Goodluck
Jonathan's former Special Adviser on Media and Publicity who is a
columnist for The Guardian, has written yet another interesting piece to
Nigerians. It's a must read.
Reuben Abati
During the Jonathan administration, an outspoken opposition
spokesperson had argued that Nigeria was on auto-pilot, a phrase that
was gleefully even if ignorantly echoed by an excitable opposition
crowd. Deeper reflection should have made it clear even to the
unthinking that there is no way any country can ever be on auto-pilot,
for there are many levels of governance, all working together and
cross-influencing each other to determine the structure of inputs and
outcomes in society.
To say that a country is on auto-pilot is to assume wrongly that
the only centre of governance that exists is the official corridor,
whereas governance is far more complex. The question should be asked,
now as then: who is governing Nigeria? Who is running the country? Why
do we blame government alone for our woes, whereas we share a collective
responsibility, and some of the worst violators of the public space are
not even in public office?
The President of the country is easily the target of every
criticism. This is perhaps understandable to the extent that what we
have in Nigeria is the perfect equivalent of an Imperial Presidency.
Whoever is President of Nigeria wields the powers of life and death,
depending on how he uses those enormous powers attached to his office by
the Constitution, convention and expectations. Nigeria’s President not
only governs, he rules. The kind of President that emerges at any
particular time can determine the fortunes of the country. It helps if
the President is driven by a commitment to make a difference, but the
challenge is that every President invariably becomes a prisoner.
He has the loneliest job in the land, because he is soon taken
hostage by officials and various interests, struggling to exercise
aspects of Presidential power vicariously. And these officials do it
right to the minutest detail: they are the ones who tell the President
that he is best thing ever since the invention of toothpaste. They are
the ones who will convince him as to every little detail of governance:
who to meet, where to travel to, and who to suspect or suspend. The
President exercises power, the officials and the partisans in the
corridors exercise influence. But when things go wrong, it is the
President that gets the blame. He is reminded that the buck stops at his
desk.
We should begin to worry about these dangerous officials in the
system, particularly within the public service, the reckless mind
readers who exploit the system for their own ends, and who walk free
when the President gets all the blame. To govern properly, every
government not only needs a good man at the top, but good officials who
will serve the country. We are not there yet. The same civil servants
who superintended over the omissions of the past 16 years are the ones
still going up and down today, and it is why something has changed but
nothing has changed. The reality is terrifying.
The officials at the state levels are no different, from the
Governor down to the local government chairman and their staff. They
hardly get as much criticism as the folks in Abuja, but they are busy
every day governing Nigeria, and doing so very badly too. Local
government chairmen and their officials do almost nothing. The Governors
also try to act as if they are Imperial Majesties. The emphasis on
ceremony rather than actual performance is the bane of governance in
Nigeria. Every one seems to be obsessed with ceremony and privileges.
A friend sent me a picture he took with the Mayor of London inside a
train, in the midst of ordinary citizens and asked if that would ever
happen in Nigeria. The Mayor had no bodyguards. He was on his own. In
the Netherlands, the Prime Minister is a part-time lecturer in one of
the local colleges. Nigerian pubic officials are often too busy to have
time for normal life. Even if they want to live normally, the system
also makes it impossible. We need people in government living normal
lives. Leaders need not be afraid of the people they govern. They must
identify with them. There is too much royalty in government circles in
Nigeria. No matter how well-intentioned you may be, once you find
yourself in their midst, you will soon start acting and sounding like
one, because it is the only language that is spoken in those corridors.
Elsewhere, ideas govern countries. People become leaders on the
basis of ideas and they govern with ideas. That is why the average voter
in Europe or North America knows that what he votes for is what he is
likely to get. Clearly in the on-going Presidential nomination process
in the United States, every voter knows the difference between Bernie
Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side and between Ted Cruz
and Donald Trump on the Republican side. Such differences are often
blurry in Nigeria: our politics is driven by partisan interests; a
primordial desperation for power, not ideas. It is also why Nigerian
politicians can belong to five different political parties and movements
within a decade.
Even when men of ideas show up in the political arena, they are
quickly reminded that they are not politicians and do not understand
politics. Gross anti-intellectualism is a major problem that Nigeria
would have to address at some stage. Some of the administrations in the
past who had brainy men and women of ideas in strategic positions ended
up not using them. They were either frustrated, caged, co-opted or
forced to adapt or shown the door. The question is often asked: why
don’t such people walk away? The answer that is well known in official
corridors is this: doing so may be a form of suicide. Once inside, you
are not allowed to walk out on the Federal Government of Nigeria, and if
you must, not on your own terms. So, governance fails even at that
level of values: that other important element that governs progressive
nations.
Partisan interests are major factors in the governance process.
These seem to be the dominant factor in Nigeria, but again, they are
irresponsibly deployed. The crowd of political parties, religious
groups, traditional rulers, ethnic and community associations,
professional associations, pastors, priests, traditional rulers, imams
and alfas, shamanists, native doctors, soothsayers and traditional
healers: they all govern. They wield enormous influence. But they have
never helped Nigeria and they are not helping. All the people in public
offices have strong links to all these other governors of Nigeria, but
what kind of morality do they discuss? Those with partisan interests,
including even promoters of Non-Governmental groups (NGOs) all have one
interest at heart: power and relevance.
The same priests who saw grand visions for the PDP and its members
over a 16-year period are still in business seeing visions and making
predictions. Those who claim to be so powerful they can make the lame
walk and the blind see have not deemed it necessary to step forward to
help the NNPC turn water into petrol. If any of these miracle-delivering
pastors can just turn the Lagos Lagoon alone into a river of petrol,
all Nigerians will become believers, but that won’t happen because they
are committed to a different version of the gospel. As for the political
parties: they are all in disarray.
The private sector also governs Nigeria. But what is the quality of
governance in the corporate sector? The Nigerian corporate elite is
arrogant. They claim that they create jobs so the country may prosper,
but they are, in reality, a rent-seeking class. They survive on
government patronage, access to the Villa and its satellites, and claims
of indispensability. But without government, most private sector
organizations will be in distress. The withdrawal of public funds into a
Treasury Single Account is a case in point. And with President
Muhammadu Buhari not readily available to the eye-service wing of the
Nigerian private sector, former sycophants in the corridors are
clandestinely resorting to sabotage and blackmail. A responsible
private sector has a duty in society: to build society, not to donate
money to politicians during elections and seek patronage thereafter. And
if it must co-operate with government, it must be for much nobler
reasons in the public interest.
The military are still governing Nigeria too. They may be in the
background, but their exit 16 years ago, has not quite translated into a
loss of influence or presence. In the early years of their
de-centering, many of them chose to join politics and replace their
uniforms with traditional attires. Their original argument is that if
other professionals can join politics, then a soldier should not be
excluded. They failed to add that the military class in politics in
Africa has shown a tendency to exercise proprietorial rights and powers,
which delimit the democratic project. In Nigeria such powers and rights
have been exercised consistently and mostly by, happily for us, a
gerontocratic class, whose impact, I believe, will be determined by the
effluxion of time.
And it is like this: the President that emerged in 1999 was a
soldier: the received opinion was that only such a strong man could
stabilize the country. His successor was the brother of another old
soldier; he and his Deputy were personal chosen by the departing
President. He died in office, but for his Deputy to succeed him, it
helped a lot that he was also a favourite of the General who chose his
own successors. When this protégé fell out with the General, in
retrospect now, a miscalculation, the General turned Godfather swore to
remove him from office. And it happened. In 2015, another former soldier
and strong man, had to be brought back to office and power. When
anything goes wrong, a class of old Generals are the ones who step
forward to protect and guide the country. The only saving grace is that
they do not yet have a successor–class of similarly influential men with
military pedigree. But when their time passes, would there be equally
strong civilians who can act as protectors of the nation?
The media governs too. But the media in Nigeria today is heavily
politicized, compromised and a victim of internal censorship occasioned
by hubris. Can the media still save Nigeria? It is in the same pit as
the Nigerian voter, foreign interests, the legislature and the
judiciary. But when there is positive change at all of these centres of
power and influence, only then will there be change, movement and
motion, and a new Nigeria.
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