Britain is fast losing its credential as a human rights defender and promoter. Through a raft of questionable policies and avoidable scandals, successive governments are doing more harm to the country’s reputation than any hostile country could manage. The recent decision by the Boris Johnson’s government to send refugees to Rwanda is, frankly, reprehensible. As if this isn’t enough, the Home Office announced that it will now electronically tag new arrivals seeking asylum. This criminalisation of other human beings, whose only offence, in some cases, is fleeing political persecution and civil conflicts, is immoral and utterly shameful.

In spite of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and its history of imperial conquest (there are only 22 countries in the world that have never been invaded or colonised by Britain), it has managed to whitewash its sordid past with good deeds. It led the global abolitionist movement, banned the trade in slaves in 1807 and completely outlawed slavery across the British empire with the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833—the United States’ emancipation proclamation that freed slaves was not until 1863. Britain even used its formidable naval power, often at great cost to its naval officers, to patrol international waters and to enforce the ban.

The country also has a history of contributing to international human rights legislation. The Magna Carta, a royal charter detailing liberties and political rights has inspired international human right laws. The drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights was largely supervised by a British man, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. The country was also the first to ratify the Convention in 1951. Ironically, like a petulant child, it now rails against the same convention and threatens to withdraw from it because the European Court of Human Rights has ruled against its policies.

The truth is that the Rwanda policy is not completely out of character. It is a restatement of the ‘Hostile Environment Policy’ that former prime minister, Theresa May, pushed as Home Secretary. In May 2012, Theresa May granted an interview where she explicitly claimed that the aim of the new policy was to “give illegal migrants a really hostile reception.” That policy heralded a culture change within and outside the institutions of government. Within government, there was an overzealous effort to be seen as tough on immigration and to attract more right-leaning voters.

Read Also: Buhari to Nigerians in Rwanda: I’m proud of youths excelling at home, abroad

Unsurprisingly, such efforts inevitably culminated in the Windrush scandal that made illegals out of legal residents. Generations of decent and hardworking Caribbeans who came to the country at the behest of the British government between 1948 and 1971 to fill post-war labour shortages were harassed out of the country because of a government’s politicisation of immigration to improve its electoral chances. The same hostile environment policy was behind the shameful stop and search of ‘suspected’ immigrants on the streets of London in the 2010s. Of course, it was black and brown people who were often targeted as ‘suspected’ immigrants.

More ignoble actions followed, including the ‘go home or face arrest’ adverts on buses and vans in boroughs dominated by minority groups. Immigration enforcement did not happen only on the streets, it was brought into people’s homes. The government weaponised anti-immigration sentiments by co-opting ordinary citizens and imploring them to ‘double’ as immigration control officers. For instance, landlords were expected to determine the legal status of their tenants or face severe fines. It is not shocking that such overtly racist and deeply problematic policies have fed into public consciousness with several surveys indicating a rise in racism in the United Kingdom in recent years. A report by the lInstitute for Public Policy Research declared that the ‘hostile environment policy fostered racism’ and encouraged discrimination.

Who can forget that at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, a few days after 800 refugees lost their lives off the coast of Libya, Katie Hopkins, a prominent columnist in the UK, compared migrants to cockroaches. Where previously one thought that these policies and rhetoric were isolated and did not reflect the true image of Britain, with the Rwanda decision, there is now little doubt this is the new image of Britain. Britain appears less concerned about living up to its reputation as a country that traditionally upholds and promotes human rights. It increasingly focuses on policies that pander to sections of the society that are avowedly anti-migrants.

The Rwanda policy is morally dubious not only because it criminalises people seeking refuge, but also because it overstates the scale of the responsibility that countries like Britain bear and outsources the international obligations they hold. Supporters of the initiative argue that without such policies to discourage refugees, developed countries would inevitably be overrun by ‘hordes of human caravan’ seeking protection. The infrastructure would experience severe strain.   Such arguments do not stand up to scrutiny. In the first place, poorer countries shoulder greater responsibilities for refugee resettlement. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 4 out of 5 refugees stay in the region of displacement and seek protection in neighbouring countries. It is why Turkiye (formerly Turkey) hosts more than 3.8 million refugees (most of them from Syria), and why there are more than 1.5 million refugees in Uganda.

The irony is that states like Britain that have done the barest minimum in taking in refugees are outsourcing responsibilities. In the year ending September 2021, Britain resettled only 1,171 individuals seeking protection. It is unconscionable that Rwanda, a country more densely populated than Britain is being seduced by the promise of slush funds.

As the post Brexit era begins in earnest, Britain must be reminded that what has always been attractive about it is the promise that human rights are important enough to be promoted and protected. Openly disparaging its human rights record and reputation will not win it friends or consolidate its global leadership. If the government is as keen to expand and deepen its relationship with the global south as it professes, then it must reverse this ill-advised Rwanda policy that portrays it unfavourably and undermines its global image as a truly welcoming society.

• Adediran is an Assistant professor in International Relations at Liverpool Hope University. He can be contacted on: bolaadediran2020@yahoo.com

Although the events of June 12 1993 did not usher in democracy, or perhaps more appropriately, civilian rule to Nigeria, that date has been given a prominent and permanent place in the history of this nation. It is now an official holiday, complete with a presidential message to the country in remembrance of our heroic failure to overthrow the arbitrariness of military rule and bring up memories of MKO Abiola, the presumed winner, or indeed now, the officially recognised winner of the presidential election which was supervised by our military rulers of those days.

This year, June 12 fell on a Sunday and one of my young friends confidently expected me to at least mention this momentous event in my column on that day. It was after I received his comment reminding me of that omission in my column that it dawned on me that like close to fifty per cent of Nigerians, this young man was not even born on the original June 12 date. This event has so many sides to it that those of us who were privileged to have been part of it and saw the incidents associated with it unfold before our eyes have a duty to continue to talk about it from our individual points of view in order that a nearly whole picture of June 12 could be brought within the purview of history.

June 12 may be just one day but the only thing that happened on that day was that Nigerians came out to cast their votes in a presidential election which was to usher in the rule of law after close to ten years of military rule. The expectation of it however went beyond just changing over from military to civilian rule; it was to be the event that kicked out military rule from our land for good. At that point in time, the country had been under military rule for all of twenty-three years of her thirty-three year history and it was clear that the normalisation of an aberration was no longer in the interest of Nigerian development. The military in between killing each other, plunging the country into a ruinous civil war and acting outside the rule of law simply had to go if the country was not going to be throttled to death.

The truth about June 12 needs to be told but it has so many sides that it must be told by many people working from various angles because June 12 was not an event but a process and one that is still going on. It is looking like it is a journey on a fast moving vehicle under the apparent control of a driver who has lost whatever sense of direction that he started with. The process started in 1985 almost as soon as Babangida seized power and quite incongruously declared himself military president, immediately making a mockery of that office. After all, nobody voted for him and his tenure in office had no limit. But he was well aware of the precariousness of his office and his first task was to make sure that he was safely what he claimed he was and was prepared to do whatever was necessary for him to do to achieve his ambition. He did not have to campaign to anyone to secure his job but he knew instinctively that he had to woo people to his side and that he had to do so immediately. His immediate constituency was the military but he had that sewn up impressively and so he turned his attention to civil society hoping to convince the unruly civilians under his rule that he not only had their interest uppermost in his mind but that in addition he was going to supervise the building of a vibrant new nation on the ashes of the old one.

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In order to sell this vision to Nigeria, the military decided consciously or unconsciously, to use the old carrot and stick method to convince the people to fall in line. The juiciest carrot available was the promise of an early return to civilian rule with the added incentive that the new country being constructed was going to be so strong that nobody in his right senses was going to even think of planning a coup, let alone carrying one out in the future. In other words, what was being offered was a future without military coups. If this was not a juicy carrot, then it was nothing at all and this was enough to mollify an anxious population. But there were numerous sticks too, as many structures which had provided some opportunities for many people in the past were dismantled in an orgy of restructuring under the umbrella of the Structural Adjustment Programme, which had been prescribed by the Breton Woods institutions on the heel of loans which had been taken ostensibly to carry out necessary restructuring programmes. The government went ahead to take those loans in spite of the fact that the public which had been consulted over what step to take had advised against taking them. The wishes of the people were ruthlessly brushed aside showing the abject contempt which the government had for public opinion. However, the government wanted to be loved and the way that it cultivated that love was to bring out the carrot of impending return to civil rule thus all the noise about a transition programme but actually a transition to nowhere.

With the annoying benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the transition programme as it was played out, was designed to keep the government in power indefinitely in the manner of despots like Mobutu, Bongo, Biya, Bokkasa, Arap Moi and other such nuisances who had their subjects by the throat, sucking the life out of them in the most cynical way possible. Without the checks and balances which all governments need if they were to keep along the narrow path of responsibility, there was nothing that could be done to ensure that the country would not be short changed by her unrepresentative leaders. In the end, June 12 failed miserably, not because the much vaunted free and fair election was annulled but because the authors of the Transition Programme built their castle on a foundation of lies, deceit and rank injustice. The sad truth is that the programme was designed to crumble long before the electorate was to validate it, long before they were expected to troop out to vote under the dubious auspices of two toy parties which they were told were a little to the right and a little to the left of what exactly?

The immediate outcome of June 12 was to impose the iron fisted five year dictatorship of General Abacha on the country, a misadventure the effects of which we are still suffering. It is ironic that we have chosen to celebrate a phantom event as a symbol of democracy in our country but again maybe it is justifiable to do so because after all, the democracy we celebrate limply but persistently is also a system of painful make belief and a demonstration of the fact that you cannot get something from nothing. We arrived at June 12 1993 because we were willing to be deceived. That we were accomplices to the charade leading up to the election is shown up by the fact that General Abacha at the height of his contempt for the people of Nigeria almost immediately after seizing power unveiled his own version of a phantom transition programme and wonder of wonders, we fell for it again. I was tempted to say that we pretended to fall for it but our politicians fell in line with Abacha so quickly and completely that they could not have been pretending to be complicit with the dictator. The Babangida transition ended in tragedy but the one following it simply descended into a farce, more demoralising and arguably more damaging than the tragedy which came before.

The Abacha transition programme was working from the same blueprint as the one that crashed so spectacularly on June 12 even though it was clear from the get go that the transition was only designed to ensure the perpetuation of the regime. Politicians, undaunted and undeterred by the drubbing they had just received did not hesitate to form parties, five of which were registered to participate in the elections which they had been promised by a man who was not only inscrutable in character but hid his eyes behind not dark but my pairs of black glasses. A man who was in proverbial terms at least as inscrutable as the Sphinx. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, our politicians, fearful of losing out on the loot which was stashed at the end of the magnificent  rainbow on their closed minds decided to give the man in power the benefit of the doubt. Using colourful metaphor, they decided that the transition programme was a train taking them to the land of democracy and were each determined to secure a seat on this fanciful contraption. Those of them who through an attack of a conscience they did not even know that they had, were roundly derided for their failure to buy their ticket for the joy ride on the Democracy express.

To be fair, Abacha was not to be trifled with which is why a large number of politicians who showed even an ounce of opposition had no choice but to flee to distant lands from where they fired the occasional arrow in the general direction of the General. This time, there was no hidden agenda as this dictator did not believe in subterfuge and was determined to capture the castle of the Nigerian presidency by storm. By the time he died unexpectedly, Abacha was on the threshold of achieving his ambition as by then, he had been unanimously endorsed as the presidential candidate of each of the five parties on ground, several once powerful people including the former second in command to Abacha and General to whom Abacha owed a military salute in days past were waiting to be executed for a phantom coup plot and everyone knew better than to show any form of dissent. But for the sudden demise of the General, June 12 would surely have been buried once and for all.

The deaths of these two men did come much as a surprise to me, of a truth both men were old enough to understand that death could come calling anytime soon. But there’s a thing with we mortals, particularly we who hail from these climes , we are very much at home with hope and will glide on it against even the starkest presentation of reality.

Alexander Madiebo who died recently at the age of 90  was a soldier’s soldier, a military officer who rose through the ranks of the Nigerian and Biafran Armies, eventually becoming General Officer Commanding of the Biafran Army before traveling with Odumegwu Ojukwu to the Ivory Coast leading to the collapse of the Biafran struggle for independence.

Madiebo, who like Ojukwu had obvioulsy played no major roles in the upheavals that had led to the civil war had thrust upon him the duties of keeping the Biafran nation alive through the eventual command of the Biafran Army.

According to numerous accounts Madiebo demonstrated ample leadership which resulted in Biafra withstanding a number of vicious onslaughts on the battle field for a miraculous two years and a few months. Jaded by the several factors, such as the lack of arms, poor training, the heavy reliance on mercenaries as well as the obnoxious intrusion  of bloody civilians in running the army, it is very much surprising that the Biafran Army recorded a number of upsets and should be a case study for institutions that teach on warfare  and strategic studies, with some credit going to Madiebo who led on the battlefield.

Madiebo was to go on to pen his memoirs of the Civil War and to the best of my knowledge was the only Nigerian author who did a thorough job of recasting events through a firmament of non bias. Madiebo did not write that book, titled, the Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran Civil War as an ex Biafran combatant but as one who wanted to leave for generations yet unborn lessons of immense value. In the book’s epilogue, Madiebo asked salient questions as regarding the timing of the declaration of Republic of Biafra, procurement of Biafran arms, diplomacy and even the fallout of the coups of both January 15 and July 29, 1966. Again, in writing such a book Madiebo did what the two principal actors in Emeka Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon had very much failed to do —- give us a vivid account of whatever happened in the background of events that led to the war, Madiebo’s book offers us such immense insight and scholars on the civil war as well as historical buffs like us will always appreciate such work.

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For Professor Osayuki Godwin Oshodin, a scholar and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin was an administrator per excellence. I came across Oshodin as a student of the Great University of Benin, he was then a senior lecturer and he would always regale us with stories of his numerous running battles with the other side of student unionism and cultism. A natural academic, Oshodin would lecture for hours without a recourse to his notes or a textbook. As an administrator, his stints as Dean of Student Affairs, Dean of the Faculty of Education and finally the Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin remain sterling. Oshodin from all I knew and heard about him was incorruptible, little wonder that under his watch as Vice Chancellor the University not only witnessed a tripling of its infrastructural base but also a jump in its ranking.

Born on the 9th of August 1950,

Oshodin was to  attend Western Boys High School, Benin City, Federal School of Science, Lagos State. In pursuit of the Golden Fleece, he was to further his studies with Central State University Ohio, and, then, proceeded to Columbia University of New York city, United States where he was conferred a doctor of education degree (Ed.D) from Teachers College, Columbia University of New York city in 1980.

Returning to Nigeria in 1981, Oshodin was to begin his lecturing career as a research fellow rising through the ranks to become the first Vice Chancellor of Bini extraction in November 2009.

As vice chancellor, his tenure  was one that towered over previous and succeeding Vice Chancellors, his vision of the University of Benin was indeed superlative, culminating in the University experiencing what many would call “Its finest hour”.

A fair man and very principled Oshodin travelled all his life through the path of justice, it did not matter who the oppressed man was or his ethnic origin. Oshodin also never used his office to enrich himself as many are wont to do , he had a modest view of life as he very much disliked any idea of an ostentatious life, he was much unlike his peers who used every avenue or opportunity to stupendously enrich themselves much to the detriment of the academic environment, staff welfare and academic excellence.

As both men ride into the sunset, it is my prayer that God will give their families the fortitude to bear  the loss and men and women the wisdom to uphold their legacies for all to see.

It is not unusual nowadays to hear diplomats from western nations lament the destabilising role that China, Russia and their cahoot of renegade states play within the international system. Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, recently described the invasion of Ukraine as a Zeitenwende, a historical turning point in the rules-based international system. On May 8, in commemoration of the end of the Second World War in Europe, the leaders of the G7 released a joint statement affirming that Russia’s action violated the principles upon which the post second world war system had been constructed. China’s actions in Taiwan, the South China sea, have been described in similar terms—as threatening the stability of the international order and tearing at the fabric of the rules-based system.

The end of the second world war ushered in a new approach to international relations. Unlike the League of Nations which had not legally outlawed war, the UN was designed with the ambition to prevent future wars through international law. For instance, the preamble of the United Nations Charter opened with these words: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”

To ensure this agenda of peace was realised, the framers of the UN Charter outlined guiding principles to regulate the relations amongst states in Article 2 (1-7). In article 2(1), the Charter maintained that the organisation would operate on the basis of the sovereign equality of member states. In article 2(4), it outlawed wars of aggression by enjoining all states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states. The argument, therefore is that, by acting with impunity these states threaten to completely upend this post war order. But the important question here is, how valid is this argument?

Let us be clear, both countries are serial violators of international law and their actions often put international peace and stability in jeopardy. In October 2021, the Chinese air force sent 150 aircrafts into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone within a period of four days. It has continued such provocations this year too, prompting US president, Joe Biden, to abandon his country’s long-standing policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ regarding how it will deal with a possible invasion of Taiwan by China. Russia’s litany of violations of the principles of international law need not be rehashed here. They are visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. But this is not the whole story.

Western states have acted with similar contempt for international laws and norms. The US’ led invasion of Iraq is perhaps one of the best-known examples, but there were others too— for instance, the invasion of Panama in 1989 by the US. There have also been several CIA sponsored coups in Latin America that deposed regimes and destabilised these states. In a landmark decision in 1986, the International Court of Justice found that the US’ military activities in Nicaragua violated international law. Yet, the US did not only disregard the ICJ’s judgement, but actively prevented Nicaragua from obtaining the remedy granted it by the international court.

In essence, the narrative that Russia and China are the maleficent forces whose actions threaten the supposed rules-based system does not hold up in the face of critical scrutiny.  In fact, a more legitimate question is whether the supposed rules-based system ever took off. I argue to the contrary. The Cold War began almost immediately after the second World War and during it, states of the global south were routinely invaded or politically interfered with. The ideological contest between liberal capitalism and communism provided a pretence for the wars of proxy that the west and the USSR engaged in. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, Congo to Angola, we in the global south never saw those supposed rules operationalised. Indeed, it is not provocative to insist that claims of the existence of a rules-based system shows an unawareness of, and a complete disregard of the history of aggression by both western actors and the USSR in the affairs of the global south.

The end of the cold war did not bring much succour either. The west’s aerial bombing of Kosovo in 1998 was illegal even if it was adjudged to have had ‘humanitarian intentions’. The US continues to routinely violate the sovereignty of states such as Pakistan and Somalia by launching drone attacks or military expeditions in its war on terror. The reality is that this avowed rules-based international system is not in jeopardy, it was stillbirth. It never took off. The international system is one that is mostly based on power politics, not on rules. If rules exist at all, they exist only for the weak, for the small states.

• Dr Adediran is an Assistant professor in International Relations at Liverpool Hope University. He can be contacted on: bolaadediran2020@yahoo.com

We can be under no illusion that the emergence of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as the presidential flag bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was the wish of every member of the party; but it has a soothing effect on the psyche of Nigerians, generally. Among other things, it shows that it is not true, after all, that the Nigerian political elite has lost every capacity to resolve naughty political issues and that a section of the country is unnecessarily fixated over power.

Quite apart from the fact that Senator Tinubu had a formidable support for his aspiration to the presidential candidacy of the APC, the insistence by thirteen governors in the North – even if belatedly – that the presidency should rotate back to the southern part of the country is a pointer.

Of course, thirteen governors alone cannot be the sole determinants of whether power should go south or north but they were wise in beginning from the known to the unknown; the known in this case being able to deploy their influence within the party to insist that its presidential ticket must go to a fellow from the south. While it is immaterial whether or not they had any particular aspirant in mind, Nigerians, irrespective of partisan leanings, should dwell on its significance which is that the northern political elite, as presently constituted, still has some progressively minded fellows amongst them, contrary to what is generally believed. It is, of course, possible that somewhere inside this progressivism could be found some self serving interests among that elite but that still is subject to conjecture.

Apart from the nationalistic ambiance of the stance taken by the governors, it has elevated the APC in the eyes of Nigerians, generally. Through the emergence of Tinubu, a southerner, the APC has diffused the tension that had enveloped the entire polity since the beginning of the presidential primaries. Even though there were some well meaning leaders of the party from the south who preferred that it chooses a candidate from the North, that was not altogether in bad faith; besides that it showed that the process that led to the final outcome witnessed a robust debate that should characterize every matured polity.

Perhaps even more significant is the ease with which the party hierarchy kept in abeyance the earlier preference of some of its key members for a consensus candidate to align with a more popular demand for an open contest.

Such a thing is rare in the Nigerian context, especially when those involved ordinarily wield so much power, within and outside the party, to the extent that they could have clung to their preference at the expense of its internal cohesion and the collective stability of the Nigerian polity.

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Nobody can, of course, argue that those who preferred the consensus option did not wish the party or Nigerians, generally, well. Their choice might not have been perfect but the thing to note is the discipline and courage with which they agreed to work with the rest of their compatriots, within the party, to pursue a more transcendental agenda that would go beyond merely ensuring that the APC remained in power.

As far as I am concerned, the argument in some quarters within the APC that a candidate from the North would provide a stronger weapon with which to fight the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP),which had earlier picked its candidate from there, was quite appealing, especially if what only mattered to the party was to just retain power in Abuja.

In other words, while there is no perfect political permutation, the APC should be commended for looking beyond electoral victory in February 2023 to come up with a stance that appeals to the collective psyche of Nigerians; which is that generally, that is whether North or South, they are desirous of seeing presidential power go to the southern part of the country after President Mohammadu Buhari.While they were not sure of how this could be achieved, they became even more nervous when the PDP threw up a presidential candidate from the North. Needless to say, the outcome of the APC presidential convention, a few days ago, has significantly lessened their anxiety; and they can now go about that objective with more certainty. They, Nigerians, couldn’t get something better – this ambiance to choose from two alternatives. And from the look of things, they are quite appreciative.

Which is why I think that those elements in the PDP who have already gone to town to begin to make personal comparisons between the presidential candidates of the two parties – the APC and the PDP – should desist from such. Just a few hours after the APC convention, a top official of the PDP was quoted as saying that  Senator Tinubu”is no match to” the PDP presidential flag bearer, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Apart from that it was too hasty, the choice of words lacks tact and sophistication. The language is too ordinary to be employed in a presidential campaign and Nigerians will certainly sanction any of the parties that brings its campaign lexicon in the days ahead to such an abysmal level.

Agreed, Nigerians are used to unnecessarily harsh words during electioneering campaigns but this time around, they expect political parties and their candidates to begin to introduce some elements of ideological phraseology in engaging the people for votes.

This is where I think the APC has set itself aside; in the sense that while it did not matter to the PDP which part of the country presidential power should go to this time around, the APC has taken a firm stand on the matter and which is in tandem with the expectations of the generality of Nigerians. To be ideological is not only about the orthodoxy of forms of government. For the APC to ideate on the need for power shift at a time like this is, in its self, an ideology; and Nigerians are not taking that for granted.

My critics would, of course, raise the issue of the Southeast,a matter we all know especially as succinctly captured by Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu who, while addressing delegates during the APC convention under reference, came up with the rhetorical question: “Where Is The Justice?”.Remarkably, Onu posed that question even before the commencement of voting; which means that he knew that his Southeast was most unlikely to be a beneficiary of that exercise that night.

Agreed that with the outcome of the APC presidential convention, the good people of the Southeast have not seen justice in its full but I am of the view that half justice is better than no justice at all. Through the APC, the people of the South,taken together, now stand a good chance of getting justice, even though it might not be inits fullest. A victory for Tinubu, which is quite imminent, will be half justice for the people of the south. The full justice would have been if power were to shift, not just to the south, but precisely to the southeast.

It is a difficult situation for the people of the southeast to contend with but methinks that it will help a great deal if they hesitate less in coming to terms with the fact that the chances of having one of their own occupy the presidential villa in Abuja, through the current election season, is quite slim.So, let’s have the half justice through the APC than no justice at all which the current arrangement in the PDP portends.

Tinubu’s candidacy becomes even more attractive when it is realized that after his tenure – whether in four or eight years – it would no longer be a matter of mere conjecture as to which part of the country the office of the president should go to. We would have established a template whereby power shift would no longer be subject to convenient semantics by a few. Once that is achieved, my people in the southeast can then, with more certainty and precision, target their own day on the Nigerian seat of power. It may take some time but the “Igbo President” must not come from among the current set of gladiators.

Differently put, a victory for APC come 2023 will make the matter of power shift less amorphous, less cumbersome and less acrimonious. Conversely, the current scenario in the PDP presents the direct opposite. It means that if it is allowed to have its way, Nigerians will in 2027 or 2031 return to another round of shouting angrily at each other over presidential power.

All across the world, the policy space has always been a critical and contested one. It is critical to the extent that it is within this space that government consolidate the social contract with the citizens through sound programmes that inform the development of the state and the well-being of the citizens. It is contested because it is a space where government no longer has the sole prerogative of determining what should constitute the specifics of governance dynamics. The policy space is traditionally reserved for bureaucrats and bureaucratic expertise. It is the public servants whose original task it is to assist the government in policy design and implementation. By the turn of the twentieth century, especially when the second World War happened, with all its attendant administrative, political and social consequences, this reality started to change.

With the emergence of the United Nations after the war, the foreign policy relationships and dynamics amongst nations became all the more significant. The UN became a structural standpoint to prevent further war. And thus, this led to the need for multilateral cum bilateral agreements and global partnerships that will facilitate the cordial relationship and collaborations between NGOs and development partners with states across the world. This brings these global partners into the policy management architecture of the states. It is however the United States’ policy management experience during and after the war that signalled the widening of the policy space beyond the remit of traditional policy imperatives. America facilitated the inclusion of scholars and intellectuals, as well as the introduction of think tanks, into the policy space. This is further accentuated by the US spoils system. This practice within the context of the US presidential system is a double-edged sword. It has the potentials to both muddle the policy management space as well as strengthen it. It began as a means of allocating juicy appointments and positions to loyal party members when a president gets to power. And it eventually led to gross inefficiency until the Pendleton Federal Civil Service Act of 1883 put a stop to it. However, it still provides a solid administrative frame for injecting fresh technocratic and expert presence into the policy space.

Even though it is customary, all through public administration history, to enlist scarce skills and core expertise to bridge knowledge, information and competency gaps at different stages of the policy process, there has always been a charged relationship between the bureaucrats as the gatekeepers of the space and the technocrats and experts that are meant to complement their policy efforts. The relationship between the public servants and bureaucrats on the one hand, and the technocratic team (technical advisers, policy experts, consultants and subject specialists) on the other has been governed by the tension between two fundamental issues. On one hand, there is the need to keep all policy processes and actions within the purview of technical rationalism. This is what activates the totality of administrative governing framework, from the famous General Order (GO) to the public service rules, circulars and other legal and administrative procedures, guidelines and instruments by which the policy management processes are streamlined. However, there is also the pervasive pressure to subject bureaucrats to a general accountability control in accordance with the imperatives and demands of democratic principles and governance.

But the bureaucracy is just what it is—a turf that is guided with all sense of propriety and aggression. It is a space where the task of policy management is jealously guided from intrusion by perceived outsiders. This raises a genuine dilemma: the policy space can no longer be policed solely by the bureaucrats whose policy actions must be complemented by non-bureaucrats. And yet the bureaucratic policy space is professionally unique and cannot be arrogantly transgressed by those who think they have better expertise. This makes the policy space a very charged one. Like the larger governance space, the task of governance can no longer be left to the expertise of the bureaucrats and government officials alone. The demands of democratic governance insist that nonstate and non-governmental actors be drawn in to contribute their own perception, thoughts and expertise to the task of governing the citizenry better than the government alone is ever going to manage.

When managerialism made its appearance from the 1960s, the pressure to modernize policy and make it more efficient redoubled the urgent need for reforming the policy space and forcing the bureaucrats to comply. The managerial revolution was motivated by the need to transform the operational dynamics of the traditional administrative framework in line with modern technologies and administrative machineries, especially as determined by the private sector and its efficiency, capacities and competences. Managerialism asks for effectiveness, flexibility, leanness, efficiency, performance and productivity. And it compelled a lot of attention on the insularity of the public service in relation with the imperatives of the larger governance and policy space. With managerialism, the policy management space can no longer be the same. Thus, as dominant paradigm in public administration, and with its emphases on upending action and policy research, entrepreneurial culture, it contributed to the need for expanding the policy and governance space and deepening the relevance of technocratic experts and professionals from outside of the bureaucracy.

Within the Nigerian policy space, it is the managerial imperative of enlarging the space, coupled with the fundamental development predicament of the Nigerian state after colonialism, that facilitated the entry into policy management of such experts, scholars and technocrats like Pius Okigbo, Wolfgang Stolper, Ojetunji Aboyade, Taslim Elias, Adamu Baike, Ben Nwabueze, Jibril Aminu, Claude Ake, Kalu Idika Kalu, and many others who brought skills and competences into the policy processes. And yet, the governance and policy space in Nigeria demonstrates most tragically the charged nature of the relationship between the bureaucrats and the technocrats. Indeed, the diagnostic literature in Nigeria’s administrative history regards the civil service as a significant part of the development challenge Nigeria is facing. Apart from its institutional reform issue and the need to inject critical meritocratic competence, the civil service has a reputation for being too closed up. Technocrats, professionals and experts over the years have lamented the challenge of working closely with bureaucrats on policy issues.

One critical nature of the Nigerian state and its governance dynamics has to do with the ease with which the system reward mediocrity. Even as the bureaucracy harbours significant high-end talents, often times, mediocre, rather than the brightest and the best, find themselves at the top of the administrative and technocratic ladders where they are served by the best the Nigerian nation can afford, from the university scholars and intellectuals to top-notch professionals. Unfortunately, this technocratic best that could serve the nation are forced to look up to their mediocre bosses, especially with regard to issues and policies that shape the direction and performance metrics of the structures and institutions they oversee. And who would want to blame those who had to keep their distance from the policy space when they cannot continue to bear the brunt of mediocrity in a nation with a huge demographics of core professionals and experts of global standing? How does a nation like Nigeria that wants to be a global economic player in twenty-first century account for countless first-class graduates languishing in the unemployment market? And the agony doubles because the university teachers who are tasked with the responsibility of forming the human capital Nigeria requires to become a developmental state have been effectively pauperized!

One of the greatest challenges that the experiment of democratic governance in Nigeria faces is that of managing cross-over professionals (COPs); a term I first picked up at Patrick Okigbo’s Nextier seminar. COPs being those who, through a significant dose of patriotism and motivation, transition from private practices, diaspora, academia and civil society organisations to public service. This is even more fundamental a challenge because governments across the globe are caught in the managerial search for administrative and institutional reforms that will yield efficiency, flexibility and productivity. And the private sector provides a model for rethinking traditional bureaucracy a la managerialism. And this is all the more urgent within the context of the erosion of meritocracy and the breakdown of competency-based human resource management the Nigerian public service has witnessed. There is however a constant clash of perspective between the vision of independent expertise that stands at the heart of a depoliticized model of policymaking, and the imperative of bureaucratic control and democratic accountability that locates the Weberian policy context and its public service general order (or PSR).

But then, COPs transitioning into the public service in Nigeria are usually not prepared for the dynamics of what I have called bureau-pathology—the sets of structural and institutional deficiencies—that ambush their good intention of injecting new and scarce competencies into the public service. Thus, when bureaucrats protect their turfs, it is the administrative outsiders and their critical skills that are often on the receiving end of the bad deal, and the government pays the price in terms of productivity. Ultimately, the idea of COPs introduces the need to reflect on a model of bureaucrats-COP relationship that will facilitate the transformation of the public service for effective and efficient performance. And for my concern in this piece, such a model gives due credit to patriotic technocrats who are eager to cast their competences and skills into the task of nation-building and national development.

The other side of the equation is equally valid. Public administration is a profession with its own code of practice, attitudinal framework and value-system. The point there is that for any outsiders to make significant impact on the task of working together with the public servants in the policy and governance space, they must demonstrate some levels of understanding and empathy with the public service code of practice with full recognition that public administration is a profession in its own right. That learning curve becomes all the more rewarding if they demonstrate professional humility that enlists skilled bureaucrats in their technical team rather than creating private enclaves populated by outsiders as is the common practice. Coming into the public service is all by itself a daunting experience for any technocrat, without bringing along any professional arrogance that on its own has to engage with the turf war that the bureaucrats also have ready.

Quite unfortunately, and despite the best reform intentions and efforts of successive Nigerian government and bureaucratic leadership, the Nigeria’s administrative system still operates a one-size-fits-all codes of administrative operations usually activated by circulars and a whole range of governance codes which civil servants are experts in. This is so because many of the key reforms since 1974 have not gained ground or are far-between. Many of these standard operating systems are sadly not embedded by new and efficient management innovation, procedures and technologies at the rapidly growing frontiers of policy and project management techniques. They therefore tend to be annoyingly rigid, unimaginative and even stifling of any innovative possibilities. This procedural matter is further compounded by the civil service structure of authority, which embeds positions and persons in manners that could be dysfunctional especially where occupants of posts do not have the skills, knowledge and competence that performance and productivity require. This dynamic is aggravated by the weight that the civil service put on seniority and hierarchy at the expense of knowledge, competence, administrative discretion and team work. It is therefore no surprise that the entire system, outside of the best objectives of managerialism, is heavily oriented towards input and process at the expense of output and results.

Thus, within this context of dysfunctionality and professional/technocratic arrogance and ignorance, the stage is set for collaborative conflict founded on an adversarial model that preclude any form of agreement between the bureaucrats and the technocrats on the resolution of the problems of policy management. It is this conflict-ridden model, rather than the collaborative one that facilitate consensus and mutual respect, that had led to the humiliation of many well-meaning and patriotic cross-over professionals and technocrats who had made the bold move to serve the Nigerian state and make better and functional the policy and governance space for the betterment of Nigerians.

I particularly cannot forget the sad experience of a full-bodied and world class scholar, Prof. Adenike Grange, the former minister of health, and her tragic story within the policy space. Like many significant others, she was embroiled, in the course of her national service, in issues that led to an unwarranted and most annoying persecution and resignation in ways that could have tarnished the reputation she has spent a significant part of her life accumulating. For daring to stick her neck out, she paid a huge price simply for offering herself selflessly to render patriotic service to her country. But this is what I suspect—if these technocrats are invited again to national service, they just might overlook the wrongs done them. Patriotism seems to cover a multitude of sin.

If we are agreed that the enlarged space of policy management is required to transform democratic governance in Nigeria, then we need to explore the reform possibilities that will enable the bureaucrats and technocrats to work together and bring the full weight of their skills and competences to bear on the challenges of modernizing the space into a flexible, performing and productive enterprise. There is for instance a policy gap in the public service, MDAs without strategic plans; poor policy analysis due to non-professionalization of departments of planning, research and statistics; lack of action/policy research work that harnesses policy-research and global knowledge networks to strengthen strategic policy intelligence and for problem-solving as part of contingency planning; poor data culture; poor monitoring and evaluation (M&E) as well as project management capabilities.

There is therefore an urgent need to modernize the policy architecture in ways that allow policymaking to facilitate the transformation of the lives of Nigerians. The changes involved in modernising the policy making process would include: (i) designing policies around outcomes; (ii) making sure policies are inclusive, fair and evidence-based; (iii) avoiding unnecessary burdens on businesses; (iv) involving others in policy-making; (v) becoming more forward and outward-looking; and (vi) learning from experience. And this transformation of the policy management space will require the joint effort of both the Nigerian government, the bureaucrats and bureaucratic leadership and the team of technocrats, policy advisers and professional experts that could be taken as significant stakeholders to the policy process.

The essence of the collaborative partnership is to be able to transform the policy space into a significant recipient of productivity, which emanate from an administrative reform of the civil service. What is required to make the civil service a world class source of fundamental policymaking effort that orient good governance are not far-fetched: instituting competency-based HR practices; installing performance management accountability culture; injection of deep policy implementation techniques and project management praxis; changes in wage and incentive structure that attracts and retains high-end scarce skills and core competences; enabling a talent management system that enables only the very best to get to administrative leadership positions to cure subsisting menace of inbreeding; and establishing the best practices in the SES to beef up services’ IQ of the top administrative leadership cadre as the lead motivator of performance in the civil service system.

• Olaopa Retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos tolaopa2003@gmail.com

Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.

After months of turmoil over Johnson’s behavior in office, in which he became the first sitting British prime minister ever to be fined for breaking the law, enough of his fellow Conservative members of Parliament finally plucked up the courage to trigger a formal vote of confidence in his leadership of the party. Had he lost, even by a single vote, the process to replace him as party leader—and prime minister—would have begun immediately, culminating in a new appointment within weeks—the sixth British leader in the space of just 15 years, an astonishing period of political instability and failure. Yet, once again, this master of evasion somehow managed to escape, winning 211 votes to 148 to stay in post.

This “victory,” however, marks just the beginning of Johnson’s fight for survival. Each of his Tory predecessors who were challenged to a vote of confidence lost power soon after, many spectacularly. Even though each prevailed, for Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Theresa May, the very fact of being challenged marked the beginning of the end.

The fundamental problem for Johnson is that he is now a populist who is no longer popular. This is no repeat of the Donald Trump impeachment drama, where the president might have been unpopular nationally but was protected by a wall of support from his base. In Britain, Johnson is opposed both in the country at large and among what should be the Tory grassroots. Appalled by revelations of drunken parties in 10 Downing Street during the COVID lockdowns, the country seems to have concluded that it will not vote for him again. And so long as the country feels this way, he is toast—or, if he isn’t, then the Conservative Party most certainly is.

For any prime minister, this is a deadly bind. It is especially so for Johnson, who was elevated to power not because Conservative parliamentarians ever particularly liked or respected him, let alone backed his political philosophy—if such a thing exists—but because they concluded that he was their only hope of saving the party from electoral oblivion. Johnson was the instrument necessary to “get Brexit done,” a phrase he repeated ad nauseam during the 2019 election campaign. Then, his character faults were less important than his political potential. Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but its political class had proved unable to fulfill this instruction, and so Johnson was given the power to enact the revolution the public demanded, overhauling the Conservative Party and the country in the process, and winning the biggest Tory majority in 30 years. At a stroke Johnson became the most radical and consequential prime minister since Thatcher and, it seemed, was destined to remain in office for as long. In 10 Downing Street soon after his election victory was confirmed, one of his aides told me that Johnson’s was a 10-year project—at least.

That was less than three years ago, but regardless of today’s survival, he seems perilously close to having thrown it all away. He now faces a monumental challenge to turn this around, his authority, popularity, and political purpose lying in tatters with few obvious ways to put it all back together. And for what? A few parties in 10 Downing Street that broke the lockdown rules that he himself introduced, albeit so reluctantly that his delay cost the lives of more Brits than it ever should, but for which he never paid a political price. The entire episode is so pathetic. The entire episode is so fitting.

The irony is that we now seem to be watching the tragic chronicle of Johnson’s political death foretold—not just by his fiercest critics, who long ago warned it would end this way, but by the prime minister himself.

Alone among the politicians I have covered, Johnson has seemed to so openly flash his own flaws at the public, almost daring them to join him on his journey of self-destruction. In his novel, Seventy Two Virgins, Johnson’s main character—essentially a caricature of himself—even speculates about politicians wanting to watch their demise. “There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction,” the protagonist says. “Just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed.” Why did Johnson write this, if not to tell us something about himself?

Johnson’s political life once appeared to be a sweeping epic, an unending rise to power that would ultimately reshape Britain and secure his place as one of the country’s most important postwar leaders. Instead, this episode—even though he has survived—makes clear that his time in office now risks being more of a tragic novella, unless he can find even more dramatic ways to escape the bind he has put himself in.

The past few days have encapsulated both Johnson and Britain, highlighting inner truths about both, illustrating their deepest flaws, ones that will not go away whatever Johnson’s fate.

Confirmation that Johnson would face a vote of confidence came as Britons returned to work with something of a groggy head after four days of celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. Some Conservative members of Parliament, it now appears, submitted letters of no confidence in Johnson before the festivities had drawn to a close, but postdated them to ensure that nothing sullied the royal occasion.

This little detail neatly sums up a moment in 21st-century Britain that was both bonkers and brilliant, joyful and ludicrous, unifying and absurd—an event that revealed something of the country’s spirit while providing a vent for it. This was a festival in which a giant drone display above Buckingham Palace beamed images of corgis and handbags to a cheering crowd of thousands while Diana Ross warbled away onstage, and where street parties up and down the country created a rare and uplifting sense of national unity—but one of the defining images of the weekend was the prime minister being booed as he walked up the steps to St. Paul’s Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service in honor of the Queen.

Here was the extraordinary spectacle of a Conservative prime minister being jeered by a crowd of flag-waving monarchists. For some, the image was terminal for Johnson, proof he had lost the crowd. This fact remains, the elemental source of all of his problems that is not going away. Johnson has become a tribune of the people, without a people.

It is worth pausing to reflect that Johnson is far from unique in being loathed. In fact, he is just the latest British prime minister to be hated by the public with a vehemence that does not seem particularly healthy. Tony Blair remains a virtual pariah to this day, David Cameron a figure of open disdain, and Thatcher a source of such continuing hostility that a statue honoring her is egged by protesters. It is a strange quirk that Britain’s worst prime ministers are now its most popular: Major, May, and Gordon Brown. Yet, each was driven from office in a wave of public hatred, horribly warped and disfigured in the process.

Where Johnson somewhat differs from his predecessors is that he has always seemed so open and sanguine about his fate and, in a sense, his own smallness. “Politics is a constant repetition,” he once wrote. “How we make kings for our societies, and how after a while we kill them to achieve a kind of rebirth.” Politics is not about grand plans and ideologies in Johnson’s mind; it’s a cynical ritual used by societies to keep on some kind of even keel, a ceremony of hypocrisy in which everyone is able to feel better about themselves by raising and then slaying the avatars of their hopes and fears. Politics, like life, drifts in and out of cycles—not in a forward sweep. Problems remain; histories consume; leaders rise and fall.

The irony for Johnson is that this is now the fate he is battling to delay, while being fully aware that it will consume him in the end. Today, a sense of national unease and unhappiness, disunity and trouble hangs in the air alongside the very opposite feelings that were on display during the jubilee.

The conservative party is now trapped between those who have concluded that it needs to kill the king to achieve the requisite rebirth and those who think that it has not come to that yet. The risk for the party is that it achieves the worst of all worlds, leaving Britain to drift on in the doldrums, without a fair wind to propel it or a captain with the power to sail it.

The strange reality is that there is no real policy problem for Tory MPs at the core of this crisis. The ritual bloodletting we are going through once again is not being pursued in order to change anything other than the guy at the top. The music has stopped and Johnson is battling to stay perched on the throne, but little more than that.

Of course the personality here is important, particularly so with Johnson. As the prime minister’s fiercest critics have long warned, his character flaws are baked into who he is. What made him the popular choice for his party and the public in 2019 are the same flaws that make him so unpopular today: He is a mocking, disdainful observer of the serious and their codes of honor, someone who believes in the fleeting, cosmically tragic, and darkly comic reality of life—and the power of Boris to rise above the rest, to poke his nose out of the celestial cloud even for a millisecond in the grand sweep of time. This makes him formidable and careless, historically-minded and shortsighted, endlessly jovial but melancholy, useful for smashing through old orders, but less good at imposing new ones.

Still, should Johnson lose this battle to survive over the coming weeks or months, the fundamental problems that Britain faces will remain. It is true that character matters. The simple fact of Johnson remaining in power makes some diplomatic relationships in Europe harder to fix. Perhaps the country will be able to move on from Brexit only once all those associated with the campaign are gone too. Still, the candidates to replace him will almost certainly promise to maintain all of the major planks of his agenda. Indeed, some already have. Each will pledge to remain outside the EU and its economic zone; to stay hawkish in their support for Ukraine; and to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol that is the rot underlying Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe. Each will promise to pursue new trade deals with countries around the world rather than prioritize one with the EU, to make the economy more competitive. Each will insist that they rebalance the economy to make northern England wealthier and to protect the “red wall” seats that Johnson won off Labour in 2019. The reality is that if Johnson goes, Johnsonism will survive in large part until the Labour Party manages to win an election. And even then, if Labour wins power under Keir Starmer, Brexit itself will not be reversed.

But just as much as Johnsonism will remain independent of Johnson, so too will all the problems that Johnsonism either was elected to address—and has failed to—or has actively exacerbated, and in some senses even created. Britain’s long-term competitive decline continues, as does the shame of its internal border between Britain and Northern Ireland, and the appallingly uneven frontier now operating with France. The forces of nationalism pulling the country apart are not going away, a reality no party seems able to address in any serious fashion, while the endemic north-south divide that Johnson promised to resolve looks set only to get worse. And of course, there is still Brexit.

Britain today is a country where religion has been replaced with a kind of state Shintoism in which the monarch is raised in exaltation while her chief ministers are ritually sacrificed to cleanse the nation of its sins. And all the while, nothing ever really changes. Deep-seated problems go unaddressed, left to fester, passed from one prime minister to the next, none of whom seems capable of even seeing the scale of the challenges they face, let alone addressing them. Johnson is just the latest prime minister to fail spectacularly at the job, though in his case, in uniquely grubby circumstances. He won’t be the last.

• This article was first published in www.theatlantic.com