THIS column assumes that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) cleared the re-launched national re-orientation campaign thematically anchored on Change Begins With Me, and that in particular President Muhammadu Buhari was briefed and was satisfied with the programme of action drawn up by the Ministry of Information, the campaign’s owner and parent. As many commentators, critics and supporters of the re-launched campaign have indicated, the All Progressives Congress (APC) government will not be the first to embark on a campaign to change public attitude to life, governance and public service. And so whether ethical revolution or national orientation, Nigerian governments are skilful in producing slogans and mantras whose conceptual foundations are sometimes amateurish and often war against facts and reality.
On Thursday, the president kick-started the campaign with what some commentators have described as a rousing, appropriate speech on attitudinal change and re-orientation. If the reader is accustomed to scratching the surface of things, with little or no taste for plumbing the depths of complex and enigmatic issues, the speech is a satisfying piece of elocutionary barnstorming. It could of course be improved here and there, and more syntactic grace added to imbue it with life and resonance, but it fared no worse than the blather even Shakespeare himself unloaded upon his customers. It is the curse of the Ministry of Information that with every change in government, and with no one able to exorcise the ghost of superficial change created and unleashed by the Shehu Shagari presidency in the 1980s, its ministers find it compelling to concoct boondoggles of their own.
There is nothing wrong with campaigns, for one way or the other there will always be campaigns to change anything disagreeable, either by force or by moral suasion. It is to the credit of many past governments, and indeed President Buhari who once embraced coercive change, that they seemed reluctant to employ genocidal tools in midwifing change like the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia did. Therefore, no amount of criticism, ridicule or resistance can dissuade the Ministry of Information, either under a conservative or progressive government, from indulging its romantic pastime of campaigning for attitudinal change. It is a waste of time to try. But if they exercise their right to formulate campaigns, especially on the back of the nation’s money, critics also reserve the right to draw attention to the futility of the exercise. The campaigns failed in the past, though they were sometimes backed by force or propaganda; there is nothing now to indicate they stand any chance of success.
The Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Kar, coined a fitting epigram in the 19th century to capture the wastefulness and futility of such idealistic campaigns. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même, he moaned. Roughly translated as ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same”, it suggests that when change comes at all, it sometimes does so gradually and incrementally, almost imperceptibly. Yet, whether revolutionary or incremental change, over the centuries and from the experience of many nations, the status quo has yielded only few inches to the most assertive campaigner. Ask Napoleon Bonaparte; and ask Karl Marx. If the life and ideals of revolutionaries do not convince you, then ask Britain itself, that most famous of conservative nations whose political system, not to say its unwritten constitution, stands as a palladium of immovable change and stifling, suffocating status quo.
If President Buhari and the Information ministry have learnt anything from the failures of the past, they have not admitted the rest of the country into that secret. Perhaps when the Information minister finally deconstructs the whole exercise, more Nigerians will become persuaded. But so far, there is little room for optimism. Given all that the president has said on the impending campaign to re-orient national attitudes and values, it is hard to see what indeed has changed — no pun intended. There is nothing in the president’s speech, absolutely nothing, to suggest that anyone in the executive arm or the ministry attempted a fundamental appreciation of the problem they hoped would yield to their ethical assault. Without a conceptual statement of the problem, and with apparently no conceptual tools to transform the intended change from its limiting and metaphoric existence, how on earth do they hope to create a new and ideal society?
President Buhari merely restated the symptoms of Nigeria’s diseased past and present. But the nation ought to have got a gleamer of understanding of what he thinks is really the problem with the national attitude. Had he been able to fairly accurately state the conceptual foundation of the issues that war against the needed new national ethos, Nigerians might be fairly confident that the solution they dream about would not remain the chimera past governments had embraced and choked on for nearly 60 turbulent years.
Here is the president’s prognosis. “There is no doubt that our value system has been badly eroded over the years. The long-cherished and time-honoured, time-tested virtues of honesty, integrity, hard work, punctuality, good neighbourliness, abhorrence of corruption and patriotism, have given way in the main to dishonesty, indolence, unbridled corruption and widespread impunity.
“The resultant effect of this derailment in our value system is being felt in the social, political and economic sphere. It is the reason that some youths will take to cultism and brigandage instead of studying hard or engaging in decent living; it is the reason that some elements will break pipelines and other oil facilities, thus robbing the nation of much-needed resources; it is the reason that money belonging to our commonwealth will be brazenly stolen by the same public officials to whom they were entrusted; it is the reason a motorist drives through red traffic lights, it is the reason many will engage in thuggery and vote-stealing during elections; it is part of what has driven our economy into deep problem out of which we are now working hard to extricate ourselves. Every one of us must have a change from our old ways of doing things, we cannot fold our arms and allow things to continue the old way.
“We must resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship, pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country for so long. Let us summon a new spirit of responsibility, spirit of service, of patriotism and sacrifice, Let us all resolve to pitch in and work hard and look after, not only ourselves but one another, What the current problem has taught us is that we cannot have a thriving army of rent seekers and vested interests, while the majority suffers.”
Nigerians have never been in doubt how their country’s ills manifest symptomatically. Nor have they ever lacked adequate platitudes to hurl at the combustible follies and foibles that manifest as their country’s soft underbelly. What befuddle them, on the contrary, are the conceptual foundations of those ills, and how to engineer the right tools to combat them. Driving through red lights is a little part of the symptoms, certainly not on a scale anyone should consider a major problem. Embezzling public funds is done everywhere, and majority of people would steal or cheat if half the chance offers itself; the difference in Nigeria is the quantum, a quantum that is symptomatically enabled and driven by impotent institutions. Political malfeasance is not Nigeria’s exclusive preserve, nor is it the cause of the ills a re-orientation programme can affect with platitudinous change. For every problem the president has identified, there is nothing in it remotely suggesting amenability to the balm of re-orientation he and the Information ministry wishes to apply.
It is of course possible to strengthen institutions and identify better law enforcement methods to curb many of the tendencies the president identified in his speech last week. But neither he nor those whooping for his speech will get the new society they so wishfully dream about just because they have managed to tackle many of the ills afflicting the society. When President Shagari concocted his ethical revolution, he also inundated the country with platitudes, scratched the surface of the ills and assailed them with half-hearted ethical regimen. No government since then, not President Buhari when he was military head of state with his War Against Indiscipline (WAI), nor ex-head of state Ibrahim Babangida with his Mass Mobilisation for Social Justice, Self Reliance and Economic Recovery (MAMSER), nor yet Sani Abacha whose dissoluteness wholly and powerfully counteracted his rebranded War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC) campaigns. In his speech, President Buhari scoffs at the ‘theoretic’ exercise of fighting societal ills, probably suggesting that the problem transcended the clumsy theorising of arm-chair idealists. But whatever he has said so far has not given any indication he and his fellow programmers even have a practical appreciation of the problem or the tools to tackle it.
This columnist has said it repeatedly, but has unfortunately been misunderstood, that what ails Nigeria fundamentally is that neither the government nor the people have a vague, not to talk of clear, concept of Nigeria, and so cannot think of developing a distinct Nigerianness so sorely needed. This terrible detachment has created a vacuum that is being filled by all manner of crazy schemes, including the jaundiced ambition of ethnic and religious irredentists, and the cracked and distorted dreams and visions of myopic politicians and leaders. On this page, President Buhari had often been advised to first produce a concept of the country he wishes to lead and to bequeath. He has not done it. Instead, by a combination of suspect anodynes and jaded templates, he has foisted upon himself, and by extension the nation, a close-knit structure of aides and advisers so insular as to be unable to conceive and enthrone the breathtaking expansiveness and ideology a modern, multicultural and heterogeneous society needs to thrive and function.
There is no statesman, no great leader, no man with a sense of history, who has affected his nation or empire so thoroughly as President Buhari hopes to do with Nigeria, judging from his speech on re-orientation, that has not first formulated and injected into the body politic a fundamental concept of his country. It is that concept that will form the pivot on which everything without exception turns. It is that concept that differentiates the French from other Europeans, the German from the rest, the Briton from other Islanders, the American, Russian etc from yet other peoples. And it is on such a concept that the exceptionalism of great nations is built and nurtured. If the president and his Information ministry still can’t understand this, then let them go and read the history they have avoided and despised for so long, the history so near under their noses that it emits the fame and raison d’etre of the Oyo Empire, Sokoto Caliphate, Benin Empire, Kanem-Bornu Empire, and so many more.
In forming Nigeria, the British spurned the lessons of the nation-building cataclysm (the Spring of Nations) that convulsed Europe in 1848. They, therefore, carved Nigeria after their own disingenuous expediencies, eviscerated the country of the proud, independent and gifted souls that gave its peoples hope and being, and distorted this country’s noble histories midwifed through the magnifying glasses of the iconic Oduduwa, the scholarly Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, the audacious Alafin Abiodun, the extraordinary Tsoegi, the enigmatic Mai Idris Alooma, and the celebrated Eweka I, etc. The vacuum thus created has become so deep and encompassing that it is difficult to see how campaigns and platitudes will reform a police force so poorly funded that it cannot but be evilly inventive in resolving their financial woes, a military force built on the retrogressive tradition of lording it over the people in all manner of depressing abnormalities, a civil service treated contemptibly and brusquely by the ruling class and must fend for itself outside the law, an unfeeling political class that seeks advantage over one another, even if elections had to be ingeniously postponed, and health and education systems so barren and disconnected from the people that its functionaries are incapable of embracing any other ambition but that of self.
The national re-orientation campaign theme is ‘Change Begins With Me’. However, reading through the president’s speech, and extrapolating from what the Information ministry might be doing or contemplating, the government really hopes the campaign would begin not with the rulers, but with the ruled. The ‘Me’ in their campaign is a subterfuge. But whether the campaign begins with those in office or the hapless people subjected to gross misrule, both the rulers and the ruled would be chasing a chimera if they do not appreciate that no change can take place of the quality and structure they campaign for until Nigeria knows who it is (identity) and what its ambitions in the world are (vision). No past president has shown that requisite depth of understanding, and none has done so even now; no, not President Buhari, nor the ‘theoretic’ and highfalutin denizens of the Information ministry. Until Nigerians get a sense of a country they understand and love, and are willing to die for, all campaigns will be nothing but tilting at windmills.
