By
Chidi Anslem Odinkalu
Fifty
three years after Independence, Nigerians are caught in an uncertain land
between nostalgia and Nirvana. For the young people who comprise the
overwhelming majority in the country, nostalgia is not even an option and
Nirvana is not on the horizon: We have abolished our history and they are the
leaders of a tomorrow that is perpetually postponed.
Across
the country, it’s raining invectives, shrapnels, cudgels, and bits and pieces
of the kitchen sink. While all this happens, a majority of the tribe of
politicians are engaged in plunder. Government is the biggest business in town
and being in it is the surest avenue to inexplicable wealth.
Was
this how the country’s founding leaders envisioned it? In 53 years as an
Independent country, we have never quite managed to count our votes, count our
people or count our money credibly, the three basic functions on which
government is based. It is not because we cannot count.
Rather, it is because
counting properly comes with obligations of honesty, fairness and
accountability that a succession of managers of the Nigerian State, with the
active connivance and complicity of communities and citizens, have declined to
subscribe to.
In
its 2011 report, the Federal Government Investigation Panel on the 2011
Election Violence and Civil Disturbances, better known as the Sheikh Lemu
Panel, narrated that “elections held even before Independence in 1960 were
generally fraught with violence arising from intimidation of voters, burning of
ballot boxes and papers, snatching of ballot boxes, diversion of electoral
materials, outright rigging…”
For
about 29 out of the 53 years as an Independent country, we were ruled by
soldiers. They messed with our heads, our country and our institutions. If Lemu
is to be believed, the civilians who have ruled the country for the remaining
quarter century have learnt a lot from the soldiers but mostly the wrong
lessons.
Fourteen
years ago, we finally returned to government with electoral legitimacy. To many
Nigerians, however, democracy – government in which citizens are counted and
their votes count — remains postponed.
Today,
Nigerians have no expectations of those in power, our country struggles to
compete in the world and our institutions are ill-equipped apply our rules
properly or call to order those who do not wish us well.
In
theory, we were supposed to achieve better governance through decentralisation.
So, in 1967, we began creation of states. The problem was that the impetus for
state creation was not de-centralisation or better governance but narrow
reasons of regime security.
The
three regions of Nigeria at Independence were each too powerful. We wanted to
ensure that no sub-unit of Nigeria would be strong enough again ever to
challenge it like Biafra and the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu attempted in
1967-1970. The last act of state creation by Gen. Sani Abacha in 1996
essentially dismembered the last significant sub-unit in Nigeria – the Sokoto
Emirate – into three States (Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara).
Meanwhile,
in 1976, local government reform brought an additional level of government.
Today, we have one Federal Capital Territory, 36 states, and 774 local
governments, each with its own machinery of administration.
State
creation has created a growth industry in navel-gazing public officers whose
preoccupation seems to be leeching on the State. Members of Parliament, Cabinet
officers, permanent secretaries, advisers, their wives, husbands, spouses and
mistresses all deserve and desire their own perks, perquisites, and retinues to
be paid for, of course, by the State.
Each
also desires to bring to their own networks, the benefits of propinquity to
power. More cars are bought so that each can employ a driver or nanny from
their village. And openings must be created in the public service so that they
can ensure the next State employee is from the same place too.
If
teachers are to be hired, it can only be by allocation to the godfather, of
those in power and its bedrooms. So too with hiring nurses and doctors. Why
should any rules matter? The only rule that matters is that possession is
nine-tenths of the law. Surely, why should we start applying any rules only
when it comes to our own turn to chop?
With
about 71 per cent of the public appropriations at the federal level currently
devoted to servicing recurrent expenditure, the cost of running the public
sector has bloated by nearly 25 percentage points in the less than one and a
half decades. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the public service is not public and
hardly renders service. The only reason it exists is to provide the needs of
those who work in it and alleviate poverty among their kinsfolk.
The
result of this has been a frightening growth of different forms of retail,
wholesale and spectacular violence across the country: Domestic violence is on
the increase; commercial kidnapping is booming; electoral violence is a given;
inter-community and ethnic violence seems to be the default for settling
disputes across communities; improvised explosive devices are in the hands of
extremists who kill en masse the name of hate; and vigilantism seems to be the
preferred law enforcement method with the support of a vast majority of
Nigeria’s communities.
Lemu
had also foretold in 2011 that, The past decade has seen an unprecedented
escalation of communal violence in various parts of the federation, especially
in the northern part, which is virtually becoming the epicentre of the gravest
form….Something must be done to stem this trend otherwise it will breed a
balance of terror between groups hiding under different togas….It is fast
becoming one of sustaining a mutual balance of terror between different groups
in Nigeria.”
For
this epidemic of violence, we seem to have developed no antidote. On the
contrary, most involved in it seem assured of impunity while the politicians
who plunder us enjoy immunity. The criminal justice system and legal process
cannot be trusted to bring to account those who do this. This guarantees that
new fronts of violence are opened with each new day.
As
the country prepares for potentially explosive elections in 2015, victory seems
assured to any party that will beat the rest in the competition to frighten the
most or unleash the most violence.
National
co-existence is deeply frayed. Two years ago, the Lemu Panel summarised the
state of the country in an anguished three-word lamentation: “Nigeria has
regressed”!
Around
the country, true Nigerians are an endangered minority. The only place that you
are likely to find any Nigerians anymore are in the immigration terminals of
foreign airports. Back here, everyone seeks to be anything – ethnic merchant,
sectarian bigot, militant, bomber, online irredentist, and a chief-with-a-cap –
everything other than a Nigerian. We cannot be Nigerian, we are told, without
being one of these.
Yet,
we can and, to overcome our present difficulties as a people, we must. For we
can come from one part of Nigeria and recognise that no one part of the country
has a monopoly of good or bad. We can seek development in one part without any
need to feel that it must come at the expense of impoverishing other parts; we
can worship God the way we choose without the need to believe that God needs
any of us to protect Him; and we can wish the country well without any need to
claim a monopoly of patriotism.
The
founding leaders of our country had mutual respect for one another and for the
diverse peoples of this land. They were not thieves. They undertook public
service without amassing wealth or making grand larceny a directive principle
of state policy. Indeed, many of them died without homes of their own. Such was
their abiding faith in the goodness of this land.
On
most of these scores, our leaders of today mostly seem to take a contrary view.
Competitive narrowness is the name of the game and the public purse exists to
service private whims. Development is no longer the priority or business of
governance. In every sector: education to health; security to environment, the
indices of growth or betterment are hard to see.
The
investments we need to make for a better country are endangered. With
munificent new sources of energy now emerging around the world, the assumption
that underpinned Nigeria’s political economy – that we could always binge or
rely on free money from the sale of hydrocarbons – is about to be unscrambled.
But
this is not such a bad thing. On the contrary, the possible death of assured
oil money is the reason I remain optimistic about Nigeria. It could not come
soon enough.
The
death of oil will free us up to discover the capabilities and innate wealth of
different parts of Nigeria and compel us to exploit and develop them. It will
also mean the death of the political economy of allocation. It will compel
leaders to invest in the skills of their youths and to see their people as
assets. It will also enable us to return to harnessing the fertility in our
lands and processing them to feed our people.
If
fat and failed politicians do not have to converge in Abuja every month to
share money whose provenance they are not interested in, they will have little
option than to stay home among their people and raise the revenues they need to
justify their existence.
Despite
the difficulties, we cannot give up hope or walk out on the country. Despite
the challenges, civilian government is here to stay. It is our place to make it
work better for the people.
For
the politicians who seek to lead this country over the next half century, the
question is whether they will see these challenges as opportunities to be
seized or whether they will continue to do business as usual. Those who choose
the latter may find that they force a premature sun-set upon the country and
may have the misfortune of paying a supreme sacrifice for this kind of
avoidable folly.
For
those who recognise the new opportunities, this dangerous new world is an
exciting one too and offers a brave path to a new Nigerian century. On the
occasion of the 53rd Independence anniversary, my only prayer is for leaders
willing to seize it and for citizens able to see it.
Prof.
Odinkalu is Chair, National Human Rights Commission
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