By Jide Osuntokun
A friend of mine wondered why most columnists in Nigeria write like Prophet Jeremiah about the doom that is about to befall our country and wondered if there was nothing good about Nigeria to write about. Of course, we should all thank God that we have a good country we all can call home.
We have abundance of rain and sunshine and large territory on which can grow crops that sustains our ever-growing population.
By and large, we have a land where there are several points of light all over Nigeria where the 21st century is a reality and our people are living some reasonable kind of life and not just vegetating like plants and animals at the mercy of Mother Nature.
At least we have been able to dominate our environment although we have realized that this domination is not always positive but in reality, our environment is subject and open to abuse.
But the question is are we happy at where we are? Is this all we can do with our God-given opportunities? Are we going to be hoping for a better country forever? Is something wrong with us as a people? Are we freaks of nature doomed to failure forever?
When are we going to move from tribalism and nepotism as directive policies of governance to meritocracy and scientific thinking and planning? When are we going to progress from our pedestrian approach to national life to planned growth and development? When are we going to move away from episodic bursts of growth arising from sale of bounties of nature to development based on human ingenuity, innovation manifesting in goods and services needed to make our lives better?
When are we going to add value to our agricultural and mineral resources as our contribution to global articles of trade? When will our scientists contribute to human pool of intellectual knowledge? When will our universities and centres of learning become producers and repositories of knowledge?
When will our artistic and literary contributions be so excellent that our country will be so recognized as the new Greece or Rome? The questions are many and they can only be positively tackled by governments that have plans and are ready to aggressively pursue their execution.
We had Vision 2010 and Vision 2020 that we spent considerable amount of resources producing but never put into use but locked up in government archives. This is a new year and we should resolve not to continue in our approach to national and sub national affairs as business as usual.
There is too much frustration in the land. There is too much poverty in the land. Are we then surprised about the level of violence? We will not secure this country unless we tackle the problem of poverty.
No amount of the number of policemen and soldiers we deploy without corresponding economic development and job creation will secure our lives and properties. We must go to the fundamental roots of our problems. It is insanity to keep doing the same thing the same way and expect different results.
In the olden days when people went to school, worked hard and graduated, they did not graduate into unemployment; rather they found jobs which provided ladders of upward social and economic mobility for themselves and their families.
The extended family system provided a sustaining mechanism for social stability so that the extreme poverty now visited on our country was not this pervasive. All this has broken down and with it has come corresponding collapse of ethics and morality.
Our credo has become survival of the fittest and a dog eat dog kind of life where all things are acceptable in the mad rush to make money. Murders, religious perversion, brigandage, terrorism, kidnapping, rapes and all kinds of corruption are permissible.
Nothing seems to shock us any longer. Hundreds of thousands of our young people are rejecting their country by taking sometimes on foot, journeys across deserts, jungles and oceans to South Africa, the Sahara Desert en route to Europe. Many of our young people are in brothels even in poorer countries than Nigeria.
Some of our nationals have had their organs harvested for operations in Europe and the Middle East. If our situation does not call for a state of emergency, I don’t know what calls for it. We got to this collapse not suddenly but gradually over time.
There is however no mistaking the signs of an approaching total collapse unless all of us, that is, those in government and the national intelligentsia rally round a common cause of salvaging the country. Delay may be too late in the face of galloping growth of population compounding our problem.
The hydrocarbon resources of gas and oil that make us act in weird and crazy ways will soon become products of little economic use and leverage because of the world’s determined decision to abandon them as sources of energy in order to save the planet earth and mankind itself.
I am an optimist when it comes to the case of the future of this benighted country. I guess I really don’t have a choice. Several years ago, the same General Muhammadu Buhari who has changed his khaki military uniform for babanriga famously said “We have no other country than Nigeria…we will all stay here and solve our problems together”.
I am of that view also. In any case I am too old to leave the country for some God-forsaken cold country. I am also of the belief that all countries have problems unique to them.
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Our problems may be poverty and underdevelopment but we are still close to basic humanity and presumably to crude nature which unfortunately still affect the way we do things and our relationship with those who speak different languages to the one we speak.
We need to take a census of what works in our states and at the national level and ask questions as to why others don’t work as they were supposed to do and then find rational solutions to them. We should also decide how to educate our people particularly at the grassroots level and to endow young children with civic education and responsibility so that when they become adults, they will not be a problem to society.
We have said ad nauseam in this column what seems to have widespread support, that we need to take a second hard look at the political configuration of the country and design an appropriate architecture for effective management of resources for rapid development.
There is too much concentration of power and resources in the centre occasioning rampant looting and stealing on an industrial scale. We need to also make all our legislative houses at the centre and state levels part-time so as to free resources for physical infrastructural development of the country.
We certainly do not need 774 Local government administrations and 36 states plus Abuja making 37 in number. All these can be replaced by a quarter of the existing number without harm to normal development.
We should never forget that until 1946 the whole of Nigeria was administered by a Governor General in Lagos and three lieutenant governors in Kaduna, Ibadan and Enugu and a host of administrative officers.
I am not suggesting this was an ideal situation but to move from that clinically efficient system to the present over-administration and political jamboree with no plan of employment is simply unreasonable and unacceptable.
We must bear in mind, for those who may say what I am suggesting is unconstitutional that constitutions are made for man and not man for constitutions.
My answer is whose constitution are we really running? Is this not a pruned down military constitution of the past put together under my late colleague, Professor Justice Niki Tobi who was given an unenviable task of rushing through a constitution by Abacha/ Abubakar AbdulSalami regime?
What we need is not some wooly legalese of a constitution but a basic short document like the American constitution that we can continue to amend if and when necessary.
This can be done by select body of people representing all the states of the federation and other critical stakeholders like the military, the police, the universities, the chambers of commerce, the manufacturers association, the judiciary, labour, and religious bodies.
This assemblage of people must be manageable and not more than 100 and given six months to produce a basic law which after its subjection to a national referendum shall be followed by presidential proclamation.
The emphasis of what I am suggesting is rapid development, jobs, jobs and jobs which when available will lead to increased security.
Mustapha Kemal, The Ataturk did this kind of thing to the remnant of the effete Ottoman Empire in 1919 and dragooned Turkey into modernity, transforming a country that used to be derided as the sick man of Europe into a modern medium power with a secular constitution guaranteed by the military.
Is Buhari a Mustapha Kemal? If he is not, we can help him become one. The future of Nigeria is just too important to be left in the hands of one man surrounded by unelected self-seeking advisers and a Naira-guzzling parliament. Happy new year, Nigeria.
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