Ayo Olukotun
When Nigerians celebrate the many achievements of their fellow citizens overseas, they wonder how people from the same nation can perform admirably abroad, and deplorably at home. In answering this question, and cooperating in the search for answers, ideas for sustainable transformation can emerge.”
Emeritus Professor Richard Joseph, in Nigeria’s Dismal Tunnel, is there an exit? Wednesday, September 16, 2020.
For a nation, anniversaries are important occasions comparable to birthdays in the life of individuals. Indeed, one of the connotations of the word anniversary in the French is birthday, bringing out thereby the intimacy, and the memory which such events radiate. Anniversaries also provide ways of gauging a nation’s journey through the ebbs and flows of life as well as stir up the sense of shared destiny, and belonging.
Nigeria’s Diamond Jubilee Anniversary, a marker of statehood, constitutes a notable event in the nation’s political calendar even if many think that the country has not given a good account of itself over time. To be sure, if Nigerian newspapers in their biting opinion and editorial columns constitute a referendum on the status and well-being of the country, the report card is a dismal one indeed. A sampler; The PUNCH editorialised on the Independence Anniversary Day that: ‘At 60, Nigeria has failed. Restructure it now.’ Back page columnist, Abimbola Adelakun, called the anniversary ‘An entirely joyless October 1’. Columnists in other newspapers had such titles as ‘What has Nigeria got to celebrate at 60?’ and yet another ’60 years in the wilderness’. To an extent, this is a derivative of a tabloid media culture wrought and brash, a fallout too of protracted and historical anti-state struggles. Nonetheless, it is a political thermometer for the raw upbeat mood of a nation in the throes of economic, social, and political upsets. Atmospherics apart, very few will contend that flashes of inspiration and progress notwithstanding, the master narrative is one of a nation that hugely underachieves its true potential while its promise of a giant stature with a manifest destiny on the world stage has remained for too long, an unfulfilled promise. Worse still, and as Joseph informs in the same paper from where the opening quote is sourced: ‘Developmental Governance and inclusive growth are unlikely to be achieved through more circles of electoral chicanery’.
In other words, not only are things going awry for now, but there is also this gnawing feeling that the future is sold-out, not just through high profile borrowing but through a system of political clientelism, full of sound and fury but with little or nothing for ‘we the people’ to take home as deliverables. All these are not so new, for, week after week, this columnist has sought to address the frightening governance gap that continues to rob us of our manhood and virility. What is equally if not more important, however, is how to exit from the ‘dismal tunnel’ in which Nigeria find itself.
Indeed, the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), admonished us in his anniversary broadcast to keep hope alive by not unsubscribing from the promise of Nigeria’s nationhood. For sure, any such protracted decay as Nigeria is experiencing cannot be sorted out overnight; it is important notwithstanding, to stem what often looks like a free fall and to show evidence that the great work of rebuilding has begun in earnest. Obviously, authoritarian and strongman solutions have failed to deliver us from repetitive cycles of disrepair and despair. But in the same manner, we have managed to lock ourselves up in a strange form of democracy in which the fruits are enjoyed by over-recycled politicians and their cronies within a framework of what the late Prof. Claude Ake referred to as booty capitalism. In almost every sector of our national life, the statistics of woe are stark and gripping, so are the narratives that show that what was once a developmental state of sorts, ironically even under the military, has long been abandoned for a corrupt and dysfunctional neo-liberal state that is adept at imitating western forms and institutions without the essence and spirit thereof.
The evidence that we haven’t done well, and are raising loans furiously to cover the gaps is all around us. Nonetheless, beyond the lamentation, we must begin to show the capacity to think our way out of the forest of ghosts. There is a world of difference between established, and strong states suffering a bout of unfocused leadership as for example in Donald Trump’s America, and a developing state with pronounced ethnic and religious divisions, and that has apparently not given much thought to leadership recruitment, and the substance of politics.
True, and as Emeritus Professor Bayo Adekanye recently reminded us, Trump’s unwillingness to come clear on whether he would hand over power if he lost the impending election returns the United Sates almost to a Banana Republic in which orderly succession and democratic norms cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, Adekanye suggests, half jokingly, that perhaps it is time for struggling democracies like Nigeria to lend the United Sates a helping hand in democratic resistance to autocrats, vacillating about the transfer of power. That said, and conceding the global nature of faulty and visionless leadership, Nigeria’s problems are of a magnitude higher than the unfortunate ranting of an embattled American president. For, while established democracies have the political shock absorbers of strong institutions as well as safety nets for the vulnerable, Nigerian democracy is out in the cold partly because the overpoliticisation of our institutions, and the attachment to the temporary custodians of power put them in a default mode. It is hard to think of any of our institutions including the once respected Economic and Financial Crimes Commission that has not been tampered with or demystified by the overarching hand of politics. Every one of our leaders promises to build institutions, but in greater or lesser degree ends up making caricatures of what institutions ought to be. Gone is the elan and hallow that once surrounded some of our national institutions to the point where, for example, other African countries borrowed some of our best judges, some of our best Vice-chancellors, and some of our famous medical experts to nurture their own fledgling institutions
A good place to start will be to reward incremental steps in this direction by, for example, honouring leaders of those institutions that are above board. In practical terms, a virtuous republic or one angling for that status would have seen reason to elevate Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, Hadiza Bala Usman, for not allowing their organisations to be part of the generic rot; our failure in such small things speaks volumes about a larger dereliction. Also, that insecurity is so pervasive, dramatically quarries our statehood and the capacity of law enforcement. If we aspire to be a capable state rather than one on the verge of failure, the rising tide of insecurity and associated bloodletting must be rolled back.
On a final note, by whatever name it is called, we must somehow find our way to a restructured federation beyond the tokenism currently going on in the National Assembly. Instead of joining the lamentation chorus, Nigerians must wake up to begin the journey to statehood afresh.
