Category: Ropo Sekoni

What may not be clear at this point is how many of the promises will be honoured at the end of the day.

One thing that cannot be held against our country’s politicians this outgoing year is their readiness to make generous promises about the future they envisage for Nigeria under their watch as rulers from 2019. With promises from 59 (as of last count) political parties with presidential candidates and each with a detailed manifesto, nobody can complain that Nigeria is ending the year without various things to hope for in 2019. What may not be clear at this point is how many of the promises will be honoured at the end of the day.

But all the manifestoes, from the least-known party to the ones whose names are more or less prayer points for innocent citizens and prayer warriors indicate that none of the political parties is mean spirited. Each political party has promised to take the country and its citizens to a higher level, i.e., nothing lower in quality than what citizens already experience. Even though one of the parties publicly identified with the Tory Party of UK, all the parties still manage to promise good governance or better governance than what the country ever had till now.

From available manifestoes, pledges range from provision of reliable electricity to reduction of literacy in the country; provision of healthcare, potable water, and ‘high-quality’ basic education for nine years to every child; security of life and property; protection of the country’s unity; and protection of the country’s multi-religious character. This is not all. Restructuring, devolution of powers, and strengthening of the country’s federalism are on the list of some political parties including their presidential candidates. Even the party that promised restructuring also pledges to ensure that all pending bills on water resources will be approved, regardless of whether such bills belong more to unitary system than to a federal model of governance. Unlike in previous years, there is no difference this time between the manifesto of political parties and that of their presidential candidates, meaning that it will no longer be possible to separate any president from the manifesto of his or her party.

In my search for content for this piece, I took the liberty to ask members of my occasional backyard seminars what they would promise if they were presidential candidates or party leaders.  We first went through promises made by the three major candidates; Ezekwesili, Atiku, and Buhari, with the hope of ranking them, but the discussion took a new turn. Members of the group chose to suggest what parties should make their governments do, to reduce the suffering of citizens. Before long, we agreed on what one group leader named Folk Manifesto, which was later upgraded to People’s Manifesto, because each speaker at the event was educated or credentialed enough to be a minister or senator, given the intellectual capacity of those occupying such positions at present.

Acting on the assumption that citizens should have a role in the making of manifestoes of political parties whose membership cards they carry, the self-appointed manifesto authors at the seminar observed that political manifestoes in our country resemble military budgets in the era of military dictatorship: both documents attempt to do everything under the sun in Nigeria, without being able to do anything at the end. And that none of the manifestoes available to people online can be removed from the category of ‘Do-it-all manifesto for Do-it-all government. For example, all governments—military or civilian—having been fighting corruption since 1966; they have been making efforts to provide electricity and water to all citizens since independence in 1960; they have been working to provide education to make citizens competitive globally; they have been keeping the country united and indivisible since the Biafran War; etc. Yet, not much has improved for the average citizen born before and after 1960.

Towards the end of the seminar, discussions veered in the direction of specific things that political parties should do to have a noticeable multiplier effect on other aspects of life in the country. Between ‘small chop’ and groundnuts, a consensus emerged. The backyard seminar on manifesto can be summarized, in the voice of the rapporteur, as follows:

“We are not practising politicians, but what we need to improve our quality of life should be clear to us. We should also know that the country has too many problems to solve with limited revenue, and that it makes sense for authors of manifestoes to prioritise, particularly when there is no revenue to solve all problems under the sun. Our political leaders have used the approach of solving all problems at the same time for long and without making remarkable dent. We would prefer to vote for a party that chooses to focus on just a few of the legion problems in the country, especially problems whose solution can have ripple effects on other matters.”

“The talk about improving infrastructure that many of the political parties have emphasised is on the mark. What is off the mark is the attempt to solve all the infrastructural problems at the same time. Is there a political party out there that may want to focus primarily on provision of abundant power and water for the country’s 200 million people? Most of other infrastructural problems politicians that politicians would like to solve can be solved much better and less expensively, if there is electricity for citizens and manufacturers round the clock in the country. Citizens with innovative spirit will be incentivised if there is adequate electricity and plenty of water to embark on food processing. People in the rural areas will have more opportunities to start cottage industries that can increase GDP and provide employment, especially if there is electricity to power night-life economy. Reliable electricity will positively affect the type of mass transportation technology needed for inter-state and intra-city rail systems that can respond to the country’s special needs, etc.”

“Professional manifesto consultants are likely to cry foul about any prioritisation that may render many other areas of governance redundant. But this may not be for long, if it happens at all. This option will only make public servants more agile than they have been, as they will be exposed to new ideas and methods. After all, almost 15 per cent of the country’s annual budget has been going to fight an internal war, resettle displaced citizens, and rebuild cities, at the instance of Boko Haram terrorism for about the six years. We can commit 30 per cent of the nation’s revenue to buying the technology to provide adequate power and water within the next four years with the possibility of transforming life in the country. Our new friends, unlike our traditional ones, the Chinese, may be agreeable to such proposal from our government, since it falls into the pattern of helping us build railways from Lagos to Kano and Maradi or from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri.”

One takeaway from this informal discussion among some regular readers of this column is the need for more participatory democracy and more citizen involvement in taking decisions about what citizens need, before governments commit national resources to too many things at the same time, to the extent of inducing self-enervation and little remarkable outcome.

Happy 2019 in advance to readers of this column and those who took time to share their ideas with the columnist in the course of 2018.

At a time that the current crop of legislators was billed to listen attentively, legislators chose to play to the gallery in the most reprehensible manner.

In most pre-colonial societies, deliberative discourse designed to lead to decision making was not constructed on the pattern of agonistic lines of ruling and opposition parties, yet people still disagreed, but they were obligated to be civil or well-mannered while expressing such disagreement. For example, in the traditional Yoruba political and governance space, anyone who acted like the way members of our ruling and opposition parties did at the joint sitting of the Senate and the House at the presentation of the 2019 Budget by the President, such persons would have been referred to as Oponu (roughly in English a churlish or surly person).

The two quotations overleaf are selected to illustrate that the two political traditions Nigeria had copied—British and American, have norms and rules that govern speaking in the legislature. What happened last Wednesday in the National Assembly did not happen because lawmakers had no good tradition to follow; it happened because many of the legislators did not take time to learn the etiquette expected of and from those who would like to be addressed as rulers or leaders.

Although the voice of lawmakers in the PDP was louder and cruder than that of APC fanatics of President Buhari, both sides failed to live up to acceptable standards of the game. Presentation of the budget to those with the remit to approve it is an occasion for listening to the presenter. This is one of the reasons lawmakers are paid handsomely or overpaid. At a time that the current crop of legislators was billed to listen attentively, legislators chose to play to the gallery in the most reprehensible manner. For example, the shouts of ‘Sai Baba Sai Baba’ by APC lawmakers when President Buhari entered the country’s ‘House of Laws’ was an unnecessary sycophantic outburst. Buhari was not in the room to campaign for second time; he was there to perform one of his statutory roles—presentation of the annual budget. Even if he chose to exaggerate the achievements of his government in the last three years, there was no basis for the shouts of ‘No, no, liar’ from opposition party members who relish referring to themselves as ‘Honourables or Distinguished Senators.’

The legislators that shouted ‘Sai Baba’ did not have to use a constitutional and national moment to dramatise their sycophancy. They were in the Assembly not as partisan politicians but as the nation’s lawmakers called upon to do one of the most important activities of the average legislator. For them to have acted like cheerleaders, they have removed dignity from their office as lawmakers. Similarly, those who used the occasion to insult the president while on a constitutionally mandated assignment brought shame to their position and the nation. It ought to have been obvious to them that they were not in the legislature as partisan politicians looking for attention, but supposedly as mature men and women with full understanding of their legislative oversight role over the budget.

On both sides of the aisle, the lawmakers who made distracting noises during the the 2019 Budget speech forgot or ignored the fact that the presentation being done by President Buhari was not only to the legislators but also to citizens who put many personal chores off to have time to watch the event in the Assembly via television. All the acts of distraction in the Assembly illustrate how contemptuous of Nigerians the legislators are. Acting as praise singers of the president or as his mortal enemies at an event that required dignity on their parts may have excited lawmakers involved in the un-dignifying actions of a few days ago, but it presents such lawmakers as a pack of indecent citizens with inadequate sense of responsibility. It was not surprising that young school children in front of televisions rushed went to invite their parents to come and watch the trivialisation of an important national event.

Citizens hitherto optimistic about the national Assembly must have been unmasked as lowbrow representatives of the people. One lesson is that the process that throws up candidates for the legislature needs to be improved. For example, lawmakers hitherto mistaken for adults to whom serious responsibilities can be entrusted did show a few days ago that they too can act like irresponsible clowns. Political godfathers sponsoring candidates to executive and legislative positions ought to think more critically. Many of the people they sponsor for political power over the average citizen may be worse than Area Boys behaviourally. One wonders what many of the legislators sponsored to visit other countries to observe legislative behaviour got out of such visits paid for by taxpayers.

There is a need for local training of lawmakers. Legislators need to be tutored about the difference between electoral democracy and democratic culture in general. Regardless of what weaknesses democracy may have, it is still one functioning system shaped by rules. To ignore such rules in the name of partisanship or lust for attention and power degrades democracy as a culture. Civility is one value that political actors in democratic cultures need to have in quantum. It is ironical that Buhari who started his political career as a dictator did not lose his senses, regardless of how embarrassed he was by lawmakers who started their political career as democrats—freely chosen representatives of the people, who preferred to throw civility to the wind, during an event that called for unity of purpose and civility of language. From the way many of the country’s legislators acted last Wednesday, such lawmakers presumed to be adults may lack the emotional literacy they need to act like adults.

Party leaders ought to invest in training of their members about the culture of deliberative democracy. They need to expose members of their parties to the importance of rules, norms, conventions, and customs that serve simultaneously to sustain plurality of perspective and freedom of speech, the right of citizens to express their opinions without destroying the right of others to do the same. Political party members aspiring to be lawmakers need to be socialised to believe in rules of discourse and parliamentary etiquette.

Voters need mature debates and arguments from the candidates, not pontifications on the merit of Atiku to obtain U.S. visa.

In past election seasons, this column had written about the tricks by candidates to demonize the other during the season of political campaigns for national or state offices. For the past three election cycles, the dominant theme of this writer’s comments was about the bellicose character of campaigns in the country. In the days of Do-or-Die characterisation of the presidential election of 2007, this column complained about prevalence of vocabularies of destruction in the diction and syntax of presentation of candidates of both parties. But for the 2018 season, it seems that principal candidates, especially APC’s Buhari and PDP’s Atiku have largely focused on vision and mission driving their political platforms. However, the readiness of faceless political operatives and power brokers to turn campaign to persuade voters to choose their preferred candidates calls for concern from all sides.

For example, the narrative of two Buharis—one in limbo and another one functioning as president of the country is new and troubling. The authors of the narrative of Buhari and his double act as if citizens are idiots that would believe anything thrown at them. This is not to say that there are no such people in the country. But many of us who had watched Buhari since he came as military dictator ought to know if the person we see on television or in person during his foreign trips ought to know if he is a ‘fake person’ and political strategists and tacticians ought to give citizens some respect that they could not all have lost all their senses. Even if Jubril, the double from Sudan had been an identical twin of Buhari, the impact of social environment of growing up in the Sudan would have left some impact on his mannerisms that can blow the cover of the false Buhari and prevent someone who is in exile to discover the truth about the real ruler of Nigeria. That many voters are ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder does not mean that such people cannot tell a fake Buhari from a real one.

Nigerians who gave this fiction some emotional attention may not be as foolish as many people had thought. There was a time in the political history of this country when it was impossible for Nigerians to know where their president was—in hospital in Saudi Arabia, in Katsina, in Abuja,  in Dubai, or on the plane between countries, or inside air-ambulance between Abuja airport and Aso Rock. But, without being a fanatic of Nigeria’s new political ideology of characterology, I find it unkind to expect a man who had ruled as military dictator in the same country, contested presidential elections several times and campaigned in the last two decades in many Nigerian constituencies to agree to subcontract governance of Nigeria to a foreigner, especially in a country in which there are several forensic experts that can tell identical twins apart. President Buhari’s decision to affirm his individuality or identity in faraway Poland, though unnecessarily belated, still acted in good time to prevent any damage that the rumour could have caused the polity. And Nigerians deserve to congratulate themselves that their president is well, alive and in the right country. If this was a stratagem devised by any of the political parties to win votes, it was not a smart one at all. It is capable of painting Nigeria as an irresponsible nation-state where anything can happen.

Another troubling campaign style is the involvement of real politicians and ghosts in the matter of approval of Atiku’s request for U.S. visa. It is absurd that serious-minded party functionaries would openly complain against granting of American visa to Atiku or anybody for that matter. Democracy expects democratic societies to respect their rights and the rights of other societies. How would Nigerians who are shouting that America should not give Atiku visa feel if America gives such directives to us Nigeria about the citizen of any country? It makes us look churlish when   citizens in any political party complain against readiness or lack of it of the State Department to give visa to Atiku? It is a sign of inferiority complex on our part for our citizens to act or even imagine that the electoral success of any of our candidates depends on the ability or freedom of any candidate to enter and exit the United States.

More depressing is the attempt by a group of people to demonstrate on the street against issuance of visa to Atiku. This is akin to surrendering the country’s sovereignty to the United States at a time that the U.S. itself is doing everything to protect its own sovereignty. It is unlikely that Buhari will be interested in such silly campaign tactics, because he is a proud Nigerian. People who believe that approving visa application for one presidential candidate or the other is an important factor in getting elected do not act as proud Nigerians. If it is true that Atiku himself believes that going to New York or Washington can make a difference in the number of votes he gets, then he ought to question the sanity of such feeling or belief.

Nigerian political system is about the capacity of political leaders to deliver the common good, not about freedom of anybody to travel to any other country. If the report that Atiku once said that Buhari was banned from entering the United States because of his religious views was accurate, that was also a wrong thing to say for a national leader. The country’s problems are serious enough for light-headed politicians to distract citizens from having the peace to concentrate on the political planks of the candidates in all the parties. Nigerians do not deserve to be distracted by frivolities or trivialities. Nigerian voters deserve more respect from those appointed to act on behalf of presidential candidates. Voters need mature debates and arguments from the candidates, not pontifications on the merit of Atiku to obtain U.S. visa. The noise about Atiku’s visa application is as much a distraction as the noise about a Buhari look-alike in Sudan now travelling in our presidential jets to other sovereign countries to represent Nigeria. What some politicians see as smart political moves are more moronic than they can imagine.

And any intervention to save religious groups from becoming tribalistic enclaves can best be provided by appropriate constitutional arrangement

The conclusion to the first part of this essay last Sunday reads as follows: “The ongoing crisis in International School Ibadan may not be just about the school. It is conceivable that ISI crisis is a sign of the future in a multinational polity, where the struggle for relevance may focus on symbols, rather than substance, until fundamental changes are welcome by all diverse cultures that want to live together in one political territory.” Today’s piece will focus on suggestions to federating units on how to prevent struggle for symbolic relevance among religious tribes from sparking conflicts.

As I mentioned last Sunday, members of the Association Muslim Parents of children in ISI who demand that the rules of the school be altered to allow their children wear hijab to school operate on the premise that their children should have the right to wear the symbols of their religion in whatever context they find themselves in the country—public or private space. On the other hand, those charged with the management of the school who invoke the inviolability of the school’s rules operate on the premise that civil law is supreme in a civil or non-theocratic state to religious laws. Muslim parents claim that the Basic Law of the country-the constitution- allows each citizen the freedom of religion; school managers invoke the importance of amending an existing regulation that previously protects behaviour of students and teachers.

But what citizens for and against hijab wearing have not worried about is the long-term implications of a national constitution by framers without mandate for harmony in a  multicultural republic. One question that supporters and opponents of the crisis in ISI need to give attention to is how feasible is a constitution that chooses to operate as if Nigeria is both theocratic and secular. Is a country that characterises itself as a multireligious state necessarily a theocracy or is it automatically a secular state? Can such a country function in both capacities at the same time, without creating confusion and crisis? Is a constitution that promotes freedom of religion free and fair to all in a country, like Nigeria, that may be multireligious and at the same time irreligious? These are questions for a multicultural and multireligious republic to address in its constitution.

At present, the 1999 Constitution is not sufficiently theocratic to deny citizenship rights to citizens who are not religious within the framework of the faith that subsists a theocratic state. Nor is it secular enough to deny any citizen the right to cry foul if his or her taxes are used to promote the interests of specific religions at the expense of others. For example, there are two religions that are recognised by the Nigerian State—Islam and Christianity in that order, if the number of times that Islam and elements associated with Islam, such as Sharia, are mentioned in the constitution illustrates any ranking. Similarly, citizens taking oath are generally allowed to swear by the Qu’ran or the Bible. Nigerians sponsored or subsidised annually with public funds to Mecca or Jerusalem are obliged to demonstrate that they are Muslims or Christians. Nigerians who self-identify as Jews or Animists do not qualify for such privilege. While Muslims and Christians can attract discounts on foreign exchange for religious trips, citizens of other faiths who need such assistance to improve their health are not countenanced by the government.  The constitution also imposes Islamic and Christian holidays on citizens who may not belong to the two religions recognised by the State. Public communication facilities are also used by government leaders to propagate preferred religious beliefs as values citizens need to make the nation work for them. A constitution that discriminates against citizens who are not Muslims or Christians cannot claim to offer unfettered freedom of religion to citizens.

Worse still, many citizens who subscribe to faiths other than Islam and Christianity are bombarded daily by religious symbols that can make non-religious citizens feel unsafe. For example, on public roads, in markets, or public places, it is not uncommon for citizens to sit down with or walk into citizens or foreigners who cover every part of their bodies, including their eyes in various forms of niqab or burka. Even at a time of high threat to security in the country arising from Boko Haram terrorists as suicide bombers, Nigerians are at the risk of selling or buying from market women whom they cannot identify should there be any security threat, because such women are fully masked. Operating in the nebulous zone near constitutional theocracy, otherwise euphemistically referenced as a multireligious ethos, seems to condone marginalization of millions of citizens who do not refer to themselves as Muslims or Christians. There are already too many tensions that are capable of distracting political leaders whose attention span to governance is already too thin for such leaders to be saddled with problems of managing the state as a multireligious republic, rather than as a secular republic.

The crisis of International School Ibadan over what to wear to school raises important issues that pertain to the country’s choice of constitutional model. Given the kind of constitution at hand at present, there is no limit to how many tensions the matter of twinning of state and religion may cause in Nigeria’s multicultural and multi-religious society.  As the number of religions and religious sects grows, the higher the chances of increasing tribalistic groupings that need to assert themselves and turn the public space into a conflict-ridden one. For example, nobody heard of Nigerian Jews in the 1960s as a term of religious identification. But there are Nigerian Jews today. Many Nigerians today say they are Buddhists just as some call themselves scientologists. The list has been growing. For long, most people did not worry about individuals who refer to themselves as Shiites and there was no visible conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims until the 1980s. Cherubim and Seraphim groups’ dress codes are starkly different from those of Celestial churches, etc. The growth in religious groups may be good and exciting, but there needs to be a state intervention in preventing the multitudes of religious sects from encroaching on civil space. And any intervention to save religious groups from becoming tribalistic enclaves can best be provided by appropriate constitutional arrangement.

The choice by many African countries of constitutional secularism is worth considering as part of the restructuring exercise. Nigeria for its citizens is essentially a political territory that is to be made beneficial to all citizens, regardless of religious affiliations. The civil space that Jefferson distinguished 300 years ago from the private space of religion still exists today in most countries. Designating Nigeria as a multi-religious state diminishes its democratic credentials, as such designation automatically denies non-religious individuals their birth rights. Adopting a secular constitution like many countries in ECOWAS: Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, and many others in other regions of Africa will allow as many religions as are needed by individuals to thrive while preserving the public space from tribalistic struggles that can lead to crisis capable of threatening the republic’s unity.

• Concluded

Are those calling for formal opportunities to celebrate or flaunt their religious identity being unnecessarily facetious?

I have prefaced this piece with quotations from the Qu’ran and the Bible, just to show that the two canonical religions believed by many faiths to be national religions in Nigeria are equally opposed to scopophilia or lustful gazing at women. The first preaches prohibition while the second preaches just abstinence, two concepts or practices that are central to public order in various societies today.

In the last two weeks, Nigeria, more precisely the political headquarters of the Yoruba region of the country has been gripped by what looks like clash of civilisations at one of the most prestigious pre-tertiary institutions in West Africa, the International School Ibadan (ISI). The crisis started with a resolution of Association of Muslim Parents of ISI students, to unilaterally change the uniform of the school in a way to project their Muslim identity. The children came to school without preparing their non-Muslim students and teachers ahead of time, in hijab, a special covering of the neck and parts of the head and face. The report said further that the management of the school, in shock, closed the school, to avoid crisis or violence, not totally unimaginable in a country in which Boko Haram (Western Education is Evil) has been on the prowl for almost a decade. What started as a precautionary move has since blossomed into a raging crisis in which non-Muslim parents insist that the traditional dress code of the school be sustained while their Muslim counterparts insist that their children be allowed to showcase their own religious identity.

In a country in which life has been defined by electoral politics, it is not unusual if discussions of the ISI palaver in the media and by public intellectuals are eclipsed by the rhetoric of electioneering that now seems to polarise the mind and heart of the nation between unity and freedom, diversity and integration, or tradition and progress. Nobody can cry foul if patriotic citizens overlook the crisis brewing in ISI as a sign of unforeseen change in Yoruba culture and of the clash of civilisations that may be in its infancy in a country that needs to find a balance between diversity and uniformity. The pieces of which today’s column is the first is designed to keep in full view the issues—overt and hidden—that spawned the ISI crisis as Nigeria grapples with preparations for the election that is believed by many to make or mar Africa’s largest multicultural democracy, just as the 2015 election promised.

What are the issues? Some people believe that the peace and harmony that had existed in the last 55 years of ISI under its dress code need not be destroyed by new demands from quarters that apparently had been comfortable with the traditional dress code in the last 55 years. The problem with this thinking is that the parents of students of ISI today are not the same as those who had been in that status in the past 55 years. If anything, parents of ISI students in the age of political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism are starkly different psychologically, emotionally, culturally, and even intellectually from those that had found harmony with extant ISI dress code that some now label as marginalising their religious identity. Are those calling for formal opportunities to celebrate or flaunt their religious identity being unnecessarily facetious? Not necessarily, if we choose to think sociologically or realistically. They too are as interested in their own emotional perception of reality and externalisation of their values as their non-Muslim counterparts.

Given the rise in politicisation and marketisation of religion or religiosity in many parts of the world including Nigeria, it is not unlikely that Christian and Animist business men and women making a living producing or selling hijab, niqab, and burka may be on the picket line in favour of those insistent on introduction of hijab to schools, courts, the military, etc. Such is the power of economic and political change in the world. How else can anybody view insistence by immigrant communities in non-Muslim nations of Western Europe that their members who ran away from their homes for economic, political, and cultural reasons still demand that they be allowed to don their religious symbols?  The point being made here is that Change—good or bad—has come and is coming to what some of us had gotten used to as peace and harmony of the cultural style of yore. As a multicultural nation-state, we would be hiding our heads in the sand if we believe that change of Nigeria from a secular state to a multi-religious state does not have unsettling implications for Muslims and Christians, as well as for Animists and Atheists that may be mobilising their resources to interrogate the constitution that has chosen to move away from separation of state and religion or the neutrality of the state to religion.

Further, people of Muslim faith are likely to be increasingly attracted by Muslim, Islamic, or Arab sartorial culture as the political context in the country continues to seem to be favoured by guardians of the state. It is conceivable that a similar situation may arise if Oritsejafor is elected president of Nigeria tomorrow. Although Islam does not have the political visibility it has in countries with Islamic Brotherhood as an ideological organ for political power acquisition as it has in many Muslim countries, it still has some attraction today than it had during the era of Obasanjo and Jonathan. Just reading through the names of those who secure Nigeria and hold it together as one country, it should not be surprising that Muslim parents are eager to showcase the religious affiliation of their children. I know many relations who migrated from the Catholic and Methodist denominations that were predominant in upbringing of children in my extended family to the Redeem Christian Church of Christ the day after Jonathan went to Sagamu to kneel down before the General Overseer for him to put his holy hands on Jonathan’s head. Is this a healthy development? Not necessarily, but it is part of Nigeria’s political reality, and it can get worse, especially if those who dismiss efforts to extend the envelope of cultural response as mere irritations, such as Obasanjo did when many states in the North suddenly opted for Sharia.

Ideally, citizens in a democratic country should be able to live within the preferences of their culture and the rules and regulations of the state that house divergent cultures in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural polity and society. But realistically, many, if not most, citizens in most countries find it easier to live as participants in whatever culture seems most profitable for them, particularly in an era of commoditisation of culture and politicization of religion. For example, when Babangida enrolled Nigeria in Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) without consulting citizens during the military era, many citizens who saw this as distraction now know better that it was the sign of things to come. Let no one cry foul that Muslims are calling for self-reflection in schools, court rooms, and public service. It may be Celestial church members, Ifa worshippers, and Ogboni—original or reformed fanatics—that may be the next to invoke and test the 1999 constitution on freedom of religion and expression.

The ongoing crisis in International School Ibadan may not be just about the school. It is conceivable or imaginable that the ISI crisis is a sign of the future in a multinational polity, where the struggle will be with symbols, rather than substance, until fundamental changes are welcome by all diverse cultures that want to live together in one political territory.

• To be continued

When Obasanjo was in power in 1999, he was quoted as saying that a call for restructuring the country was tantamount to a call for disintegration

There are too many people talking lazily about restructuring in Nigeria. Unfortunately, people are not asking them individually what do they mean by restructuring? What form do they want restructuring to take? Do they want us to have something like the three regions we used to have? And now we have 36 states and the FCT. What form do they want? They are just talking loosely about restructuring…. Let them define it and then we see how we can peacefully do it in the interest of Nigerians. They are just saying they want Nigeria restructured and they don’t have the clue of what the form the restructuring should be. So, anybody who talks to you about restructuring in Nigeria, ask him what he means and the form he wants it to take.—Muhammadu Buhari in Paris
In basic terms, federalism refers to “a division of jurisdiction and authority between at least two levels of government.” This division usually occurs between two or more constitutionally recognised levels of government; that is, levels of government separated under the nation’s constitution and with their own autonomous (or semi-autonomous) constitutional powers. Moreover, each level of government usually has its own particular jurisdiction; that is, areas of public policy in which it, and only it, may exercise authority (or have the final authority). For example, typically the national government will have final authority over “national” issues, such as national defence, foreign policy, and treaty-making, just to name a few. By contrast, the regional governments will have power over more “regional” issues, though this can vary widely from one federation to another—Jackson, R. & Jackson, D. Politics in Canada: Culture, Institutions, Behaviour and Public Policy, Toronto: Pearson Education Canada Inc., 2006.

What President Muhammadu Buhari said to Nigerians in France that he and many people are not sure what people mean by restructuring is not surprising. This has been a stock response from most military men who had had hands in ruling Nigeria as military dictators. When Obasanjo was in power in 1999, he was quoted as saying that a call for restructuring the country was tantamount to a call for disintegration. When he convened a conference, he called it Political Reforms conference and avoided the use of restructuring and allied vocabularies in the agenda for the conference. Even many civilians who had opportunities to benefit from the military’s “restructuring” of Nigeria away from federalism into a unitary mode of governance in which federating units were designed to function as vassals of the central government, were enthusiastic in throwing cold water on demands for restructuring, by describing the word as too polysemous for anyone to know exactly what its users’ intentions are.

As a columnist that has been preoccupied with demand for restructuring since 2006, I feel privileged to assist in today’s piece to explain what and why those engaged in calls for restructuring since 1993 mean by the word on the tongues of millions of Nigerians and to which other millions of Nigerians have cocked their ears. First on the why. From  Alao Aka-Bashorun’s call for Sovereign National Conference (SNC) in the early 1990s to work out a new charter for the Nigerian Union to demands during and in the post-Abacha era for restructuring in whatever forum, the target of the action being referenced as ‘restructuring’ has always been returning Nigeria to a variant of the federal constitution that it had at the time of its independence in 1960.

Put simply, restructuring is restoring federalist governance to Nigeria or returning political and economic autonomy to the federating units—regions or states. The belief that drives demand for restructuring is that between 1975 and 1998, military rulers in the country degraded the country’s heritage of federal system in a gradual manner that started with Olusegun Obasanjo’s take-over of state institutions and culminated in the 1999 Constitution under Abdusalaam Abubakar respectively. The degrading of the federating units or subnational governments took the form of erosion of powers federating units had in the years preceding independence and the few years before the military overthrow of the Tafawa Balewa government.

More specifically, restructuring became necessary because the central government took over resource management and distribution, to the extent that a constitutional system that used to allow regions to own 50% of mineral resources became replaced by one that gave the central government full powers over such resources. To justify the central government’s take-over of such resources, items on the Exclusive Legislative List got increased while those on the Concurrent Legislative List also increased, leaving virtually nothing on the Residual List. Functions that used to allow for freedom of choice and action to allow the country benefit from diversity of worldviews and values, such as education, judicial matters, law enforcement, power over generation of revenue became centralised, thus rubbing federating units the freedom to govern themselves in compliance with their values and in cooperation with other value systems in the country. The principle of federalism that affirms the validity of sharing of power and sovereignty was replaced by the principle of federal legislative supremacy attached to each item on the Concurrent List since 1999.

The consequence for millions of citizens of degrading of the federal constitution between 1975 and 1999 and post-military resistance to demand for a constitution negotiated by citizens in a free country is frustration on the part of many who view the power of the national government as suffocating to their values and aspirations. People feel frustrated about the quality of education they receive; the infrastructure that is available to their communities; safety and security of life and property in their communities; government’s attention to the health of citizens; etc. Such people believe that the failure of the central government endowed with enormous powers and responsibilities, and resources have resulted from the alienation of citizens from government occasioned by de-federalisation of an essentially culturally diverse republic, rather than from impossibility of turning a multicultural society and polity into an economic and political success. Such people, especially those who grew up when the country practiced federal model of governance in the years before military rule, saw the past of Nigeria with nostalgia for its effective governance under a system devoid of domination or perceived domination of one part by the other.

Put simply, restructuring is a word that can be described as a-causal or neutral. It can change any part of a situation or something: front, back, or side, but with the possibility of a positive or negative goal. Restructuring can apply to a political entity. It can change the character of its geography, economy, politics, including the soul or heart of the polity—the constitution. In short, restructuring can be customised—applied to specific aspects of a thing, or generic—made to touch every aspect of a thing. And there is no requirement that a restructuring act must have a progressive or reactionary goal. It is an exercise that can be given meaning by somebody interested in returning to what worked in the past or to what is believed to have a greater capacity to achieve a better outcome in the present or future, than the thing slated for restructuring has been able to do.

In the years that this word has been part of Nigeria’s political vocabulary, the understanding has generally been that restructuring is to lead to restoring federalism to the country or what is otherwise referred as re-federalisation. Those who believe that the current structure is not conducive to their worldview and values call for restructuring while those who believe that the status quo suits their worldview argue against it. But by itself, restructuring does not mean more than changing aspects of a thing.

Re-federalising Nigeria is a more precise word for solving the problems militating against liberty, progress and development in the country. For the avoidance of doubt, good governance is not specific to federal or unitary governance model. It is expected to exist in all democracies—be they unitary like France, Netherlands, and Singapore, or federal like Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States of America, and United Arab Emirates. Similarly, devolution is not specific to federalism; unitary governments do devolve or transfer powers to sub-national governments without making such system federal. So is promotion of privatisation of the economy not a prerequisite for federalising a country. Privatisation is as visible in federal societies as it is in unitary polities. What differs between national and subnational governments is the degree of freedom available to sub-national governments to have autonomy to govern itself in response to its values.

What is most important for progressive politicians and ideologues to consider is creating a new form of relationship between national and sub-national levels of government. If the system that citizens prefer is capable of preventing domination of one section of the country by another; if it can prevent any form of dictation from the central government to sub-national governments except on matters agreed to by all to be exclusive to the central government; if matters of education, judiciary (excepting role of an apex Constitutional court), law enforcement end in each state as it is in Germany; if resource generation and use are determined by subnational governments for their communities; and if there is balance of fiscal power between national and sub-national governments, federalism would have been returned to Nigeria or Nigeria would have been restructured.

Roposek@msn.com

How many voters are likely to have the presence of mind to read through 79 manifestoes?

Democracy …is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike—Plato

If the recent announcement about emergence of 79 presidential candidates does not jolt fans of deliberative democracy about election fever in the country, nothing else can. More than ever before in the history of elections in the country, interest in presidential elections by political parties has never been this enthusiastic, just as the number of presidential and legislative offices has never been this astronomical.

Nikolas Rose once theorized in an essay titled, “Governing by Numbers: Figuring out Democracy” that democratic power is calculated power, calculating power, and requiring citizens who calculate about power.” Though Rose’s emphasis was on the sociology of the linkage between manipulation of numbers: census, statistics, polls, etc and the struggle for and exercise of power, my interest today is about the relationship between citizens who calculate about power, even before elections.

Premium Times’ revelation that the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) had announced nominations of 79 presidential candidates from over 90 political parties to contest for the presidency in 2019; 1,803 individuals to contest for 109 senate seats; and 4,548 candidates to jostle for 350 legislative seats ought to raise concerns about efficient management of the electoral process. Without depriving citizens of their right of association, such staggering number of candidates calls for ideas on how to strengthen disciplined subjectivity of individuals, if conducting efficient and stress-free elections is to be part of the country’s electoral culture.

If the meteoric rise in number of presidential candidates is caused by feelings by political parties that had been in the margins for years that they can take advantage of the perception that APC and PDP look more alike in 2019 than they did in 2015, they may have some point. But that 77 parties have such feeling is rather unusual for Nigeria’s electoral history from 1959 till 2015. Even in the context of elections in Africa, 79 presidential candidates from Nigeria is still bizarre.  For example, 23 candidates ran against Emmerson Mnangagwa, 20 against Ellen Sirleaf before that. The highest until now is 32 in Benin Republic. Other countries on the continent that have taken the concept of multi-party democracy to mean creation of multitude of parties include Niger with 30, Central African Republic with 30, Mali with 24, Somalia with 24 and Sierra Leone with 16. But Nigeria has made good its claim of being the leader of Africa with 90 political parties and 79 presidential candidates for the 2019 elections.

What is likely to be the implications of Nigeria’s multitude of presidential candidates and of political parties, most of whom citizens do not hear of until a few months to election? First, there is an advantage: obvious respect by governments for citizens’ freedom of association, even though such respect may seem selective in other spheres, such as the tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the country.

It is the disadvantages that are legion. Although INEC enthusiastically claims that it is in full control of handling the high number of parties, there is no doubt that something will give on election days, if not in relation to logistics, it may be in respect of stress of voters that would need to read 79 names in the process of identifying their preferred candidates. Equally will voters experience stress while voting for candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives where they will have to contend with choosing from many names on the ballot paper with multitudes of party symbols. The stress will be worse for the illiterate millions of voters who rely on party symbols as means of identifying their candidates of choice. The implications for fielding hordes of candidates on election day may not end with voter’s stress. Counting of votes is another factor capable of causing delay of results for days after casting of votes, with potential problems of computation and verification of votes.

In some respect, the advent of multitudes of parties and candidates on the country’s electoral landscape may make choice difficult for voters. How many voters are likely to have the presence of mind to read through 79 manifestoes? What percentage of voters will have the time to assess legions of promises by 79 presidential candidates? Fielding 79 presidential candidates smacks of mocking the electoral process, rather than growing opportunities for adequate analysis of the candidates by the electorate. In addition, the presence of 79 presidential candidates increases the chance of getting a president who may be elected by a negligible minority of voters, simply because he has obtained majority of votes among 79 candidates. It is common knowledge that choosing may become meaningless if the field of choice is limitless.

It is not only INEC that is the facilitator of electoral theatrics in respect of the 2019 elections. Owners or creators of political parties since the transition from military dictatorship to electoral politics have not helped matters. Why, for example, is it difficult for manufacturers of political parties to align their ideological missions to a few parties as has been the practice since the 1960s when the total number of political parties were under ten? In a presidential system designed to throw up a candidate that can get the endorsement of majority of voters in a diverse polity so that the winner in a presidential election may be a unifier of the nation, it may be counterproductive to saddle voters with 79 candidates. Although the country may not have accomplished the intention of the framers of the constitution in respect of giving the country a president that is necessarily a nation’s unifier, establishing an electoral process that can promote this value is crucial to sustain the country’s unity. And fielding 79 presidential candidates is not likely to achieve this political goal.

Political parties are means of unifying a country through organizing citizens around ideologies and policies for governance, and not a means of further dividing the country into too many political factions to confound the electorate. Citizens desirous of becoming leaders need to realize that 90 political parties and 79 presidential candidates may divide the country more than they can unify it for proper governance. With two major political parties that are perceived to have become in 2018 ideological clones of each other more than they were in 2015 in terms of impact of governance toward the common good, the huge number of parties and candidates can still be used to improve the range of platforms and thus facilitate choosing of candidates by voters. For this to happen before the 2019 elections, the 77 political parties should come together to give the country a strong third party, to contest the elections with APC and PDP, instead of the 77 parties remaining as devices for attention seeking.

• Roposek@msn.com