrum has always suffered immensely for its temerity and collective narcissism.

    To achieve purposeful regional coherence, class, ethnic and cultural differentiations must be summarily liquidated. Yet for all its military alertness, its political cunning and strategic wizardry, the north remains economically and politically blighted even as the spiritual hegemony of its old feudal master-class comes under an unrelenting armed critique.

    The west has lost its old cutting edge economic, cultural, technological and intellectual renaissance with its globally acclaimed educational system in tatters, its old vibrant cottage industry destroyed, its technocratic and intellectual master-class demolished and its fractious political class ever more bitterly polarized and full of splenetic rancor.

    The east having been collectively battered, has lost its old jaunty self-confidence, its expansive chutzpah, its genius for genuine innovation and has suffered a drastic erosion of goodwill. In their place is a nasty testiness among a misguided section of its elite which does not conduce to elite consensus or the urgent political re-engineering of a fractured nation. Yours sincerely must say this as somebody who grew up in an NCNC household and who suffered the attendant persecution.

    Unfortunately, it now seems to be the turn of the Ijaw nationality to be given the Nigerian treatment in addition to the massive despoliation of its land. Two years ago, snooper had cautioned this vibrant ethnic formation not to contemplate an armed resistance should it lose its noisy and jarring hegemonic pretensions to political delinquency and power naivete. The Nigerian post-colonial state is an equal opportunity terminator suffering from the old curse of its English forebear in its nascent incarnation. By the time the rubble has cleared the Ijaw nation would have suffered severe collateral damage.

    As Albert Einstein has famously observed, the surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result. Yet despite the manifest and demonstrated unprofitability to both nation and nationality, Nigerian ethnic formations have continued to fashion preferred weapons of choice in the perpetual war to capture the Nigerian state leading to endemic tension and strife when superior thinking demands a master plan to humanize and domesticate the post-colonial state in order to make it amenable to the yearnings and aspirations of the hapless citizens.

    As it is today, Nigeria is hostage to five major terroristic forces: intellectual terrorism, hegemonic terrorism, economic terrorism, spiritual terrorism and the terrorism of insurgency with each taking turns to pound both the state and the nation into submission even as they seek to mould both in their own appalling image. It is a war of all against all in which no hostages are taken and with the nation as prime hostage. No nation can survive for long in such contentious circumstances.

    Democracy might help and it ought to help. But it does seem as if democracy is no cure for reverse nationalism. As a matter of fact, democracy often exacerbates the fault lines in bitterly divided and ethnically polarized nations as the ensuing struggle for the spoils of office among victors return the nation to its ethnic particularities and regional rancour.

    This is why the argument for a drastic restructuring of the country to devolve power and responsibility from the centre makes eminent and irreproachable sense. Environmental and political structure conditions and in the last instance determines societal character and political behavior. As Durkheim famously avers, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we can be sure that the explanation is false.

    The current reflex hostility in some sections of the country to any talk about restructuring is a sign of misplaced and misguided political aggression. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many proponents of restructuring have not been able to put their case across with patriotic altruism and without a hint of vengeful grandstanding.

    The argument for restructuring is not about hatred for a particular section of the country but about love for the whole country. No section of the country can claim exemption from the tragedy that has befallen us. In a hostile environment in which ethnocide is never far away, it is only natural for people to look out for their own and to use their God-given resources and advantages to tame or negotiate the looming Leviathan while keeping others in medieval peonage. But as we have seen, this can never and will never work in a multiethnic nation with diverse people of diverse cultural and political sensibility.

    It is time for a bipartisan congregation to reexamine the structural configuration of the nation. This is the best anniversary gift anybody can give the nation at this critical conjuncture of its existence. Despite some loud mutterings and misgivings about the political and economic direction of the government, there are many who believe that President Buhari has the residual strength of character and resolve to do what is right for the nation. Happy anniversary once again.

  • Buhari and our assets

    Buhari and our assets

    Let us not eat up our children’s future

    President Muhammadu Buhari has no one to blame but himself if he is now finding it tough to get some of the things that he feels his government needs to overcome the country’s economic challenges. This is one point that would keep recurring whenever the Buhari administration is in focus and it will remain so until the government gets that magic wand to turn its fortune around in the eyes of the average Nigerian. After losing the momentum of an early start, the government now needs to do something or something fortuitously happens to return the government to the high popularity rating it enjoyed about this time last year. Don’t ask me that thing because I don’t know; but that thing must just happen for things to turn around for the government again.

    Certainly the president would not have been in this kind of quagmire if, for instance, he had taken a decision on his presidential jets some months back. We had known long before he was sworn in that this country cannot afford the luxury of 10 presidential jets, whether now or at the time those jets were acquired and, given the low profile nature of the president, we also had thought those were some of the things he would do away with on assumption of office. That it has taken him this long to be mooting an idea that he should have implemented a long time ago, is part of the reasons he would need all the angels in heaven standing surety for him that we would not regret concurring to his idea of selling some of the country’s assets.

    The president made his intention to secure emergency powers from the National Assembly known a few weeks back. Whether he would get that or not is still in the womb of time. Now, he has his eyes on some of our national assets that his government intends to sell to get some foreign currency to shore up the country’s finances. From the angry reactions across the country, that would appear dead on arrival. Not a few see the move as being in the best interest of a few rich Nigerians, especially as Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has added his voice to those calling for the sale of the assets. It would be double whammy for the country if some of those still keeping some of our stolen patrimony are able to buy these assets.

    The fact is, President Buhari has a major weakness, and it is not clear whether any of his aides has the temerity to tell him this. Many Nigerians think he is parochial and that his major decisions are products of this parochialism. Former President Goodluck Jonathan had the same problem and this could be understood because he had all his education in his region. It would appear that the former president had the opportunity of leaving that axis only when he went to Iresi (formerly in Oyo State but now Osun State) for his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Scheme. As a matter of fact, it is being whispered in pepper soup joints and even informed circles that some of these people close to President Buhari would be his undoing if he did not separate from them before it is too late.

    I was on the same page with him on the need to set aside some extant laws, like the Procurement Act, which makes government transactions or contracts to take at least six months to scale through. We do not need such laws now. Some things had to be fixed as early as yesterday; the extant Procurement Act cannot achieve such purpose. But on sale of national assets, especially the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Company, I beg to disagree, at least for two reasons. One, the government has not given Nigerians the benefit of the doubt that it is on top of the economic issues and that selling the assets is the only way out. Second, what happens should something go wrong and we are unable to get the anticipated benefits after the assets have been sold?

    Some of the people who support selling the assets, apart from those who might be eyeing them, in one-on-one discussions cannot tell you that this and this are what they have seen of the Buhari government in the last 16 months to give us the guarantee that the idea will succeed. Whilst they acknowledge that failure after the assets had been sold would be catastrophic, they only keep supporting their position with theories or the argument that some countries did it in the past. We would be treading a suicidal path if that is all we need to give the government the go-ahead to sell these cash cows.

    One other question I have always asked since the idea was mooted is: what could have happened had a rapacious government like that of Dr Jonathan’s thought in this direction and had sold the assets and the proceeds shared among the gluttons in his government and their cronies? Would President Buhari simply surrender helplessly instead of looking elsewhere for solution to the problems? The point is that national assets, especially the ones still yielding good dividends for the country, like the NLNG should not be thrown up for sale just because of momentary challenges. “Tough times”, as they say, “don’t last”; only tough people do. President Buhari might mean well; but, government and governance is not about a good man. Even with a very good man, things might not go as planned. This is the main reason I will continue to oppose the sale of the core assets.

    Some will oversimplify the matter by comparing it with that of a father who could not pay his child’s school fees but has some assets. They say it is not a bad idea for the man to sell such assets in order to pay the school fees. There could be some sense in this; but it is also going to be based on the assumption that the child would face his or her studies squarely and pass at the end of the day. Moreover, even for the brightest students, some examinations might not be a true test of their ability. At any rate, even if the child fails in the long run, the result would be that he and his immediate family members would bear the consequence. With regard to selling of national assets, we are talking about the fate of no fewer than 170 million Nigerians, excluding those unborn, that are inextricably tied to these assets. That is too huge to gamble with.

    The Buhari government must reflect deeply on this issue. Forget this talk of making provision for buyback; the person who bought a good asset is not likely to want to surrender it just like that. Perhaps it would have been a different thing if we are in a country where leaders are punished for corruption or failed policies. President Jonathan is still moving about freely despite the whole lot of atrocities perpetrated during his administration. If tomorrow, there is a meeting of the National Council of State, he would join his colleagues, some of whom also played ignoble roles that led us to where we are.

    It is sad, so sad that we are contemplating selling some of our national assets just to raise $15-20 billion. All those responsible for this mess should bury their heads in shame. This amount is too small for a big country like Nigeria that has raked in billions of dollars over the past three decades from crude oil to lose sleep over or dissipate energy on. But what did we do with the proceeds? Honestly I think we should be getting to the point where we call people to account for their stewardship. It is not just to answer to corruption charges because the people who left us this bare should not go scot free. We can only imagine the extent of damage they have done if we are able to calculate the social cost of their ineptitude or corruption. Nigeria is not the only crude producer affected by the slump in oil prices; but it appears we are the most irresponsible and the worst hit of the lot because we never saved for the rainy day during the era of boom. We had visionless and cruel rulers who cared only about themselves and behaved as if they never knew we could come to grief should there be crude price slump again, despite the fact that we have had some shocks in the past occasioned by the same reason.

    As this paper said in its editorial on the issue, President Buhari should make haste slowly. He should not crash into a trailer while running away from an ordinary bicycle because that is what we would get if things do not turn out as expected after the government would have sold the assets. We have taken the future of unborn Nigerians for granted too far and for too long. Those who want to rest in peace in their graves should not toy with it any further.

  • Prayer for our nation

    In my early years of travelling out of country, I never ceased to be amazed about the level of our underdevelopment compared with that of many other countries. I could understand that of the developed nations, but not that of many developing countries on the continent and some others who we have no basis not being better than.

    I remember always writing about my experiences and lamenting how we were not making enough progress to match our status as a supposed giant of Africa, but I have since stopped, to save myself the agony of the depressing comparisons.

    Though I no longer write about our shameful lack of basic infrastructures, my secret prayer has always been that the present and future governments in the country will make up for the past mismanagement of our resources by implementing projects that will make our country the desired destination on the continent.

    On a recent trip to Rwanda and stopover in Qatar, I was again reminded of our infrastructural deficiencies in terms of power supply and good airport. During a week stay in Rwanda, a country which about 12 years ago experienced genocide that left the country in shambles, I and some Nigerian colleagues looked out endlessly for generators. Electricity supply did not go off for a minute.

    We travelled seamlessly from Kigali the capital to Lake Kivu on the border with Democratic Republic of Congo on a long winding road without having to contend with pot holes. The road had street light.

    If a small country like Rwanda, without oil revenue like ours, could get its acts right and make itself a major tourist destination, why can’t we do much more. Why should Rwanda have a national airline and we don’t have one?

    For a trip to the United States, we had to fly Qatar Air which meant a stopover in Doha, the country’s capital. The airport is undoubtedly world class with none of our airports comparable to it.

    Qatar is an oil-producing country like Nigeria. From what I could see of the small country, oil is indeed a blessing not a curse like ours.

    I can go on lamenting the bad fate that has befallen us over the years but the independence anniversary marked yesterday is yet another opportunity to pray for a better future for our country. There is a lot to pray for about our country.

    We sure need good leaders that can take us to our desired promised land.

    More than ever before, our economy is troubled and we need solutions that can take us out of the recession we have found ourselves.

    The level of insecurity in the country is alarming with kidnappers and other criminals having a field day.

    The second stanza of our national anthem is a very apt prayer for all to always sincerely recite and take necessary steps to accomplish.

    Oh God of creation, direct our noble cause

    Guide our leaders right

    Help our youth the truth to know

    In love and honesty to grow

    And living just and true

    Great lofty heights attain

    To build a nation where peace and justice                              shall reign.

    Yes we must pray, but prayer without work, according to the scripture, is death. Prayers in the words of Bishop David Oyedepo will not replace planning.

    The choice is ours.

  • Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria? – Resuming a forgotten debate (4)

    Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria? – Resuming a forgotten debate (4)

    The following was the last paragraph in this column last week: “Obviously, we have traveled or strayed far from the paths indicated by those debates. Indeed, anyone who, upon reading all the relevant documents in those debates, claims that she or he could have anticipated an extremely unregenerate and unjust capitalism in which mega-looters and their defenders dominate the political order, the national economy and the judicial system would be hard put to defend that claim. So: how did we get here and how can we get out of it? If there are no simple answers to this question, this does not mean that there are no answers at all. This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.”

    I think it is productive to begin this week’s column with an online reader’s comment that I deem a fit and proper launching pad for the concluding piece in the series. Here’s the short comment, quoted in full because of its brevity and succinctness: “My dear Prof., you may as well help us to (sic) with those documents because I know you have them. But in case you don’t, I know you know people who have them. Thanks for your ever illuminating pieces”.

    In response to this reader’s comment, I say that both the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions can be downloaded via the Internet. So also can the 1989 Constitution whose Chapter 2 is very similar to the Chapter Two of the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions. Readers may also wish to download the American Constitution in order to avail themselves of the following very pertinent fact: The American Constitution is only 12 pages long. Now, if you add the supplement of Amendments that were ratified (27) and those not ratified (dozens), together with historical and philological notes on the background of these amendments, the entire document is 85 pages long. But the essential document itself is only 12 pages long. In fact, the Constitution of the United Kingdom is zero pages long – since it does not exist in a written form. By contrast, none of our own Constitutions is less than 153 pages long. The reason for this is the fact that while philosophers, businessmen and inventors greatly outnumbered lawyers in the drafting of the American Constitution,overwhelmingly the drafters or “writers” of our Constitutions were lawyers who believe, quite erroneously, that the longer and more cumbersome any legal document is, especially a Constitution, the more “legal” it is. This is an absurd tautology, this idea that something is more legal because its length seems to make it more legal! But that is how in general the law, with notable exceptions, operates in our country – as an instrument, not for illumination but for mystification. As to our online reader’s query about how and where to get the Minority Report of 1976 produced by Drs. Segun Osoba and the late Bala Usman, while it is widely discussed in articles easily available on the Internet, I have not found any downloadable versions on the Internet. Fortunately, Dr. Osoba is still alive and well and I promise to approach him soon to see if he has a personal copy of that document.

    I have a reason for the sarcastic comment that I have just made about lawyers in the preceding paragraph: I want to start with the law in my final reflections in this series on whether or not capitalism can or should be reformed in our country in a future historical path of evolution away from the extremely backward, cannibalistic capitalism in force in Nigeria at the present time. But before I give my thoughts on the law as the very first item on the agenda of reform, permit me for one last time in this series to explain why the very subject of reforming capitalism is neither my or anybody’s pipe dream nor a waste of time in pursuit of a lost or unworthy cause.

    In this series, I have in mind three particular groups of readers. First, I have in mind self-identified socialists, Marxists, Leftists and revolutionaries. Some of them, especially those of the older generation, are my friends, comrades and acquaintances. In general, they hardly ever talk of capitalism – except to denounce it. Moreover, they denounce capitalism in very vague or generalized terms, without any differentiations as to which capitalism they have in mind, especially with regard to the kind of capitalism in force in our country at the present time in contrast with the past. I remind them that this did not use to be the practice in the past – as they will find out if they go back to the documents I cited in last week’s column. And I ask them to remember that reform is not an end but a beginning, a possibility for deeper renewal and development.

    The second and third groups of people I have in mind in writing this series are, first, progressives, democrats, patriots and decent and humane people who do not apply any ideological labels to themselves and, second, compatriots who as a matter of fact and principle, do call themselves capitalists and are fierce opponents of socialists and Marxists. I have met many of these two types of Nigerians and actually have close friends, relatives and acquaintances among them. In my opinion, they have all rather become more complacent than they used to be. For instance, it is a long time that I have seen or read either a robust defense of capitalism or a critique of the kind of capitalism dominant in our country at the present time. Again, this is a departure from what used to be the practice in the past in this country, a past that is not so distant in time from the present moment. In fairness, we do occasionally get criticisms of aspects of the capitalism of these years and decades of the rule of the PDP and the APC, aspects like wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and public utilities that has massively and very cheaply transferred their ownership to a few Nigerians, without in the least improving the quality of products and services rendered. But these criticisms are never extended to capitalism as a whole with regard to how the political economy, the fiscal and monetary policies of government at federal and state levels, relations with foreign-owned multinational corporations doing business in our country and the law in general and the criminal justice system in particular all work together at the present time to make what I call Capitalism Nigerianaone of the worst, if not the very worst of capitalisms in the whole world.

    I have only a modest proposal to offer as a conclusion to this series and it concerns reforms that are not only necessary but that, for once in a long, long time, seem at last to be within our reach. Thus, with the systemic and structural framework outlined above in mind, I see the law and the criminal justice system as pivotal with regard to the all-important question of what to do, and how to stop the super-exploitation, the looting frenzy, the untold suffering and hardship of the vast majority of the Nigerian peoples across the length and breadth of the land. Reform of the law and the criminal justice system in our country is a desirable end in itself,but it has the added advantage that if the reform can be successfully carried out, it will redound to benefit of the system as a whole. Let me be very clear and concrete on this point.

    Most Nigerians do not know this, but by far the greatest acts of “looting” going on in our country are being perpetrated, not by the mega-looters- as incorrigibly menacing to the national economy as they are – but by policies through which around 70% of the budgets of all the governments in the country go to so-called recurrent expenditures while only 30% are allocated to capital expenditures. In plain language, the salaries, emoluments and allowances being paid are far in excess of actual services being rendered. As a result of this, the cost of governance in our country is one of the highest in the world; it is one of the most uneconomic among the fiscal policies sustaining all the national capitalisms of the planet. If only half of what is consumed annually in cost of governance is used to create employment for the masses of Nigerians, the multiplier effect on the national economy would be incalculably high. (Remember, apart from the federal government, we have thirty-six states in the country – thirty-six mini-states!) This is completely unacceptable, but as long as mega-looting not only exists but thrives, the popular demandfor, and the national will to reform capitalism in Nigeria will never be sufficiently mobilized to take on this much bigger source of looting and wastage in the APC’s Nigeria.

    There is also the fact that as regrettable as this may be, it is nonetheless true that most Nigerians are far more outraged by mega-looting than “looting” via the immensely bloated cost of governance. Fortunately for us, the law in general and the criminal justice system in particular are the only things blocking a permanent end to mega-looting with impunity in our country.Against this trend, The Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) is gradually aiding the Buhari administration’s hugely popular war against corruption and the mega-looters in the law courts. And an internal war is raging within the Bar and the Bench as to where the winds will blow: business as usual and the status quo; or reform to bring criminal justice in our country in line with the justice system in the more benign capitalist systems in diverse nations around the world. It will be a very different Nigeria the day mega-looters are made not only to cough up their stolen loot but to suffer punitive, deterrent justice for their crimes against the nation and the national economy.

    At this point, I would like to use the analogy of medical science with regard to treating cancer itself and treating the severely high fevers often caused by cancer to illustrate the point that I am making here about reforming the law and the criminal justice system and reforming the bloated and severely uneconomic cost of governance in our country. The corrupt and compromised criminal justice system is the “fever”; the unregenerate and extremely wasteful cost of governance made possible by the rentier state and its clients in the thirty-six states of the country is the “cancer”. As surgeons and physicians know, you must first bring down the fever before attempting to deal with the cancer, otherwise the patient may die on the operating table before surgical operation on the cancer has even started. To extend this analogy of cancers and fevers a bit, it sometimes happens that a minor but aggressively opportunistic disease may kill the patient before either the fever and/or the cancer does: a bad cold; pneumonia; a bad fall caused by the extreme physical exhaustion and debilitation of the patient. There are many such symbolic social diseases lurking around the cancerous, fevered body politic of the nation – ethnic militias; religious bigotry and fanaticism; extreme feminization of poverty; a whole generation of restless youths without any prospects in the present or hopes for the future. Please, treat the “fever” quickly and successfully before any of these other opportunistic ailments finish us off.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Economy: time to avoid short-termism (1)

    Economy: time to avoid short-termism (1)

    But selling part of remaining public assets, especially those that bring revenue to the government does not seem logical

    Whether one belongs to the school of thought that problems arising from economic recession are exaggerated by political enemies of President Buhari or to the group that believes Nigeria has never had it so bad, since the era of Essential Commodities, it is hard for the average citizen to ignore or dismiss negative impact of collapse of the value of the naira or of failure of many states to pay salaries to workers on physical or social health of citizens.

    It is therefore not surprising that various interest groups have become enthusiastic in proffering solutions to the country’s post-election economic problems. But if there is any caution that must be taken by those holding the levers of power, it is to avoid any decision that replays the country’s political game of short-termism or lack of capacity to endure delayed gratification as they re-invent the country’s laggard economy.

    Any decision making that reacts solely to effect(s) and ignores cause(s) of the country’s current situation is also likely to opt for palliatives when what is needed is total cure of whatever has been ailing the country’s political and economic planners for several decades. It should not be hard for rational observers to realise that Nigeria is in the present economic mess, not only because of decline in oil price and the reckless corruption of the past sixteen years but also because those who ruled Nigeria since 1975 have been pre-occupied with creating a polity and economy that collect rents to spend on bottle-feeding various levels of governments and their managers, rather than investing in stimulation of productive domestic economy. How else does any rational person explain creation of 37 money-guzzling state and 774 local government bureaucracies in addition to a federal bureaucracy that is the largest in Africa?

    If development was part of the vision of past rulers, how does one explain the inability of governments since 1975 to produce more than 5,000 megawatts of electricity to meet energy-  needs of a country of almost 200 million people? If past leaders were interested in making necessary sacrifice for a better future for citizens, why was there no commitment to providing rail transportation to move goods and services for 200 millions of people? Why would any sane person be surprised or alarmed in 2016 that millions of youths are not employed when the infrastructure that could lead to creation of jobs in the formal and informal sectors was ignored and money that could have been used to provide such infrastructure stolen and carted to Switzerland, London, Luxembourg, New York, and even Panama? Having invoked Epicureanism as the guiding philosophy of governance for decades, it is now imperative that suggestions from various political and economic stakeholders be viewed very critically.

    After discountenancing those who make a career of demonising the fight against corruption while making a religion of urging the Buhari administration to take the economy back to what it was in the days of Goodluck Jonathan without worrying about failure of past governments to prevent this mess, suggestions on how to end or reduce the pain of the current recession can be broken into two categories: calls for foreign loans and for sale of the country’s assets. Each of the two suggestions believes that the situation cannot be left as it is without endangering the lives of millions of citizens and causing collapse of many of the few manufacturing companies that are still active. Both groups are aware of the imperative of diversification which had been a mere slogan for years. Those proffering solutions also know that the incubation period for turning agricultural produce and solid minerals into foreign exchange earners cannot be less than 24 months. Also, they know that producing enough electricity to power agricultural production will require 24 months. In addition, both schools of thought regarding how to finance economic recovery have no doubt that building railway and roads to facilitate economic diversification will require about 24 months.

    In President Buhari’s assurances to world leaders recently in New York, he made it clear that his government is interested in taking foreign loans to use for driving diversification, assuring the international community that such loans would not be available to looters, an assurance that must have recalled the misuse of past loans for which Nigeria sought debt relief during Obasanjo’s presidency. President Buhari in particular said in New York that loans would be used for capital projects that can bring revenue to pay back such loans.

    But at home, members of his government—legislative and executive, including state governors are echoing calls by the business community for sale of government assets, especially in the oil and gas sector. This call is reminiscent of the culture of doing anything or everything to avoid delayed gratification in the process of change, a political system that quickly brought the country to its knees, once a substantial drop in revenue from petroleum occurred. Sale of government property is not new in the country. Just a few years ago, NITEL was sold and substantial parts of the country’s energy company, PHCN, were also sold to Nigerians with deep pockets. It is on record that these public assets were not doing well in the hands of government.

    But selling part of remaining public assets, especially those that bring revenue to the government does not seem logical. Selling such assets to local and foreign money bags is more likely to add to loss of direly needed revenue in the long run. Even with the argument that government can buy such assets back when its situation improves, the call for assets sale does not make sense, especially as buying back such assets from speculators would be with huge interest. The government might as well take loans with interest to fund projects that can generate revenue with which to pay back such loan, while it continues to earn revenue from existing assets.

    Without doubt, neoliberalism is the reigning ideology of the 21st century in most countries. It is therefore understandable that people with diverse backgrounds including business and lawmaking are calling for sale of Nigeria’s assets. Such call is in character with neoliberal ideology. But it is not in the interest of the country to allow private sector leaders to convert the interest of the state to their own, on the excuse of the government’s desperate need for more funds to repair a troubled economy. Sale of state assets, disguised as protecting economic development, may not be about Nigeria’s progress as much as it may be about vested interests of owners of capital. With commitment by the newish government to diversify the economy through modernisation of agriculture and mining, the sky seems to be the limit for the private sector with respect to acquiring pieces of the new pie to grow from economic diversification. Existing revenue generating assets of the country should continue to be used by government to generate revenue to meet some of the country’s needs, while looking for more creative ways to access funds toward economic recovery.

    The debate about how to respond to the current recession must not be left solely in the hands of businessmen, partisan lawmakers, and governors besotted to easy funds from the federation account, most of whom failed to read the handwriting on the wall in respect of gyrations in the oil market. This column, though not written by an economist, had been warning about the oil and the future of Nigeria since 2012. As successful as many of private sector leaders and politicians calling for sale of assets may be, the role of professional economists in this debate is crucial at this time. It is regrettable that there is no Obafemi Awolowo to bring reasoned and well researched argument to this debate. But the cerebral economists left in the university and other places need to throw light on right choices for the country, before the politics of short-term gains or benefits is made to lead the country into taking another decision that may not serve the interest of citizens in the long run.

    • To be continued

     

  • Falling behind and stumbling forward

    Falling behind and stumbling forward

    The summit of human knowledge is self-discovery through constant self-examination. While some societies are quite adept at meeting the great expectations of their people, others are notorious for breaking the heart of their citizens. Dear readers, what you are about to read was written in 2004. It was in response to the promise by the Americans at the beginning of the century to put human beings on Mars by the year 2030.

    Sixteen years later, there is nothing to suggest that the Americans are daunted or fazed by their single-minded scientific resolve to perform the greatest human miracle of all time. Having conquered the world as we know it, there is nothing left for the Americans to prove, except the possibility of humanity conquering extraterrestrial space. Very soon some Americans will land on Mars.  Please permit me to quote from the earlier script.

    “In some strange ways, we have come to the end of history, and the nation-state paradigm is about to exhaust its possibilities. America has become the ultimate nation. Nothing underscores the nature of America’s total dominance and the reality of its mega-powerdom than the fact that at the last count two former rulers of sovereign nations are its unwilling guests, making nonsense of the very notion of the nation-state and its hallowed apparatuses.

    There may be more in the kitty before the end of the decade. Noriega and Saddam Hussein may be former American thugs but they would have learnt to rue the day they cocked a snook at their former masters. The Americans are bored, having dealt with all the challenges to their authority and global supremacy. Like a monstrous super heavy weight boxer who has beaten all challengers black and blue, Uncle Sam now relishes a fight with outer nature itself and its robotized machines.

    It is a moot point to argue that the money to be spent on this venture could have lifted all human societies from the abyss of poverty and deepening immiseration. But that is against the logic of history and human nature. Let the dead bury the dead. It is better to stumble forward than to wobble backward. If America courts disaster, it does so on behalf of all humanity, whether as involuntary spectators or as active participants”.

    When this was written in 2004, there was no Barack Obama as a presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, not to talk of President Barack Obama.  Obama was a junior senator learning the rope with hope and audacity. But since then America has broken a centuries old taboo by electing twice its first president of African American extraction. If the Americans were to elect Hilary Clinton as their first female president in the November election, they would have broken another centuries old taboo.

    Why then would the Americans not be in Mars? In one concentrated burst of history, America has broken through seemingly impregnable fortresses of racial prejudice and gender bias, even if at the merely symbolic level. As this column loves to quote, there are decades when nothing happens and there are periods when decades happen. No country can survive without constant self-rejuvenation and ceaseless self-invention. America, for all its manifest faults, its crass materialism and the constant possibility of backsliding, is a classic example of relentless striving towards a more perfect nation.

    For those interested in a tale of two nations, the history of Nigeria during this period cannot be more startling in the intriguing paradoxes it throws up. Nigeria has been famously described as a country where the best never happens, but where the worst portents also never occur. Nigeria is a nation of legendary luck. Like a punch-drunk heavy weight boxer, Nigeria may wobble and stumble in the ring, but each time it hits the canvas, its power of recovery has been a tad short of the miraculous.

    When what follows was being written in 2004, Nigeria had just managed to survive a badly rigged federal election which returned General Obasanjo to office. The loser was none other than the current President. So egregiously rigged was the election that the usually perceptive Chief Sunday Awoniyi observed with gnomic wisdom that the atmosphere had been so badly fouled, so comprehensively besmirched, that something good must come out of the pervasive electoral rot.

    This was followed in 2007 by an even more sensationally rigged election in which the declared winner openly acknowledged his own suspect legitimacy by setting up an electoral reform panel. But what Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya famously described as the National Riggers’ Theatre was yet to act out its full script. The 2011 election was met with such savage reprisal and wanton destruction in the north that for a moment, the continued survival of the nation was called to question.

    Yet in 2015, Nigeria managed to achieve a momentous regime change through the ballot box which has never happened in the history of the nation. In the interval, Nigeria has survived a full scale religious insurgency which has put the corporate existence and survival of the country to its stiffest test since the civil war. In fact large swathes of the north east of the country were overrun and occupied by the vicious sect.

    But as we are discovering to our peril, elections, however historic, do not resolve some fundamental questioning of the nation. In fact they often exacerbate it. In the glorious aftermath of the 2015 elections, Nigeria has reverted to its default line of endemic crises and conflicts. With the two major parties fracturing before our very eyes in a cesspit of intrigues and treachery, with the judiciary under siege, with the legislature under the spell of delinquency, with the economy in critical straits and with ethnic and regional rancor embroiling the polity, Nigeria has never been more divided and polarized in its entire history.

    The national demons are here with us once again. This is the most critical conjuncture in the history of the country. Suddenly, we seem to have arrived at the epoch of zero-party politics or no party formation.  It is a sign of revolutionary anomie. Will our legendary luck hold once more?