President Buhari in his New Year message touched on a number of issues germane to the overall progress and development of the country. Apart from blaming fuel scarcity and the attendant hardship on some unidentified people, he promised to get at the root of the blackmail to ensure that those behind it are prevented from doing so again.
The president also reeled out a plethora of measures his regime intends to take to address the huge infrastructural deficits across the country. This spans across power, works, housing and transport. The measures are ambitious and promising as they raised new hopes for a better future.
Since these are largely statements of intent, the most we can do at this point is to cross our fingers in wait of the coming into fruition of the promised quantum leap in infrastructural development. No doubt, significant progress would have been made if these promises give practical expression in the delivery of public goods and services within the projected time frame.
One is nonetheless not enthused by the president’s attempt to blame the devastating fuel scarcity and the attendant prohibitive cost of the commodity solely on some imaginary enemies bent on sabotaging and occasioning harm on the rest of us. There is obviously a government angle to the scarcity. The stock the NNPC claimed it sufficiently had to cushion the effect of the scarcity was of little or no help in the circumstance. Neither did the promise of price enforcement translate to anything.
As I write, the price of the commodity still sells above N250 per litre in many parts of the country. The problem does not solely lie in the identification of the so-called saboteurs and preventing them from a repeat. It hinges inexorably on extant policies measures working to push up the price of the commodity to a level that is bound to make life unbearable for a majority of our people. That is the issue to contend with rather than the trending obsession with buck-passing.
In an apparent reaction to rising criticisms on his claims to have defeated the Boko Haram insurgents in the face of escalating attacks on both soft and hard targets, the president sought to draw parallels with some advanced countries which he claimed are yet to overcome such unconventional warfare. He contends that even the best policed countries cannot prevent determined criminals from committing acts of terror as evident in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and America.
Whereas it is not possible to prevent determined criminals from committing occasional acts of terror, it is incongruent to liken the organized warfare going on in the north-east to isolated terror acts by criminals. They are not the same. What we are contending with is a full-fledged war that is taking a huge toll on human lives and property.
As the president spoke, the military were celebrating their success in releasing 700 people held hostage by the insurgents. According to them, the captives who hitherto were forced to work in the farms of the insurgents got freed due to the impounding of their camps by the Nigeria Air force. If they were working on farms owned by the insurgents, it implies that they still have some territories in their control. So the attempt to reduce the serious warfare in the north-east to a similitude of occasional terror attacks in some countries is as laughable as it is ridiculous.
By far, the most contentious and controversial of the president’s speech is his position on agitations for restructuring. His interpretation of the aggregate of opinions is that the nation’s problems have more to do with process than structure. “We tried the parliamentary system: we jettisoned it. Now there are shrill cries for a return to parliamentary structure”. He argued somehow correctly that in older democracies, these systems took centuries to evolve and we must give a long period of trial and improvement for the system to fit our purpose.
The issue canvassed is not entirely out of place. But the first problem with it is the conceptual error in equating systems with structures. His argument that “whatever structure we develop must periodically be perfected according circumstances” suffers this conceptual liability and therefore very confusing. A difference must be made between systems and structures. Systems are analytic constructs and in them are found structures. Whereas it can be admitted that systems (democracy or federalism for instance) need periods of trial and error to get attuned to the operating environment, that perfection is attained by adjusting their structures and processes in line with the dictates of the adopted paradigm.
Again, each system has a set of supporting elements (structures) that must be in place for it to function optimally. When we take democracy for instance, the process Buhari talked about would manifest in terms of attitudinal support. In this wise, we are concerned with the orientations and dispositions of the people that are supportive of the thriving of democracy. Max Weber called them political culture and came out with three variants in terms of their dispositions and capacities to support and sustain democratic practice. They range from the parochial to subject and participant political cultures.
For him, what you find in established democracies is the participant variant. So when Buhari talked about the process rather than the structure, he may have had system in mind. Yes, systems need adjustments; they need to be aligned to the environment in which they operate. But such alignments must come in the form of adjustments in processes and structures of the system. But whereas processes may have to do with the human element, structures are largely institutional. The latter does not require the long period of trial and error Buhari referenced upon.
Those who canvass restructuring are of the opinion that the ingredients of a stable federal order are lacking in the contraption that we currently operate. Their contention is that what we call our federal system is an aberrant order. And for us to make reasonable progress, we must adjust to the true dictates of federalism. It did not take us donkey years to create states and local governments (structures of a federation). It does not require long period of time to devolve powers to gain the right balance.
The argument that it took established democracies centuries to get where they are today is defeatist, stale and uninspiring. Those countries, as pioneers in the process, made mistakes and learnt from them. Those mistakes constitute the real issues to the agitations on restructuring. Or are we going to wait for centuries to address systemic challenges whose solutions are too well known and within our competence? We can as well go back to the atavism of the Hobbesian state of nature and wait for centuries before opting for either democracy or federalism. It is a sad commentary that a government confronted by emergent challenges is seeking to justify its inability to rise to the occasion by citing such trite and worn out arguments as the long period it took some other countries to get to where they are today. And we depend on the technology of those countries for most of our needs. We should have waited for more centuries for our whims and caprices to dictate the way forward.
The real issue is that Buhari is averse to restructuring. So he must invent all manner of reasons to dampen and ridicule the momentum of the rising agitations. But his arguments are confusing because they lack clarity. The argument on restructuring has nothing with jettisoning either democracy or federalism. They relate in the main to genuine desires to perfect their structures so as to stave off their disruptive influences on our quest to enthrone a stable political order.
In the political equation of this country, Buhari knows the interests the convoluted federal system serve best. So we must invent all manner of subterfuge to ensure such changes do not see the light of the day even when they can be ignored at a great risk to the progress and unity of the country. Ironically, this is a government that touts the change mantra.
