By
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
It is fitting that this conversation
takes place in the week of Nigeria’s 53rd Independence Anniversary
and in the week that the Federal Government has announced steps towards the
convening of a “National Dialogue”.
Congratulations are due to Tayo
Oyetibo, SAN, for investing in institutionalizing law practice in this way and
using the formal opening for this dialogue and convening on the social contract
and Nigeria. The learned Senior Advocate continues a tradition of passionate
forensic application and mentoring pioneered by our late and dearly mourned
mentor, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAN.
53 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.
As evidence of this, the Advisory
Committee on the National Dialogue (the Senator Femi Okorounmu Committee) does
not include any Nigerian below the age of 50. For a country whose median age is
23 and where life expectancy is just about 48 years, this is worrying.
Across the country, meanwhile, it’s
raining invectives, shrapnel, cudgels, and bits and pieces of the kitchen sink.
While all this happens, many politicians are intent on plunder. Government is
the biggest business in town and being in it is the surest avenue to
inexplicable wealth.
Was this how the 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 since Independence, 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 53 years as an
Independent country we were ruled by soldiers. They messed with our heads, our
country and our institutions. If Sheikh 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.
14 years ago, we finally returned to
government with electoral legitimacy. To many Nigerians, notwithstanding the
improvements in 2011, however, democracy – government in which citizens are counted
and their votes count – has not yet arrived.
De-Centralising Despotism
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 de-centralisation. So, in 1967, we began creating of
states. The problem was that the impetus for state creation was not
de-centralisation or better governance but narrow reasons of regime security
with little consideration for governance.
The three regions of Nigeria at
Independence were each considered too powerful. We wanted to ensure that no
sub-unit would be strong enough again ever to challenge the country to a
wrestling match like Biafra attempted in 1967-1970. The last act of State
creation by General Abacha in 1996, therefore, 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. For electoral administration, we have an
additional 8,100 wards.
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 sundry hangers on
all deserve and desire their own perks, perquisites, and retinues to be paid
for, of course, by public appropriations.
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 god-father of those in power and its bedrooms. So
too with hiring nurses and doctors. Surely, why should we start applying any
rules only when it comes to our own turn to chop?
With about 71% 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.
An increasingly incapacitated state
suffers under the weight of its natural responsibilities. The result is
frightening growth in 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 (IEDs) 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 support of a vast majority of Nigeria’s
communities. We have de-centralised despotism.
Sheikh 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 epicenter 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.”
Regressing into impunity
For this epidemic of violence, we seem
to have developed no antidote. On the contrary, most involved in it seem
assured of impunity while those politicians who plunder us enjoy immunity. The
criminal justice system and legal process cannot be trusted to bring to account
those who do this. Rather, the legal process often facilitates these crimes
against collective patrimony. 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 country the most or unleash the
most violence.
National co-existence is deeply frayed.
Two years ago, the Sheikh Lemu Panel summarized 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 places 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 recognize 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, many of the
people who occupy position of public trust 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 – we struggle to assemble credible indices of betterment.
Civilian government must work for the
people
Yet, 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 and contractocracy. 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, therefore, 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 recognize 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.
Chidi Odinkalu, Ph.D, Chairman of the
nation’s Human Rights Commission, made these remarks to the Opening of the new
Law Offices of Tayo Oyetibo & Co, Block 113, Lekki Expressway, Lagos, 3
October, 2013. With respect to these remarks, Dr. Odinkalu says, “The views and
opinions expressed here are the author’s and do not represent the official
policies or positions of any entities or institutions with which he is or has
previously been associated.”
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