The Nation Newspaper

Category: Ropo Sekoni

  • Mending Nigeria through security

    The challenges of insecurity posed by corruption, terrorism, communal clashes, herdsmen-farmers conflict, trafficking in drugs, arms and humans, kidnapping for ransom, armed banditry, proliferation of arms and light weapons, money laundering and other transnational organized crimes are some of the vices threatening the regional peace, progress, integration and development. President Mohammadu Buhari at the 16th Annual General Assembly meeting of West African Police Chiefs
    We are determined to descend very hard on criminals. We recovered 37 AK47 rifles, 12 locally made guns, a revolver pistol, 60,000 fake US dollars, military uniforms, and a foreign made pistol….Farmers who farm along Kaduna-Abuja expressway, Birnin Gwari and other volatile areas can go back to their farms. They are now safe—Frank Mba, DCP on recent joint operations under the auspices of Operation Puff Adder in Kaduna, Niger and Katsina States.

    The two quotations above, perhaps the most recent references to one of the greatest threats facing the average Nigerian, are selected for opening today’s column for many reasons. First, the statement by President Buhari delivered on his behalf by his Interior Minister underscores the latest thinking on the country’s governance about a problem that has formed the core of discussions in homes and on the roads across Nigeria in recent months: the matter of insecurity. The second is the quotation from the story of the capture of 93 kidnappers and bandits along Kaduna-Abuja axis and parade of some of those criminals and the illegal weapons found on them on the front page of The Nation two days ago. This full story puts through in perspective the sources of recurrent nightmares in many families in the southwestern region of Nigeria and other places since the kidnapping of a professor of surgery at the Obafemi Awolowo University and other persons along Akure-Ilesa, Ife-Ibadan, and Ore-Ondo roads in the last few months.

    There is no better way to read these two quotations in relation to security for all citizens in a government of democracy. The two quotations may suggest sincere attempts to end the last four years of governance in a government of change or announcements that the focus on the incoming administration will put priority on mending Nigeria through focused and intense security measures, not only within the borders of the country but also in relation to countries that surround the continent’s most populous nation-state.

    It is no exaggeration that the issue of security has been on everybody’s lips for many years. At the beginning, it was attributed to terrorism in the northeast of the country under the banner of Boko Haram. When security challenges started to spread beyond the northeast to other parts of the country, security men drew attention to security problems arising from the crisis in Libya after the killing of Ghadafi, particularly the belief that the flow of surplus arms from Libya would soon evaporate and restore peace to Nigeria. But this projection did not hold water as the situation got worse with time.

    Later, citizens started to cry that they were becoming increasingly endangered even in places as far from Boko Haram as Ondo, Ekiti, and Osun States. Such observers claimed that Fulani herdsmen from Nigeria were killing and maiming innocent farmers. Official spokespersons for the federal government countered that most of such marauders were not necessarily herdsmen from Nigeria but predominantly from neighbouring countries. Nigerians advised the government to check in-flow of such foreign threats jealously at the country’s borders, as is expected in all modern societies.

    Even believers in the concept of geography as fate or destiny theorized that insecurity in Nigeria results from the coming down of the Sahel that has created herdsmen-farmers conflict and violence. Fear-gripped citizens cried out lout that all countries in West Africa have a share in the Sahelian reality and that the government in Nigeria ought to face more frontally the dangers lurking around its own corners. But the problem of lack security continued unabated, to the extent that only a few days ago lorries filled with gun totting criminals blocked expressways in Osun State to rob and kidnap innocent citizens and to kidnap and rob motorists between Kaduna and Abuja.

    It is remarkable that the Nigeria Police has chosen to launch Operation Puff Adder, which from the news in The Nation two days ago has started yielding major results: the capture of 93 violent criminals within weeks around Kaduna, Niger, and Katsina States. Without doubt, victims of violent crimes in other parts of Nigeria must be inching close to some measure of relief, as their own version of Operation Puff Adder kicks-in to nab criminals threatening peace and public order in such areas.

    General Buhari’s recent identification of the multiple sources of the threat to security in Nigeria deserves serious attention from all security forces in the country. If all the sources of security threats are true, as this author believes they are, the job before the nation’s current security staff seems larger than what periodic launching of Operation Puff Adder can complete at the same time for a social cancer that comes up at the same time in various communities. Even with about half a million policemen and women in the country, it is unlikely that Operation Puff Adder can be launched for each cluster of local governments or states. If this were possible and given the recurrence of complaints in all parts of the country for months about the prevalence of violent crimes, the good harvest from the Kaduna-Abuja Operation Puff Adder would have been replicated in other zones almost simultaneously.

    Special security operations, such as Operation Puff Adder, are rare even in more advanced democracies because they involve prohibitive costs that generally accompany emergency-type of response to serious problems.  The police officers in charge of the Kaduna-Niger-Katsina special operations deserve to be congratulated for the feat that has made it possible for the police command to assure farmers in these states to return to their farms without fearing any evil. But in realistic terms, no country can protect all its citizens and their property from criminal encroachment via the mechanism of intervention by special forces. For law enforcement to be more like civilian (than military) operations and for maintenance of peace and public order to be cost-effective and available at all times, efforts should focus on pooling the diverse resources of all forms of security organisations for  preventive work than curative peace keeping for millions of citizens speaking various tongues and upholding diverse cultural values. This is more so in the case of a country like Nigeria with attractions, despite its varied problems, to people from all directions in the ECOWAS region.

    It is, therefore, encouraging that the Buhari government has also outgrown what has seemed to  be an obsession with the philosophy and culture of a central police organization, under which insecurity has developed to the current nightmarish proportions. By embracing the concept and practice of subnational policing, now euphemistically referred to as community policing, the central government has started to think beyond the box. The central government should have enough to do with interstate criminality within the country and with inter-country criminal matters in the Chad Basin Community and the ECOWAS region, not to mention problems from neighbouring Cameroons, that it should be obvious to discerning leaders that the imperative of creating a new police system has become undeniable and irresistible.

    As the country’s security policy wonks go to work on fashioning an efficient and cost-effective police system for hundreds of its communities,  citizens acting in the capacity of partners for peace and progress for the country along with professional security agents need to continue to show in unmistakable terms all the cracks in the country’s security. Changes in the magnitude and complexity of internal and external criminality in and near the country is certainly calling for new ideas, which patriotic citizens can enrich with intelligent whistleblowing.

    Furthermore, governors at the state levels, though basically symbolic heads of security in their states, are also called upon to garner the little information they can about the culture of crime in their respective jurisdictions and what they can sniff from their citizens about the way out of a life of terror spawned by proliferation of crimes. Governors cannot afford to push the challenge of creating and sustaining peace, order, and progress in their jurisdictions to the lap of the central government in the nonchalant manner that characterizes response to the phenomenon of federal roads, as the national government searches for a new way to maintain law and order.

  • Enhancing citizen-police relations, not one-way street

    A few days ago, the Nigeria Police showed concern about reports of killings and brutalization of citizens, by issuing tips to Nigerians on how to avoid clashes with officers at a police checkpoint. Among other things, the police advised citizens to avoid unnecessary arguments with the police; avoid challenging armed personnel on duty; and avoid giving an unhappy impression when encountering an officer on their beat.

    Other tips passed to citizens via tweets include being polite when answering questions put to citizens by the officers; making sure citizens have all their relevant car papers and desisting from actions or inactions that constitute either a criminal or traffic offence; seeking an audience with the most senior police officer at the checkpoint if things are not working out smoothly; insisting politely insist to be taken to the police station if citizen’s complaint is not properly addressed; and keeping hands visible to avoid unnecessary suspicion or fear by the officers that citizens are attempting to bring out a gun or other harmful objects to attack the police officer on beat.

    Further from Yomi Shogunle, the author of the manual of behavior expected from citizens, is the need for citizens to be “friendly and cheerful; commending the officers especially for working under very unfriendly weather conditions such as the rains, the harsh harmattan conditions, excessive heat, cold or sunshine;” and taking “note of the name tags, Force or Service numbers, personal description, description of weapons or patrol vehicle of the security officer especially where the officers begin to conduct themselves in an unprofessional manner.”

    Of course, many of these tips are reasonable. But the problem with the tips is the assumption by the author that all that is required to improve citizen-police relations is to prepare and pass tips to citizens, without sharing police understanding of the ethics and etiquettes of law enforcement with citizens. But such assumption on the part of the police should not surprise the average citizen. It is a left-over from the imagination that the police in Nigeria is still part of a force conceived and funded to repress natives, the way the police was in the colonial era.

    Whether it is with the existing police or the community-oriented police now in the making, the federal government needs to be deprogrammed of the obsession that the police is doing citizens a favour, without also realizing that police men and women are making a living by enforcing the laws of the land. The right philosophy of policing in democracies is that the police is a protector of citizens for the purpose of creating a life-affirming social environment for citizens and other professionals in the land. Just as citizens need to see the police as partners for progress, peace, and order, so do the police have to see citizens as partners for the same goal; peace and order for all.

    To create a bipartisan manual capable of forging trust in the police system, citizens ought to be provided with a list of what the police should do when they have good reasons to deal with citizens on the highway, urban roads, and in village squares. There is no doubt that many citizens recognize that police job is not an easy one and that police deserve politeness and friendliness from citizens. By the same token, citizens also do other strenuous and frustrating jobs in the country and that they too deserve to be treated as important people in the community.

    The tips sent out by the police last week smacks of arrogance on the part of the police. The one-sidedness of the tips suggests that the police leadership needs better understanding of the issues at stake. For far too long, the police have lost the trust of the citizenry. Even those citizens, like this writer, who had primary experience of the the colonial police system, know that the pre-independence police system seemed more trustworthy than what has been in existence for decades, particularly since the emergence of military dictatorship. This is not to say that the pre-independence police was in any way comparable to the modern police system in most democracies, then and now.

    The goal of achieving a positive relationship between the police and citizens is a noble one. And it is attainable, but not in the way charted by the author of the Tips. There ought to be a parallel manual for police officers and recruits. Certainly, citizens ought to be friendly with the police, but the author of the Tips has overlooked the importance of the cliché; “it takes two to tango.” The police should be under greater obligation to be polite to citizens, because they do the job of protectors of persons and property. For example, which of the following dialogues between citizen and law enforcement officer is likely to draw friendly or hostile language?

    Cop: Good morning sir. I know you are rushing to work but may I see your driver’s license sir?

    Motorist: Morning officer. Kindly give me a minute to get it out of my back pocket. Here you go.

    Cop: Sir, the reason I stop you this morning is that you failed to yield at the roundabout behind us. I just need to see your license and verify your driving record sir.

    Motorist: I thought I yielded long enough because there was no vehicle close by.

    Cop: Sir, your papers and driving records are fine, but I am going to give you a written warning, which will not include any fine or loss of points. Be more careful and have a nice day.

    Motorist: Thank you and have a good one.

    Cop: Didn’t you see my hands waving you down? Tabi you don’t want to stop?

    Motorist: I saw your hands and that is why I have stopped. I did not want to stop suddenly because of the vehicle behind me.

    Cop: You are expected to stop once an officer says so.

    Motorist: Sorry, it was the problem of reaction time.

    Cop: Reaction what? What has that got to do with stopping, Wey your papers?

    Motorist: Which ones—license or vehicle registration?

    Cop: Every paper on you. Don’t waste my time my friend.

    Motorist: Here they are.

    Cop: Where is your Triangular or See Caution?

    Motorist: In the booth

    Cop: Where is your fire extinguisher?

    Motorist: In the booth.

    Cop: Na inside the booth I go see the?…

    There is no doubt that the first dialogue makes it difficult for a sane motorist not to be polite and friendly to the police officer while the second one is likely to frustrate the motorist. It is thus not only the motorist that needs to be friendly to the police; it is both sides that should develop a programme of mutual encouragement to build a peaceful and orderly society. The author of the Tips ought to be more bipartisan than he has been. Painting the motorist, the victim of police brutality as the hostile one is as flawed as painting the police as a compulsive power abuser. The reason our country has many universities that offer degrees in psychology, sociology, criminology, and policy studies is to assist all government agencies including the police to use such existing expertise to design manuals of behavior that can address citizen-police relations holistically.

  • Making public-police partnership work

    The Report of the Presidential Committee on Police Reform (April, 2008) clearly articulates the basic parameters for the implementation of Community Policing in Nigeria. It states that, “There is need to adapt community policing to suit Nigeria’s peculiarities. Government should formulate a community policing Policy and Framework for the country, taking into account our cultural and political environment.” Recommendations from M.D. Yusuf’s Presidential Committee on Police Reform in 2008

    We have to look at other parts of the world when we are doing it. Sitting down in Abuja by an IGP and policing the remote parts of the country and being in charge of the welfare of all the policemen across the length and breadth of the country doesn’t seem to be working. Vice President Osinbajo calling for change of architecture of policing in 2017.

    The roll-out of the community policing programme is intended to enhance crime prevention and control, improve intelligence-gathering capabilities of the police and deliver quality and people-oriented policing. Osinbajo 2018.

    The Special Constables will be drawn from members of the community to serve as voluntary community police officers under the coordination of the Nigeria Police Force.”This new drive is in line with the expressed desire and directives of the President, His Excellency, Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR-Inspector-General of Police while announcing approval of Community Policing by President Buhari in April 2019.

    Recently, the Inspector-General of Police spoke at the inauguration of Police Community Relations Committee in Onitsha to urge citizens to participate in strengthening public-police cooperation in the fight against crime. In a manner reminiscent of the tendency of the country’s leaders to oversimplify problems, the IG called for building of more “recreation rooms, inspectors’ mess and canteens in the various police divisions, to encourage members of the public to interact with the police for greater tomorrow.” He also hyperbolically claimed that the public-police partnership is capable of helping Nigeria attain its vision of joining the 20 world’s biggest economies by 2020, claiming that there can be no meaningful socio-economic development without internal security, domestic peace, law and order.” All these claims by the IG would have been believable if the country’s police system has been designed to engender the flourishing of community policing.

    If there is to be a viable interaction between police and community, there must be a community to which the police and citizens belong. Is there such a community in Nigeria? From my extensive travels throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria, I have noticed, since the disappearance of local government policing, cases of alienation between the police and the community the former is paid to protect from crime. For example, I have met in Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, and Sokoto police men and women who do not speak Hausa. They communicate with the members of the community they serve in pidgin, believing that listeners who do not understand English should understand Pidgin.

    The situation is the same in other parts of Nigeria. In the Yoruba region, many of the police in the states are non-Yoruba. They do not speak Yoruba and apparently do not have any interest in learning the language of the community they protect, in the same way that Yoruba policemen and women in Sokoto or Onitsha do not feel compelled to learn and speak Hausa or Igbo. I had an experience between Ibadan and Ife last year. I was stopped at the police check-point between Gbongan junction and Ipetumodu junction. There was a long queue of vehicles, mostly passenger buses and a crowd of police officers ‘interrogating drivers of the buses and other vehicles. I stopped and asked the officer that stopped me in Yoruba: “Se ko si ewu o?” (Hope there is no trouble?) The officer flared up and shouted back: “I have nothing to do with the goats in the buses being checked by my colleagues.” Without bothering to find out the native tongue of the officer, I knew that he had little knowledge of ewu  ( trouble or danger), which he confused with ewure (goat). I laughed and shook my head.

    “Oga, what are you shaking your head about,” the officer fired back. I told him I was shaking my head at Nigeria that posted a police officer to a community whose language the officer does not understand. “Why is that important Oga, this is Nigeria, and we are all Nigerians,” he retorted. I then asked him if my driver could park properly to allow for free flow of traffic so that we could talk about Nigeria. He was not interested in any street-side seminar. He waved me off and quickly stopped the car behind me. I still managed to tell him that his employer was endangering his life needlessly by posting him to a community whose cultural nuances he could not grasp because of language deficiency. He thanked me and waved me off in his rush to get to his next customer.

    This police officer on Ife Road is typical. Most men and women in the Nigeria Police (which the trustees of the system still prefer to call Nigeria Police Force) do not have any understanding of the culture they are paid to protect from crime. They operate on borrowed language and on the assumption that Nigeria is an English or Pidgin-speaking country. With close to 40% illiteracy in Nigeria, for the government to assume that everybody can communicate properly in English is erroneous. Even in the best of educational climes, citizens with primary school leaving certificates in Nigeria still do not have adequate social survival skills in English and this group includes most of the police men and women. But the guardians of the system have always known this, but this is the only kind of police system that can truly function as a Police Force-for suppressing indigenous people(s).

    Now, fifty years after political independence, as in colonial days, the police system in Nigeria is to enforce law and order, the same way that UN forces keep law and order in countries at war. Just as the soldiers sent to the Congo or Sudan do not have to speak any of the local languages in these places in order to perform their duty of keeping law and order, so are the men and women sent as police officers to various ethnic communities in Nigeria not expected to understand the people they are charged to protect. All they are charged to do is to keep law and order: stop, search, flog, or prosecute for any violations. I forget to add that in Nigeria, the police may keep law and order without taking any of these steps if the victim is willing to pay for a waiver.

    The search by the IG for a positive interaction between the police and the community must be well intentioned. But good intention may not be good enough. There is a need for a good structure that can sustain productive public or community-police relations. That structure may not exist if the police system is not changed to reflect the country’s reality.

    Now that President Mohammadu Buhari has approved the use of Community Policing, and the Inspector-General is also enthusiastic about this approval, the public eagerly awaits the Policy on Community Police in relation to the recommendation of the Presidential Committee on Reform of the Police in 2008: “There is the need to adapt community policing to suit Nigeria’s peculiarities. Government should formulate a community policing policy and framework for the country, taking into account our cultural and political environment.”

    Apart from paragraphs in italics, the body of this article was first published in this newspaper about one year ago.

  • Who is afraid of private universities?

    Are the fears of people who are afraid of the surge of private universities in the country rational or otherwise? This may be a difficult question to answer in a country with a weak culture of research and data appreciation. How much more anti-data can a country approaching sixty years of postcolonial life be than one that is still debating and ‘planning’ how to create an effective birth and death registration system? But today’s focus is on proliferation of private universities.

    The news from the National Universities Commission (NUC), the body that regulates universities in the country, that it is in the process of considering 303 applications for establishment of private universities should be enough to startle citizens on the right and on the left of the ideological pole. As expected, the Executive Secretary of the commission assured his audience that his agency is in cooperation with the federal government to review requirements for starting private universities and standards for sustaining them. But the huge number of applications throws up issues about the future of university education in a country that is never tired of talking about equal opportunities for all.

    Currently, there are 180 universities, not counting the three newly approved universities of education and 68 illegal universities that dot the country, struggling to teach students yearning for degrees at all costs. At the conference on “Regulating Private University Education Delivery in Nigeria,” the secretary affirmed that many of the 80 existing private universities have been unable to meet their admission quotas. The Minister of Education acknowledged that private universities have added value since they came on board, while the Executive Secretary of Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said the private universities have caused more problems than they have solved. The reference to these three officials with divergent views is to draw attention to issues that deserve special attention from those charged with planning strategies in respect of development of higher education. It may be necessary for the country to assess contributions of existing 80 universities before licensing new ones.

    One question crying for answer is what has broken in university education system to induce in 2019 over 300 applications for new private universities? Granted that not every citizen with prerequisites to benefit from higher education gets admitted because of limited spaces in existing universities, is the solution to this problem necessarily in starting new universities? If about 80 existing private universities admit a total of 7% of undergraduates, is it not possible to urge such universities to improve their capacity for increased enrollment? Are the over 100 public universities—federal and state—already at saturation point in terms of enrollment? Given the size of physical space available in existing public universities, nothing should stop each university from having 50,000 students in residence every year. Many US public and private universities have teaching spaces for 50,000 students at a time. For example, Northeastern University (a private college) and many state university systems: Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Missouri, Michigan, and Illinois have up to 50,000 in enrollment at a time.

    Another question concerns how stringent are the requirements for setting up private universities? Having 303 applications on file suggests that the conditions may not be realistic in the context of the country’s economy. From what the average observer can see, the wealth of most of the country’s billionaires derives from and depends on funds from petroleum or government contracts or pork projects. The country’s productive economy does not look strong enough to create in one year over 300 billionaires that can start and sustain credible university education, especially in a cultural context in which each applicant for ownership of university may desire to name the new university after himself.

    Such desire for self-advertisement or self-immortalization, as most of the owners of private universities in the country are not younger than 50 years, prevents such educational entrepreneurs from pooling resources to own one university. There is ample evidence that many of faith-based universities currently in operation are not doing well, particularly since their resources depend on collections or donations from members, and in some cases, donations from foreign countries interested in promoting specific Christian or Muslim sects overseas. Solo ownership of universities by individuals should remind us about the situation of the proliferation of private primary and secondary schools across the country. A Yoruba proverb that says, “a husband who wants to know what his wife would look like in old age should just look at his wife’s mother,” may apply to the future of having too many private universities. All that we need to look at is that pushing education on the laps of entrepreneurs does not necessarily determine efficiency.

    For example, despite the huge number of private schools in the country and without countenancing all manners of examination malpractices, success rate in WAEC and NECO hovers around 40%. It is common knowledge that private secondary schools hire more unqualified teachers than public schools. We need to collect data on success rates of private secondary schools to guide us about how to regulate private universities, especially that there is no common examination for university students. It is already common knowledge that private universities award more first-class degrees than public universities with most of the country’s long-serving and internationally exposed professors.

    It is appropriate that NUC and other government agencies are keen on the need to enhance delivery of university education by private owners. The conference should also be followed by another one on what should governments—federal and state—do to make regulations of private universities effective, given the fact that public universities are believed to be producing less competitive graduates than the public universities that produced in the past the current leaders of most public universities.

    A final aspect of making private university system the predominant model (by creating more private universities than public ones) is the implication of such choice of policy for closing or reducing the equality gap in the country. It is a fact that those who invest in private universities want good returns on their investments by charging fees that may be unaffordable to majority of citizens. What plans do the governments have to ensure that existing public universities do not become ghettoes for children from poor homes, as admission to private universities continues to be available only to children with parents with deep pockets? Currently, places to private universities are taken by children with parents who can afford to spend at least N1 million naira per annum  per child, in a country where the minimum wage is N18,000 per month and may not exceed N30,000 per month for the next four years?

    There ought to be a balance between the interests of those on the right who believe in the magic of the market in every sphere of modern life and those on the left who believe that the purpose of government is to make sure that it is able to cater to the needs of all citizens. It is risky to crowd out public universities with private universities and in the process marginalize children from the largest class. This may also be a good time for a public referendum on how to fund public universities and make them competitive without failing to provide access to citizens with humble economic pedigree. The country needs to find out if citizens, especially the poor would prefer that their children receive an education that can make them get jobs anywhere on the planet and whether they are allergic to restoration of scholarships, bursaries, and loans, to replace the current ‘free’ university education that has proven to be incapable of delivering education that can compete globally.

    I believe it is possible for the country’s leaders to come up with a compromise that may be acceptable to those on the right and on the left of the ideological pole regarding how to create a university education that can make graduates competitive, not those that federal ministers characterize as unemployable. Now that 303 applications for private universities are on the table may be a good time to look at higher education reform.

  • Is fuel subsidy ideologically inevitable?

    Ade Alabi was sick in a village near Ibadan during the recent fuel scarcity. His neighbor had a car and was willing to take Ade to the nearest primary health centre. But the raging fuel scarcity at the time prevented his neighbor from having petrol to buy, even though he was ready to pay the prohibitive price of N200 per litre charged by Black Market sellers of petrol in the village. All efforts to take Ade to the hospital on his own Okada proved futile. There was no rubber hose to transfer petrol from Ade’s Okada into the car of his neighbor. Even though Ade had a brother who could ride Okada, his brother was just as big as Ade. It was not possible to have both brothers on the Okada with a third person to prop Ade up on the way to the clinic. While the entire village was thinking about how to get Ade to the hospital, the poor man slumped and died, leaving behind a wife and three children.

    The story above illustrates the danger (to the poor in particular) inherent in the insistence by self-defined socialist ideologues (in and outside the trade unions) on the religiosity of retaining fuel subsidy as the best way to protect the poor and workers from exploitation by money grubbing oil and gas merchants and from neglect from a government in charge of a country whose most effective source of revenue in petroleum.

    Many cases are being made in traditional and social media in support of cancelation of fuel subsidy in the country. Some pundits base their position on evidence of corruption in the handling of the subsidy scheme, citing examples of irregularities in various committees established to probe the country’s subsidy scheme. Examples of financial irregularity are drawn from Farouk Lawan Committee’s Probe in 2012. This report claims that N232 billion on subsidy was paid to marketers for PMS in 2011 for fuel that was not supplied. The same committee also established that, contrary to the claims of marketers that 60 million litres was imported for each day in 2011, only 31 million litres per day was accounted for.

    Some commentators focus on the Nuhu Ribadu Probe in 2012 to argue for cessation of subsidy on the ground of lack of transparency. They draw attention to the report that NNPC deducted subsidy-related expenses before payment to the Federation Account in 2011. This group argues that NEITI’s audits from 1999 to 2011 also confirmed that NNPC deducted a total of N1.40 trillion for subsidy. Similarly, the Presidential Committee on Verification and Reconciliation of Fuel Subsidy (2012) is cited by anti-subsidy commentators to illustrate that 197 subsidy transactions worth N229 billion were illegitimate and that actual expenditure on subsidy was higher in the same year than appropriated sums for fuel subsidy.

    Economic thinkers of the free market persuasion also argue that natural resources are finite and attract largely time-limited revenues, more so if such resources are sold in the international market where the exporting country has no control over pricing. This group posits that it is not rational for any government to prefer fuel subsidy for citizens across the social spectrum to promoting sustained inclusive economic development through investments that can have multiplier effects on sustainable empowerment schemes for the underprivileged. This group calls for an end to fuel subsidy which its spokespersons believe to be a non-sustainable way of allocating natural resource revenues.

    On the other hand, trade union leaders and self-defined advocates of the poor argue passionately in favour of continuing with fuel subsidy. The trade union’s claim includes the need to view fuel subsidy as a non-negotiable poverty-alleviating policy. This school of thought calls on government to accept the need to make every Nigerian enjoy the fruits of a natural resource that under a unitary system of government is viewed to belong to the entire country, regardless of the damage the exploitation of such natural resource does to the economy and ecology of the communities in which such resources are located.

    Another line of thinking within this group is that underpaid workers, poor, and unemployed citizens need fuel subsidy to mitigate the knock-on effect of their poverty. The same group also argues that it is unfair for the federal government to stop fuel subsidy until the government is able to create the type of transportation infrastructure that exists in more developed countries, where fuel subsidy is discouraged as a policy. They add that the government must repair existing refineries and construct more to bring the price of refined petrol for domestic consumption down to the point of making fuel subsidy unnecessary. The Jonathan government accepted the thinking of labour leaders by creating another bureaucracy, Sure-P, to pacify workers and labour leaders, after agreeing to peg the price of petrol at N97 per litre. Just like the subsidy scheme itself, it did not take a long time for Sure-P to become another trick to occlude financial mismanagement by the country’s venal political elite.

    The position of trade union leaders and believers in social democracy appears unassailable. In a country where there are not many social assistance programmes for citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder, there should be nothing wrong with calls for special assistance to the unemployed and underpaid workers. In terms of fine ideological thinking, trade union leaders and their social democratic supporters are making respectable arguments. But the hard question that needs to be asked and answered by radical social and economic thinkers is whether fuel subsidy is the best way to assist the poor in our country.

    Despite the social democratic credentials of this author for over half a century, I do not believe that there are no better ways to assist the poor than the current fuel subsidy that is as enmeshed in the culture of political and bureaucratic corruption as it can ever be in any human space. In a country in which political parties do not openly embrace any noticeable form of social democracy, as in countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway, where social democracy is a fact of life, there are hundreds of ways to assist the poor without having to attempt to pay some of the cost of fuel for them. In these social democratic systems, the line between the middle-class or middle-income and low-income groups is made clear when policies of social assistance are being crafted. It is not so in the case of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy scheme, which allows upper-middle class professionals to enjoy fuel subsidy that should have been reserved for the underprivileged.

    The argument that fuel subsidy in Nigeria is to protect the poor is spurious. Out of the 145 vehicles per 1,000 citizens in Nigeria, 85 of them are cars belonging to middle-class members of the society. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the car-owning middle-class citizens that benefit largely from fuel subsidy. If indeed fuel subsidy assists the low-income and the unemployed, it is not to the extent that it benefits the middle-class. Definitely, there ought to be better ways to assist the poor.

    For example, the federal government can use the money spent on fuel subsidy to pay for such services as free education, free meals for school children, free health for the poor, social welfare checks for the poor, and free adult education for the poor. In addition, poor citizens can be given social welfare support that they can use to pay for market price of petrol. Furthermore, trade unions can insist that the existing refineries be sold to workers for one naira each so that workers’ cooperatives can manage the refineries. The federal government can put the matter of removal of subsidy to a referendum to determine what majority of citizens want, as opposed to what paid representatives of labour prefer. Without doubt, if Ade Alabi, referred to at the beginning of this piece and his relations had been given a chance to vote Yes or No in a referendum on removal of fuel subsidy, all of them would have voted Yes, in hopes that the Ade Alabis of Nigeria can be taken to the hospital before it is too late.

    President Buhari and his team should pluck the courage to address this albatross around the neck of the nation. In addition to initiating many direct social assistance programmes for the poor, the federal government should use funds currently being used to pay subsidy charges to assist the poor in ways that those assisted can use the social assistance funds to solve the problems most important to them.

    • This article was first published in 2016

     

  • Enough of off-season campaigning

    Even over one month after the presidential election, both parties still operate as if the election had not been held. It is expected that opposing parties would seize opportunities to criticise the other party periodically, but both All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) seem to have been making a career of castigating each other as if it is a democratic virtue to just talk ill of the other party. If leaders of the two leading parties are not tired of repeated complaints about each other, the average voter is, because the average voter is eager to see the blueprint for the next four years, rather than be subjected in the media to trading of blames.

    Although it is consoling that none of the two major candidates involved in the presidential election had engaged in throwing of brickbats at each other, several leading members of the parties have been talking as if the election is yet to hold. The APC is not tired of reminding citizens about what they believe are inadequacies of PDP while the latter seizes every opportunity to cast APC as a party that has robbed it of victory in the recent election.

    If PDP is eager to cry over election results while its election petition is still in court, such whining may be more understandable than hearing the ruling party at the beginning of its second tenure complain about how bad the past governments of PDP had been. Psychologists would have assessed PDP as suffering from negative emotions stimulated by what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky once characterised as Loss Aversion, the notion that negative emotion caused by loss is more than double the feeling of pleasure produced by success.

    The latest manifestation of campaign after elections is the poster named ‘Pukka.’ Pukka has been reported as marketing the qualities of the PDP presidential candidate in the recent election and whose electoral petition has already been submitted to the election tribunal. The photographs reported to be in Abuja and Yola describe Atiku as the real and the right. But it is remarkable that former Vice President Atiku has dissociated himself from the poster. Spokespersons of the two major parties should not do anything to create additional difficulties for emergence of some measure of bipartisanship that can bring progress to the country after the courts have treated the petitions currently before it.

    Remarkably, the first statement of Atiku’s media adviser: “Our attention has been drawn to posters of Abubakar, presidential candidate of PDP in the 2019 election being circulated in Abuja. We disassociate the former Vice President of Nigeria from the said posters in circulation.  is starkly more mature and appropriate than the one by another supporter: “I have not seen the posters. I am just hearing it from you. We are not aware of it. aWhatever it is it not connected to the PDP campaign organisation. Further, disassociating the former vice president from the Pukka poster is more logical than the literal interpretation of the Chief Press Secretary to the Chairman of INEC: “Is there anything like party name or logo on it? If a poster does not contain any of these or ‘vote for a person’ the commission does not see it as campaign.” Elections are over and so should campaigns be over. It is time to allow the judges to concentrate on their assignments.

    Also inappropriate are direct and indirect references by APC’s officials to PDP’s failures, after APC had ruled for four years since Jonathan’s presidency and had also won election to rule for another four years. Ordinarily, the APC shouldn’t have any reason to worry about PDP at a time that it is planning to commence its second term four years after the PDP. After all, if majority of voters had believed that PDP had acted sufficiently in the interest of the electorate in 2015, the APC could not have been the party to produce the president in 2015. What then is the use of a party that had just won a second tenure to continue to paint the losing party as a problem?

    For the sake of the future of APC as a party that has so far acquired the profile of a ‘progressive party’ in relation to the PDP, the ruling party ought not to be involved in any blame game. It should be busy crafting messages that can mobilise all citizens toward to the Next Level, the new metaphor for proper and productive governance. Continuing to complain that Jonathan’s administration had about double revenue from petroleum sales during his tenure in relation to what Buhari has earned in his first term shows how the APC is yet to move out of the campaign mode. APC’s image makers are over dwelling on the negative (the failure of PDP in power) while it should be emphasising the positive: elaborating and popularising policies in plan for upliftment of citizens in the next four years.

    Another instance of senseless preoccupation with campaign verbiage is recent discussion by some northern political and cultural leaders. The new election-linked agenda setting has many subthemes: the claim that the North has enough votes to stay in control of the federal government without needing votes from other regions; the rejection of rotational presidency as from 2023 on the basis that APC as a party does not have rotational presidency in its constitution, just as there is no space for the concept in the 1999 Constitution. Popularisation of such motifs may spark new controversies that can cause confusion among voters who had voted for President Buhari under the belief that the presidency would move south and thus to another type of the many worldviews in the country. If the sermon that the North can rule Nigeria without the other regions is being flown just to test waters, it is an unwise sermon—whether the message had been constructed by APC pundits with interest in keeping federal power in one region or by PDP intellectuals with the desire to keep power in the North after 2023.

    It is not as if it makes any difference whichever region produces the president in 2023, particularly in a political culture that pays inadequate attention to how to stimulate and sustain a stable and harmonious multiethnic state and, in the process, transform it into a progressive modern nation-state capable of seeking and finding solutions to the problems confronting majority of the country’s citizens. What is worrisome about the premature discussion of who qualifies to be presidential candidate in 2023 is the nuisance value that such theme may generate.

    As if it is not bad enough for the three regions in the South to struggle over which region captures the opportunity to produce the president in 2023, those who have chosen to throw up the suggestion that 2019 may very well be the end of rotational presidency show little concern for its political implications. For too long, Nigeria has had to grapple with distractions from the most important goal: finding a political culture that can transform centrifugal into centripetal forces capable of creating one of the world’s largest truly modern multiethnic federal state.

    It is conceivable that the principle of rotational presidency may not be the best solution to the country’s many problems, it has since its inception in 1999 brought a measure of political stability, such as the country had not known until 1999. It may be too soon and too risky to throw away this baby with the bath water.

    Calling for cancellation of rotational presidency may feel unpleasant to many regions just as calling for restructuring has been to some regions since 1993.  There is no better time for patriotic Nigerians to urge promoters of rule by one region to desist from restoring monopolisation of power that spawned rotational presidency in the first instance.

     

  • A good time to improve our democracy

    From comments of pundits and folk observers of political affairs, it is becoming clearer that more efforts are required by political and government leaders to listen, more than ever, to texts and subtexts of political conversations from the academy and the media to bus-stop or beer-parlour seminars. Those who see elections as the most important aspect of democratic governance are already calling for electoral reforms that can make voting less stressful for the electorate. Just a few weeks after the elections, some citizens are asking for further digitization of the electoral process to further facilitate voting. Such calls include introduction of proxy voting, online voting, online registration for PVCs, carrying ballot boxes to millions of Nigerians in diaspora, and making election dates sacrosanct as it has become in the United States.

    But much more muffled than demands for electoral reforms are calls for political reforms that can save and strengthen democracy in the country. Even in constituencies which in the past seemed inured to post-election tension, such as those who assured neighbours after the annulment of June 12 presidential election that Nigerians have uncanny flair for surviving any form of crisis, are now whispering that the country should not push its luck too hard and too far.

    New calls are coming from old and new quarters that the belief by many political leaders that Nigeria’s political system has reached the ‘end of history’ needs to be jettisoned. During the Jonathan administration, symbolic efforts were made to reopen the country’s journey away from the imagination that the legacy of the military in government has sealed the country’s destiny. But the efforts, marked by the 2014 National Conference, quickly fizzled out, as Jonathan himself looked away from recommendations on how to reform the political system.

    The first four years of President Buhari’s administration returned to the school of thought that Nigeria has reached the end of history, especially from the perspective of Buhari. Even after the All Progressives Congress (APC) had campaigned among other pledges to devolve powers to subnational governments and after the APC as a party had made recommendations on how to reform the federal political system, President Buhari held on to the belief that nothing was wrong with the political culture of over centralization that military regimes had bequeathed to the country via the 1999 Constitution.

    Even at the time that many communities in the country were calling for sovereign national conference, restructuring of the polity, re-federalization, or devolution of powers to subnational governments, the kind of division that surfaced during and after the 2019 elections was almost unimaginable. Callers for restructuring were at that time more concerned about ignoring the need to reinforce national unity through the mechanism of decentralization. Today’s Nigeria looks more divided than it was in the Abacha years, despite that today’s government has the legitimacy that the Abacha administration lacked. Fortunately, today’s government has more  legitimate opportunities to act than Abacha did.

    It may be true that citizens voted for President Buhari because of the manifesto of Next Level and that all his government needs to do in the next four years is to deliver on the promise of Next Level. It must also not be lost to us that millions of Nigerians could have voted for Buhari and the APC to give them four more years to deliver on the promise of devolving powers and bringing federalist spirit to the country. Adding the number of APC men and women who read the APC manifesto of 2015 and 2018 as complementary platforms and then voted for Buhari and APC for  another four years to those who might have voted solely on the basis of the platform of Next Level, we are likely to get a true picture that majority of voters who voted desire economic and political reform or restructuring.

    Democratic elections not only allow citizens to choose the leader(s) they prefer, they also allow those seeking to govern the electors to have a glimpse of what bothers them. The 2019 elections reveal that there are diverging views in the polity about how to sustain the country’s national unity and development. Thereafter, it is the leader that is expected to receive and digest the messages embedded in the patterns of voting. It is not only the desires of those perceived by the winner that have voted for his stated manifesto alone that should matter for inclusive governance. And inclusive governance is not necessarily limited to choosing candidates for political appointments, governing in an inclusive manner often requires that the leader pay attention to wishes of those who might have voted for other parties, once such wishes are not inimical to progress of the country.

    Remarkably, President Buhari has promised open and inclusive governance voluntarily, a sign of his readiness to be different than when he complained about those who did not vote for him in 2015. The promise of inclusive government coming from him unsolicited by those in opposition suggests that the president is ready to listen to the views of others during his second term more than he did in the last four years. Therefore, this column congratulates him for announcement of his commitment to open and inclusive governance. Unlike in the last four years when he relished dismissing those who called for political reform that includes returning federalism to the country, his final tenure may require cultivation of a different leadership style.

    The leadership style of the last four years was not democratic enough for the needs of the country. It indicated that President Buhari was more interested in keeping the re-engineering of the country’s political system by military rulers as a mark of ‘end of history.’ Nigeria is one of the youngest countries in the world, even though the nations within it are old civilizations. Imagining the country as having already reached its apogee in political system is akin to disregarding the humanity of its citizens, especially their God-given capacity to improve ideas and structures that affect their life and living.

    Afterall, President Buhari has already recognized that the economic system bequeathed to the country by military regimes is now outdated and needs reform. His rhetoric and actions in respect of reducing reliance on finite fossil energy as means of livelihood for about 200 million people must have stimulated his economic reform, particularly his emphasis on economic diversification.

    The President will leave a richer legacy if extends his acceptance of inevitability of economic change to the political system left behind by the military, just as he has been trying to do for the parasitic reliance on petroleum. The need for change becomes more urgent when citizens demand that the political system by which they are governed are alien to their history and requires to be replaced by a more user-friendly political system. His second term in power gives Buhari a rare opportunity to improve not only the economy of the country but also its governance. Coming back for another four years gives him a chance to create structures that can lead to sustainable national unity. The calls for democratic decentralization, regardless of whatever irritating names this process must have been given in the past, is a call worth giving consideration by President Buhari, no longer because he needs to market himself for another tenure, but because he cares about Nigeria beyond his presidency.

  • Towards a post-election nation building

    Vice President Osinbajo’s call for a new energy at nation building could not have come at a better time. His words: “We have to build the nation and live in harmony, so that posterity would be proud of us. The nation cannot grow when there is trouble. It is better we stay together in harmony and build a nation that would become a pride to the world” are soothing words that should be welcome, not only to partisan politicians but also to national leaders. Just as Prof Osinbajo has implied, national leaders are the people to provide leadership for the project of building the nation.

    Not surprisingly, many people are already congratulating the vice president for opting to raise the rhetorical bar about nation building at such a critical time. This is the kind of discourse that the nation needs direly, not just because of the division caused by the recent elections but also because such positive sermons from above should be a part of national discourse in a country with tension-inducing diversity. Worldwide, citizens enjoy encouraging words from their leaders.

    But uplifting words are expected to be accompanied by encouraging actions. So much of the discourse on nation building in the last 50 years has been more from leaders, with very little space given to citizens, especially during the many years of military rule. It is, therefore, reassuring that calls for nation building are being put on the table, despite the tension that characterised the recent elections. The commitment to nation building should go beyond reconciliation of members of opposing parties currently in court over aspects of the election. It will need to be extended to citizens at large, to encourage them to feel that they belong to the same country as those that lead them.

    In the two decades of post-military governance, emphasis has been on decisions reached by elected officials in the executive and legislative branches of government, with little consultation with citizens as givers of mandates to both sides of the government. For example, lawmakers have little consultations with their constituents once elections are over. If things have been otherwise, the issue of how much lawmakers earn as salaries and allowances would have been resolved. Most of the citizens are too poor to be ready to condone a lawmaker in a country without electricity and water to most citizens to collect on a monthly or quarterly basis funds that are much larger than accrue to their counterparts in advanced economies with proper and infrastructure and social benefits for citizen empowerment.

    Given the culture of separation of powers, it is not expected to be easy for the executive to dabble into reviewing how much money legislators should be worth, but it is time for government leaders to realise that citizens are unhappy that lawmakers earn humongous amounts of money every month in a country where market women are given N10,000 loan from Trader Moni. A man in his 90s who served in his youth in the legislature recently asked me why lawmakers are not part-time as they used to be in his time. My reply was that the reason is that the military who ruled us for decades wanted it that way, by failing to allow citizens to have a say in the making of the constitution that has guided governance since 1999. The old man added that this is the reason why voters agree to sell their PVCs to candidates for legislative positions, adding that in his time no aspiring lawmaker could afford to buy votes for a  for a modestly remunerated part-time job.

    In the Next Level, the executive cannot afford to leave the matter of how much public funds lawmakers choose to pay themselves. This is one task that President Buhari may need to add to details of his party’s Next Level strategies, especially if he chooses to align salary structures across the government. And citizens ought to be brought into the picture through the mechanism of Referendum at national and subnational levels.

    Another area that requires serious attention in the project of nation building is in respect of citizen-police relations and perceptions of the police by citizens. It is no exaggeration to say that citizens feel threatened by the current police culture. Such feeling of insecurity has less to do with existence of Boko Haram’s terror than it does with the agency charged with law enforcement and public order. For example, on the same day that the new Inspector-General of Police was defending his agency’s budget before the National Assembly, I had an experience between Ifetedo and Olode in Osun State that made me feel concerned about law enforcement. Four policemen stood by the side of the highway and one in the middle of the road. There were two passenger buses behind my car. My driver thought the police in the middle of the road wanted him to stop. Alas, my driver was wrong. The policeman wanted my driver to move out of the way, to allow him block with his hands the driver in the commercial bus behind our car.  But the driver behind us refused to stop and the bus behind the policeman almost knocked him down, as he too tried to avoid being stopped. Meanwhile, the policemen on the road side were busy collecting N50 from Okada riders with ease. My driver started laughing hilariously, murmuring in between laughs “it would have served the police right.”

    The purpose of this story is to suggest that when citizens at the grassroots feel like this about the country’s law enforcement, a brewing crisis seems to be ignored by the designers of the post-colonial police system. Citizen alienation seems to be peaking and may require to be addressed before anomie sets in. Next Level’s efforts to build a nation will benefit from a wholesale police reform. A police system that feels at home with officers that act like petty thieves does not only embarrass decent and patriotic citizens, it also prepares a ground for mass disobedience by the people. Citizens who feel the way my driver feels (and such people are legion) do not see a nation in Nigeria; they see a space reserved for exploiters and the exploited. They see a space occupied by enslavers and slaves. No sense of belonging can develop from the kind of police that we currently have. It needs to be re-designed to look like a profession or an occupation for people who are morally responsible and also patriotic. It is always a pain for me to hear relations tell me Oga e rora pelu awon ore yin olopa, ko si omoluwabi lara oloja o (Kindly be careful with your police friends sir, because there are no decent people in the police force). For citizens to feel confident to say this about the agency responsible for keeping public order sends bad signals.

    It is depressing that each of the many IGPs since 1999 had always promised a new start for the police, with some even pledging to end the culture of police officers stopping drivers and motorists on highways or urban roads to ask for registration papers. In over 20 years, such pledge has not amounted to anything. In 2019, a policeman is even ready to put his life in jeopardy in an attempt to collect N100 from commercial bus drivers. This behaviour is not only embarrassing; it is dehumanising and de-spiriting. It is a shame that all the ugly things said about behaviour of the police during the elections are believed to be true, not because they are verifiable, but because they are probable, given citizens’ perception of the agency responsible for law enforcement. The first step in the Next Level’s fight against corruption is to change the culture of the Nigerian Police, from the image of extortionist to one of protector.

  • Matters arising from 2019 elections (3)

    It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in “Federalist No 1”

    Not with inconclusive elections, cancelled or deferred vote collations, rising number of election petitions, social media theatrics about how elections have been rigged and won or lost by competing political parties, mounting cases of cults around personalities, such as Kwankasiyya, Gandusiyya, and assurance of due process before visitors to Aso Rock on incomplete elections, it should not surprise anyone that obsession over the 2019 elections in traditional and social media may continue until President Buhari enters his lame-duck season by the end of last quarter of 2021. If readers are bored by unearthing of arcane matters arising from the 2019 elections, they need to relax and come to terms with the fact that this is a fertile season for over sensitivity and overreaction.

    One thing that commenters have recognised about the election is that it has divided the nation or poisoned inter-ethnic relations. Even the Hausa-Fulani world that has been characterised by readiness of northern politicians to give other Nigerians the impression of peaceful relations across political divides between Hausa-Fulani political figures has since the election looked like a cracked world. Secondly, media pundits especially in the social media have recognised the war of words between indigenes of Lagos State and Igbo people resident in the state. It is more optimistic to look at this situation as resulting from the elections. But what if in fact the division has always been there long before presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections? Any surprise that President Buhari himself rated ensuring the unity of the country high on his 2019 manifesto, without necessarily limiting erosion of unity to Boko Haram terrorism?

    Similarly, if the struggle for political power over Lagos State between Igbo residents and indigenes of Lagos State has been in existence long before the 2019 elections, then the country’s unity must have deserved its being cast as a problem by President Buhari. In other words, blaming what appears as receding national unity on the elections may be putting emphasis on effect rather than cause. It may mean that just about any contest for any form of power—political power to rule the country or states, economic power to enable one ethnic group to dominate others, or cultural power, like the claims of some Igbo men and women that Lagos is a no-man’s and no woman’s land can turn an election into a mini civil war.

    As desirable as electoral reforms may be to reduce election-related tension in the country, an urgent problem to address is why are Nigerians so divided that even elections, i.e., giving opportunities to citizens to choose their leaders of governments often seems like the beginning of a civil war? As all petitions are judicially settled and unchallenged governance at the national and subnational levels becomes acceptable to all contestants, leaders of government may need to be more amenable to calls for dialogues or discussions on the way forward for the country on how to realistically bring sustainable unity to the country or respond to what is popularly referred to as the National or Structural Question.

    Going through the manifestoes of APC and PDP does not indicate irreconcilable differences that can frustrate moving forward, once the claims and counterclaims about the elections are settled.  There are overlaps between the platforms of Buhari’s APC and Atiku’s PDP. For example, both Buhari and Atiku pledge to pay more attention to Universal Basic Education. They also agree on representing and getting approval for the Water Bill not passed by the outgoing legislature. They are also on the same page on the imperative of reinforcing national unity. However, they differ on how to reinforce and sustain the country’s unity. Buhari has affirmed that nothing is wrong with the present structure of the polity, the single and centralised police system, and the need to focus on making all political re-engineering projects in the country by military dictators intact, despite demands from citizens to the contrary.

    But Atiku as the Candidate for Restructuring still promised to get all outstanding water bills approved, regardless of how subnational units feel about putting all forms of water—underground and surface— under federal control feel about losing this aspect of their autonomy and geography. He also promised to use his presidency to review existing state laws in respect of cattle grazing, while assuring voters that restoring a noticeable measure of federalism to the country and increasing percentage of funds to subnational governments are sure bets to sustain the country’s unity. Apart from the hype around restructuring, there are no major ideological differences between Buhari and Atiku, nothing too wide between them to forestall some measure of bipartisanship between them once the courts confirm the winner of the presidential election.

    Given that PDP as a political party has never been warm toward restructuring, it is likely that Atiku’s promise of restructuring must have lost its steam after the elections, thus reminding Atiku’s supporters of the danger in embodying a legitimate democratic demand in a man whose political party has never acknowledged the importance of restructuring. Unlike PDP, APC at its birth as a political party embraced restructuring as a mechanism for enhancing national unity in a multicultural society. APC’s acknowledgement of the importance of federalism may have explained why devolution was one of the highlights of the party’s 2015 manifesto: “Initiate action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit.” Despite changes in Buhari’s assessment since 2015, there is still a good role for genuine autonomists to play in the post-election era.

    In most democracies, the ideology of ruling party is often superior to the personal mission of the president or prime minister. Even though President Buhari has not since he won the 2015 election with the manifesto to use the constitution to restore federalism taken any effort to move in the direction of devolution, his party now has a second chance to fulfil the promise it had made as a national party in 2015.

    After the country returns to regular post-election governance, one challenge for ideologues of the APC is to assist Buhari to fulfil the ‘Hardware Problems’ he had promised to fix-provision of security across the country; accelerated power supply; integrated mass transit system, etc. An equally important challenge is for APC ideologues to assist the president to see the importance of finetuning the “Software Problems”—fighting corruption, enhancing national unity, and others on his list of things-to-do during his second and final tenure. One Software Issue that President Buhari has not included in his second-term goals is pursuance of rational debate on effective management of the country’s diversity. The intellectuals of the ruling party need to encourage him to add this important matter to his laundry list.

    It is important that President Buhari himself has promised an open and inclusive governance. And those who are convinced that Nigeria requires a new political structure should hold the president down to this great promise. An open and inclusive government is more than having representatives of all groups in political offices under the presidency. An open government also means governing under the principle of unfettered dialogue on all areas of governance that inevitably include perpetual search for solutions to existing problems and those that may surface in the life of a country or even an administration. Returning a federal system of governance is one such problem.

                                                    

    • Concluded

     

  • Matters arising from 2019 elections (2)

    After the 2011 elections, former President Goodluck Jonathan brought the attention of the country to what he considered one of the most important matters arising from the 2011 elections which he won against General Muhammadu Buhari. He asked the nation to opt for a maximum of one term in office for the president and the governors.  He argued that such constitutional amendment would save the country billions of naira that could be better spent on delivering the common good to the citizenry.

    Jonathan’s idea was loudly underplayed by many politicians, particularly those who had their eyes on the presidency and the governorship for second term. The matter was quickly crowded out by the voices of politicians hoping for at least two terms in office. From experiences garnered by public affairs observers in the 2015 and now 2019 elections, it is not just the cost of money spent on elections that calls for a constitutional amendment; it is the hardly noticed emotional and psychological cost of presidential and gubernatorial elections every four years in a country that is not sufficiently structured along clear ideological lines on the way to political and economic modernity.

    Even though President Buhari called for a low-budget for electioneering, there is no way of knowing how much was committed by the various political parties, especially the two major ones on preparations for and mobilisation of voters for the elections of the last three weeks. With media reports about over 40 deaths and several cases of maiming of supporters of opposing parties by hoodlums organised by forces of personality cults across the country, there is no exaggeration in saying that the casualties for 2011 elections that startled Jonathan are nothing compared to the figures of the 2019 elections. Not even the election of 2015 had the traumatic impact on citizens that families of the dead and wounded from the 2019 elections have experienced, not to talk about how much money—private and public—that must have come into play in an election that the ascetic Buhari had wished to be as low-profile as possible.

    Apart from politicians that may prefer to turn Nigeria into a plutocracy, there are many that also enjoy the festivals and rituals of personal attention that has characterised the politics of personality cults in the country. There are also many optimists who believe that with time, Nigeria will grow up politically to the extent of appreciating the culture of democracy, such as is evident in many democracies across the globe. But there are many patriots who believe that using the constitution to tame the excesses of politicians and their hero worshippers is a more effective way to streamline the country’s electoral process. Just as in 2011, this writer sees more wisdom in pushing for constitutional amendments that can limit or reduce the trauma of elections in the country. There is so much that can be achieved through restructuring in this respect, such as bringing more powers to the regions or states to reduce the attention on the central government. But with a president who has not campaigned on the manifesto of devolution of powers (unlike the platform on which General Buhari contested the election against Jonathan in 2015 in which re-federalising the country was manifest on the party’s manifesto), it may be more effective to use the constitutional approach to change many things that the 1999 Constitution had imposed on the country. Constituents who are for restoring federalism have the right to pressure their lawmakers to present such bills.

    It is conceivable that if Nigerians had been asked to participate in negotiating a post-military constitution, they could have asked for a system of one term of five or six years that obviates the problems of incumbency or a system in which the incumbent governor would feel that his reputation is on the line if he does not do everything to come back. More importantly, a one-term presidency would take a lot of attention away from incumbency factor and give presidents more opportunities to act like statesmen than partisan politicians. Those who are likely to benefit from sycophancy to the incumbent president or governor would not have the need to over exert themselves as we had witnessed in the recent elections at national and subnational levels.

    The argument by those who want two or more terms for president and governors is based on the reasoning the UK and the US, often cited as reference points by Nigerian politicians, have systems that allow their heads of state to stay on for eight or more years. The same set of politicians have no difficulty cutting tenure of vice chancellors to one term of five years on the ground that heads of tertiary institutions would have exhausted themselves at the end of a five-year term. Not allowing incumbents to run for a second term would prevent the situation where sitting governors get emotionally involved in winning to the extent of committing public funds directly or indirectly to such elections, as it often happens in the country. That many advanced democracies have multiple terms for their executives does not justify Nigeria to do so, as there are so many choices that such countries make which those who get to positions of leadership in our country do not strive to imitate.

    A related area that may benefit from constitutional reform is the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Too much noise has been made about INEC this election season in respect of poor preparation, overloading caused by centralization of the powers and functions of the commission, and even charges of inadequate impartiality (independence). Without doubt, INEC can be more independent than it is, even in terms of process of appointment. In a system in which the powers of the president are extensive, just the appearance of sycophancy on the part of electoral officers is enough to give the impression of partisanship. Presidents can be saved from unnecessary charges of influence on the electoral process if they do not have a second term to contest. With a single-term tenure, presidents can be allowed to nominate INEC officers for an election he or she is not contesting. Confirmation for INEC officers can be subjected to two-thirds vote of approval. Leaving nomination and approval of commissioners in the hands of the legislature after a two-thirds vote of consent to such nomination will certainly make the INEC visibly independent and the search for independent individuals more rigorous than it has been since the exit of military rule.

    Since President Buhari has identified his four areas of concern during his second term: Boko Haram and other security threats to the stability of the country; improvement of the economy; ridding the country of political and bureaucratic corruption; and oiling the wheel of the country’s unity, bringing pressure to lawmakers on constitutional amendments to make the 1999 Constitution reflective of the wishes of the citizenry is a task that must be continued at the level of party policy discussions and through sponsored or private bills from legislators who believe Nigeria and Nigerians deserve a more democratic and federal constitution than the current constitution. It is never too late to demand for constitutional changes in any democracy. Fortunately for party leaders, further sensitising legislators about the danger of saddling the country with a constitutional document never approved by citizens is not antithetical to the stated agenda of President Buhari for the next four years.