One remarkable paradox about the 2015 General Election is that it ought to be a referendum on whether President Goodluck Jonathan has done well in Agriculture, Aviation, Road construction, Education, Health and especially Ebola, Railways, Electricity, and whether he achieved the purpose of putting constitutional reforms on the agenda of the Nigerian state as most Nigerians have been asking for since the beginning of the Fourth Republic. It is simply true, and provable, that in these areas, Jonathan has done exceedingly better than his illustrious predecessor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a very remarkable under-achiever, who has been needling him on all grounds and coking the mythology that Goodluck Jonathan has no clue.
It is also quite true that President Jonathan’s achievements have been made possible in spite of the devious antics of stalwarts of his political party, the People’s Democratic Party; a party on the verge of earning a National merit award for looting the treasury, a malfeasance for which so many of its former executives are in court awaiting the kind of long trials that give a stinking name to the judiciary.
It happens to be a political party mis-constructed by Obasanjo in his days as his own two-term oil Minister, to function with cabals that President Jonathan once had to alert the country about on discovering that he could not take any serious steps without being checkmated by those who assumedly made him a President. Trying to unriddle his way off the hold of the cabals has earned Goodluck Jonathan a permanent needling for clue-lessness that has been joined by a protest movement which has not cared to face the cabals, because protests in the country are partly sponsored by cabals, but has since merged with a very vibrant opposition, clever at brickbats and hyper-inflating about how poorly Jonathan is doing, without having the ideological savvy to set a new agenda for Nigeria.
Indeed, the hard part and what rankles is that, without showing evidence of a clue as to how an opposition, given Obafemi Awolowo’s enduring example, marshals a strong sense of policies and programmes to lift a country up, the party of opposition has acquired the reprehensible features of the PDP and is confronting the country with a mirror image of that other party in the name of an electoral choice.
The crucial point here is that, in the face of the menace of Boko Haram, the Islamic religious sect pursuing a propaganda of arms and suicide bombers against Christians, Muslims of other sects, and against western education, of which its prime minders are evident beneficiaries, it is needless to ask why President Jonathan’s better performance, above Obasanjo’s, is not getting a fair hearing and an objective appraisal. It so happened that Boko Haram was pampered from a foetal stage into grand terrorism by Olusegun Obasanjo’s government with the help of all the Governors of the Northern states who gave a subvention to the sect until President Umaru Yar’adua stopped it. After the extra-judicial killing of Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram during Yar’adua’s term, the sect went nuclear in search of external aid that has still not been fairly distinguished from domestic sponsorship. In the face of the kidnap of the Chibok school girls, the bombing of markets and public places by the sect, and successful compromising of the territorial integrity of the country, whoever was President of Nigeria ran the risk of never getting fairness of judgement unless he found a means of ending the terrorism.
The truly intriguing part is that President Jonathan needed to do his job as chief security officer of the Nigerian state in the face of many Northern leaders who saw anti-terrorism as a war on the North, while seeing Boko Haram itself as a fit response of the North to Niger Delta militancy.
A President of Niger Delta extraction caught in the web of such presumptions was bound to suffer distraction of a kind that required him either to let his government be controlled by the antics of the terrorists or to learn to steer his course irrespective of the distractions that are designed to put his resolve off balance. Learning to steer his course has had the implication of sometimes making him look uncaring about the massacres and pogroms being committed across a wide swipe of the North East and North West of the country by suicide bombers and stray gun-totters. But, clearly, he has owed a responsibility that he could only discharge by standing with the military and other security forces that have been ritually under-equipped and under-supplied for decades.
This has also meant standing at the centre of the political class in disgrace when school girls and others are abducted by terrorists and the country’s territorial integrity is assaulted with impunity. The disgrace has been made most obvious by the United States of America which has rather brashly refused to share intelligence information with the Nigerian government and insisting on not selling ammunition to the Nigerian state, because of the infiltration of the Nigerian government by the Boko Haram sect and the disrespect of the Nigerian Army for the fundamental human rights of the insurgents. Surely, with a foreign power earning a role that is not so innocent in the narration of the events, the matter ought to be seen not so much as problem for just the President of Nigeria but one on which a sensible political class ought to see a high-powered annulment of its status and an oblique pressure for its members to be pushed sideways for a foreign body to be inserted as problem-solver.
That this is not the case and that there are sensational disagreements of a partisan political nature between the government and the opposition, without a sensible proposal for an alternative handling of the matter, portends a serious challenge to the integrity of Nigeria’s political class as a whole. To have allowed matters of national security and survival to degenerate to partisan brickbats in such a manner is like refusing to see the handwriting on the wall. Which makes it quite a sore point that President Jonathan has not volunteered what he is doing about those Nigerians, within or outside his government, who are alleged by the United States to be working for or sponsoring Boko Haram.
When will they be outed and exposed? Or what are the highly explosive Nigerian dynamics that the President is keeping quiet about because of the need to defeat Boko Haram or prevent the break up of Nigeria which a United States Intelligence outfit almost gleefully fixed for 2015, a decade ago? Well, these are questions which have cut into an assessment of President Goodluck Jonathan’s term of office and which may explain why he is being denied objectivity or fair hearing in many quarters.
The truth of the matter however is that there is simply no running from the reality, which some may wish, like ostriches, to forget by burying their heads in the sands. This reality is that Boko Haram is part of the running sore of competition between “North” and South which must be resolved either by capitulating to those who wish that the North be treated as another country or by acknowledging that the harsh drawline between North and South must be removed by proper social engineering and the building of a new national consensus. Once this is realized, it becomes clear that the inverted commas used in the case of the North are worth emphasizing.
This is because the North is a diverse zone in which forced-draft unity (northern exclusivism) has become the means deployed to create violence on a large scale by those who believe that all who live in the region must have the same standpoint on all issues, without dissent or difference of opinion. Those who so believe are the real culprits of the Boko Haram insurgency even when they have nothing to do with Boko Haram. Otherwise, there is no reason why any set of citizens should be allowed to act with such brashness and impunity as flaunted by those presuming to have a divine mandate to prevent other citizens from having or taking to, a different viewpoint form theirs.
The crisis in the North East and across the North is, in this sense, simply one that requires Nigerians and the Nigerian government to defend the right of every Nigerian to self-respect, integrity, freedom of opinion, worship and association. Mercenaries and suicide bombers who seek to force the rest of us to abandon our own idea of Islam or Christianity and to buy into their rejection of western education, must be seen as enemies of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious Nigeria who think that taking over the North East and, may be, the North West, will give them a place to stand from which to take the rest of the country.
No question about it: the idea that one part of the country has to be granted special benefices as a result of some over-played difference, or lack, is the basis of the success that Boko Haram has had so far. In my view, the champions of such exclusivism, searchers for an Arewa President for Nigeria instead of a Nigerian President for Nigeria are the real bulwarks of Boko Haram, even if they do not belong to the sect and have no religious reasons to hate western education.
In this regard, the shame of the Nigerian political class is that the northern exclusivists who took over Nigeria’s largest political party, the PDP, from the beginning, have since succeeded in overcoming the new mega-party, APC and are hammering on President Goodluck Jonathan’s ‘cluelessness’, as a means of ignoring outstanding performances. Still, it does need to be said that the humungous corruption across the country and the large-scale insecurity in the North East and elsewhere have dented greatly but not managed to erase Goodluck Jonathan’s good deeds. Of interest here is that Olusegun Obasanjo who has been making a show of siding with the northern exclusivists to hide, or remove obviousness from, his own ‘coup of succession’ against the North simply wont let up.
More critical for him is that Goodluck Jonathan’s performance in sector after sector after sector has down-graded and displaced him, in his bid, now supported by so many ‘commissioned’ books, to be seen as father of modern Nigeria. To make matters worse for him, his fears have been confirmed by the glittering success of the national conference which Goodluck Jonathan made possible and serviced executively against all blandishments.
In this period of electioneering, it is particularly important to talk about the success of the national conference because of the queer habits of the political parties, all of them acting shy of presenting formidable manifestos and retreating from taking strong positions on the serious matters that have worried Nigerians who continue to see the conference as the grand necessity required to firm up a basis for living together in harmony and plenty. In this connection, it is good always to remember that the Fourth Republic began with a national consensus on this necessity: to provide for a new constitution that could end the charade of having a decided military over-hang purloining our democracy.
True, there were Nigerians who felt there was no need for a new constitution. Theirs was the bemusing cop-out that the trouble was not with the constitution but with its operators. Except that no one ever could tell how to deal with the operators outside the champions of dictatorship who continued to offer grim-faced dispensers of fiats and feckless “immediate effects” as messiahs. Generally, they failed, and are still failing, to look at how the oddities of the 1999 Constitution have been obstructing reforms and reformers, deleting development, empowering corruption, and making Nigeria look truly big for nothing. The surprise is that anyone could think of a law-governed change in the country without attending to the business of having a constitution that truly works. Unfortunately, although the political class seemed convinced about the need for change, the leadership under President Obasanjo was playing games.
The 2005 Political Reform conference flopped because President Olusegun Obasanjo turned it into a self-aggrandizing pursuit of a third term agenda. His personal ambitions sought to over-ride national honour and a sure sense of national destiny. Besides, he was overburdened by the necessity to meet the instructions of a cabal of Northern hegemonists who said they gave him power to do their bidding from which he could not renege. In response to their brag, he decided to put a worm in their ointment when he strategized for President Umaru Yar’adua, a better Nigerian than a Northerner, to succeed him.
He proved he had a hidden polemic, however, when, in obedience to his minders, he gave Nigeria a good man whom he knew would not last the distance. All the same, whatever President Yar’adua may have done, or not done, the most important part of his legacy is that his successor, President Goodluck Jonathan, did not abandon the imperative of working for a new constitutional order. While Jonathan’s opponents, including Obasanjo, successfully seized the airwaves to paint his progress as clueless, he pulled off a deft platform by setting up a Belgore Commission to pair down the known differences between the previous constitutional efforts.
He organized a parley of civil societies to confront the difficulties in the way, and saw to it, that the Senate and the House of Representatives each delivered virtually a new constitution before he set up the Okunrounmu Committee that strategized the way to a national conference which brought Nigerians of different fractions and factions together and has since further empowered the National Assembly, as it should be, to complete the process. It showed skill. Those who had asked for a sovereign national conference obviously saw the futility of insisting on their pursuit and so participated in making the national conference a whopping success.
Never mind that some did it through proxies. So easily forgotten now is the absence of the great champions of constitutional change, and their political siblings, who against their long-drawn and highly effective and praise-worthy advocacy of restructuring and campaign for social welfare turned their backs on the conference and are still uttering truly cynical and distracted opinions about its glittering success.
The good thing is that all Nigerians, including those afraid that the salutary outcome of the national conference may never be adopted, are agreed that the document from the conference remains a solid departure from the impunity-ridden ones of hidden agendas in preceding national conferences. The new document is so grandly superior to the current 1999 constitution in terms of ideals and implementation strategies, and has been so very wisely handed over to the National Assembly to boost the many politically correct positions already taken by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, that it deserves to be at the heart of the current campaigns. Especially so, now that the process has reached a most self-congratulatory stage with the Houses of Assembly across the country submitting their joint report in response to the National Assembly.
The indisputable fact is that, irrespective of what anyone might think of particular provisions in the constitution being crafted, Nigeria is actually on the verge of having a new constitution that is less problematic, more development and people-oriented, less tolerant of ethnic and regional hegemonies, and more oriented towards the fight against corruption, than all the attempts made since, and including, the 1979 and 1999 Constitution, to move Nigeria in a positive direction. It might well be added that those who wish to fight corruption and Boko Haram and to restructure Nigeria for effective implementation of genuine social welfare policies have been provided with a formidable constitutional context from which to do so. The question is: those who cannot openly identify with the constitutional changes, can we trust them to adopt what all Nigerians including their proxies have drawn up? In my view, this is the core question at the heart of the current election. Quite so, because what the candidates think and feel about the provisions of the constitution can tell who is standing by what majority of Nigerians want.
The sad part for Nigerians is that in these 2015 Elections, we are all having to choose between a grandly corrupt political party whose internal dynamics have favoured a great constitutional change and a distracted political opposition that has acquired not only critical personnel from the down-side of the ruling party but has striven to become a mirror image of its zanny briefs while abandoning its own advocacy of restructuring of the Federation and pursuit of social welfare policies like free education, free health services, and full employment. In the case of the latter, they offer charity for citizens without a respectable job creation or incomes policy.
A safe way of saying that Nigeria needs a proper third party that must present the people with a choice that is not based on deceptions and power-mongery. How else confront the queer personality conundrum at the 2015 General Election which finds Obasanjo, the great kleptocrat of the PDP, on the same side as the opposition, whose leader, General Muhammadu Buhari, with a dubious military reputation for being an anti-corruption crusader, is ramming together two incongruous agendas, one thoroughly parochial and “northern”, (yes, “northern”in quotes”) and the other studiously distracted but in favour of the cabals. The evident self-contradiction is in the fact that Buhari’s former party, the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, fused with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, to form a mega-party, the All-Progressive Congress, APC, without properly streamlining an ideological platform beyond the need to capture political power at the centre. From the moment the APC absorbed five decamping Northern Governors from the PDP who were insisting that only a Northerner could rule according to their understanding of their party’s zoning formula, it was clear that the APC had taken on the baggage of capturing of power with a northern candidate as the only desirable “progressive” position. A neat way to put it is that the APC took over the reprehensible zoning formula that made the PDP a party of zonal godfathers. Of course, from the standpoint of national unity, the formula has had a shameful history.
It saw the rejection of Obafemi Awolowo’s politics of social welfare because he was Yoruba. It yielded a coup against MKO Abiola’s June 12 victory in the 1993 Presidential elections, the freest and fairest ever, as it is said, because it was supposedly tribalized when his supporters jubilated over his nation-wide victory. The history also covers the hand-picking of Olusegun Obasanjo to become a President in 1999 after he purportedly signed an agreement to function as decreed by his Arewaminders.
Goodluck Jonathan, who has said, like Obasanjo, that he did not sign such an agreement has been pilloried for not relinquishing his chance to an Arewa candidate as required by the exclusivists. But what kind of country is that in which the northern bride’s chamber must produce or dictate how a President functions? Why couldn’t the APC, if it had to get a northerner, go for one who was less mired in this politics of giving back the Presidency to the North on such an egregious basis? I mean: get a decided Nigerian, with credentials for promoting inter-communal harmony, supporting educational development, advancing democratic rather than dictatorial reflexes in the public space;without a misuse of the sharia overhang, and whose credential for being an anti-corruption crusader is based on an understanding of the phenomenon which includes but goes beyond the simplistic notion of jailing those who steal, a mere case of letting the police do their work?
What rankles above all is that former ACN champions of restructuring of the Federation who used to make big noises, if not act, in favour of social welfare programmes and policies, simply abandoned their advocacies. Once they discovered the need to capture power by chumming up with the five decamping Governors of the People’s Democratic Party, they lost their ideological front. Why should such a laudable coalition between a Northern bracket and a Southern agency lead to abandonment of serious issues of social engineering! It beats the imagination. Although they may be giving the impression that nothing of value is happening, it is provable that they have been too tethered to their insufficient attention to national survival to see where the wind is blowing.
Otherwise, findingthemselves in the highly incongruous position of opposing the national conference that was called to correct the mish-mash that the country had become under the constitution imposed by the Nigerian militarily in 1999, they have simply allowed a poor finishing to mangle the three brilliant master strokes that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu deftly put on the road in the annals of the Fourth Republic. It is good to look at them.
The first brilliant master-stroke was in causing Honourable Aminu Tambuwal, PDP member for Sokoto, to be made Speaker of the House of Representatives against the wishes of the PDP. This laid the basis for future cooperation between factions of the PDP and the ACN. The second brilliant master-stroke was in firming a fusion between Buhari’s CPC and the ACN. The third brilliant master-stroke was in wheedling, cajoling and suborning the five decampee Northern Governors of the PDP, plus Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, to fuse into the APC. This would have been the truly unimpeachable master-stroke because it succeeded in breaking the jinx that had always spoilt common cause between North and South of Nigeria. Unfortunately, it was flawed by taking tactics so much more seriously than strategy. It became a mis-triumph.
First, because in bending over backwards to achieve a mega-party status, the ACN literally lost its soul to the devil by abandoning restructuring and pursuit of social welfare, which had made it a party to watch. Yes, new friends were being made comfortable but it amounted to throwing away what had galvanized South-western politicians to claim to be followers of Awolowo, even when they reneged on too many of the oldman’s ideals and principles. What was left were individualistic ploys by die-hards like Raufu Aregbesola of Osun state who held the ideological front to heart to await another day.
If Governor Amosun of Ogun State, Governor Ajimobi of Oyo State, and Okorocha of Imo state, easy to acknowledge as hard-working executives, were now to be acknowledged outside the ideological context of their pursuit of restructuring and social welfare, what was the basis for differentiating them from the PDP? It reduced everything to a matter of merely wanting to capture power at the centre. A shocking way to turn main-streaming into the virtual staple of the new progressives.
In the end, some strategic question: if a party cannot capture power, how can it implement restructuring and social welfare? But this happens to be the wrong question to ask or to try to answer. If the purpose is merely to become like the PDP which, since Obasanjo, has been no more than a party of loot-sharers, privatizing national property in the name of the masses for whom there are only laughable job creation strategies and no viable incomes policies or labour laws to match them, what are we talking about? What is worse is for people who pay attention to serious matters to be made to accost the spectacle of former ACN stalwarts in the APC who stand upright, but silent, on the same side with jingoists of the Arewa Forum like Professor Ango Abdulahi, who simply cannot define the North but must go demanding power back for the North while opposing restructuring, the creation of new states and boundary adjustments, among the sound outcomes of the national conference! Nothing could have been more predictable than for the APC to shop for a northern candidate as a matter of course. It simply had to be Muhammadu Buhari because he had a more determined national constituency. But which Buhari? The one who has been unable to offer a nationalistic and modern solution to the problems that herdsmen constitute in communities across so much of Nigeria? Or the one who opposed the National Identity Card scheme since it could be used to prove malfeasance in census counts that northern governments had always been allegedly involved in?
The Buhari whom I personally recall was the one who sent security men to seize files at my old office in Awolowo’s house at Park Lane, Apapa thus putting me in trouble with an Egba princess who said she was told by an operative that I had opened a file on her. Or was it the Muhammadu Buhari who, as a military dictator, supervised the confiscation of the free education books that LK Jakande had bought for the schools in Lagos State and caused them to be sold off in the open market? Or the Buhari who literally wasted 80 million dollars of Lagos state money by refusing to guarantee 100 million dollar loan for a metroline and thus ensured that traffic lockjaws remained the staple across our city by the lagoon. Or was it the Buhari who had given draconian jail terms to several politicians of the Second Republic for giving ten percent to their political parties but has had no contribution to the discussion of proper party finance and how to organize parties of subvention instead of the corruption-laden approaches to political money that all parties of the Fourth Republic, including the APC, have to be ritually seduced by?
I am simply unable to imagine which Buhari, born again or not, who would support restructuring and social welfare programmes except as a mere vote catcher. Even if it is true that Saul can become Paul, why should one not see that, like Obasanjo who became a formidable part of an Arewa strategy only in order to knock it sideways, Muhammadu Buhari is merely employing a hoodwinking strategy to return the baton to those who said they gave power to Obasanjo and wanted it back? It is a game between Generals. After all, and it is arguable, the Arewa Governors who joined the APC from the PDP never renounced the claim that they were representing an Arewa geo-political wicket whose agenda could be just as antithetic to restructuring and the politics of social welfare as the sharia-oriented politics that Buhari had been too much a part of.
On the face of it, it has to be asked: why can’t those withdrawing enthusiasm from restructuring be made to see that there is life outside the hunt for Federal Power? Particularly, why cant they see that it creates bad vibes for people who used to like identifying with stalwarts of the ACN in the hope that Nigerians outside the Southwest could be made to see that a party does not have to control the Federal Government at the centre for the masses to be given their due.
Sadly, the lukewarm attitude to serious economic planning, and lack of enthusiasm for economic thinking of a non-profit kind, have caused even minimal policy integration of contiguous APC states to be down-played. It has become a case of using the search for Federal Power to excuse not doing the right things. To cap it, the party has consummated its abandonment of the ‘ideological front’ by the manner of its rejection of the national conference and the effort it has made, ever since, to demean the startling achievements of that conference.
Now, beginning to look more PDP than the PDP, it is not surprising that in the current electioneering campaigns, the APC has not made a serious bid to differentiate its policies and programmes by unfolding rationales and implementation strategies but engages in a fish-wife’s haggle over who will make ‘NEPA’ work, end Boko Haram, and fight corruption, without realizing that what counts is to convince the electorate about how they intend to do what they are saying they want to do. It all rankles because even corruption which has had something of a peeping chance of being a proper issue in this election is haggled along lines of sheer obfuscation which suggests that, irrespective of who wins the election, the country is bound to be all mucked up in sheer fun-fooling and shadow-boxing while the proverbial cankerworm called corruption goes nuclear.
Specific to the General Election: what does need to be pointed out is that the angst and cynicism that gush from all directions arise precisely because of the refusal by the political parties to confront the issues that have been dealt with by the National Assembly and the National Conference in the process of making the new constitution. Across the country, only the former ACN members in the APC appeared to know how to drive the issues with consistency. With the two political parties virtually becoming Siamese, supposedly serious-minded and self-respecting Nigerians began to talk about the 2015 General Elections only in terms of how it could lead to violence and the break-up of Nigeria. Haba!
It is like discussing a terminal caput for the country over trivialities. What is the serious matter to fight over but petty loot-sharing which the current oil-crisis is turning into a joke? What it reveals is that there has been too much over-coding of an endgame for the country as if we are all seeking ways of acting in conformity with the hare-brained prognosis of some US security outfit which pencilled 2015 as the last year of the Nigerian Federation. Too many Nigerians on the corridors of power appear to have simply taken it as a challenge to amass either more power or more wealth for themselves in anticipation of the evil day. No question as to how to prevent it.
Or what to do if some mischief-making group or powers, within or outside the country, were intent on realizing the unrealizable prognosis. Consequently, the average Nigerian is left to see the elections, not as a means of choosing aright because many Nigerians have been schooled by stomach infrastructurists to believe that the right to choose is not as good as immediate gratification. It ends with making all possible outcomes, any kind of change, appear desirable. Quite a mess: as there is absolutely no reason why Nigerians should so act like political suicides. I mean: even in the worst of times, rationality should not be removed from the national agenda.
Truth is: there is clearly a basis for choice in the forthcoming elections which need not depend on wishy-washy sentimentality but on hard-headed discrimination between merely surviving and creating a sound basis for thriving, and thriving well. Although the mode and manner of electoral management by the Independent National Electoral Commission leaves little room for great expectations, even for many of us who stuck out our necks in favour of Professor Attahiru Jega as the Chairman of INEC, there are good grounds for hoping that a great decision can come out of the General Elections that will put Nigeria on a path that leads to more rational decision-making.
What must be borne in mind is that a country is not a once-for-all project. It is a continuing exercise, an everyday plebiscite which can take a turn for the worst only because a country’s best minds get distracted or fall asleep in moments of anxiety. Seen in this light, the General election is an opportunity that deserves to be used well. Those who want to wait for all the conditions to be correct before they exit from cynicism may have their point. But it is not good enough. A country need not sell itself short, or act thoughtlessly like drunks, whether out of frustration with an endless run of bad leaders or the hope that the future can be bribed by fudging the present. Hence, it should matter that what is happening around us, our capacity to dream and plan, be made into platforms as a test of the candidates and the political parties in the running. We do need to measure their fitness beyond the outright falsehoods, and empty broadsides against opponents, that they may spout in place of delineating policies and programmes for moving the country forward .
It is necessary to do this, because the current electioneering campaigns demand a highlight of some of the great advances that have been made by both the national assembly and the national conference in pursuit of a new constitutional order. There are critical issue areas, relevant to transforming the country, which may be considered by anyone interested in a positive outcome at the end of the General elections.
In an environment in which political parties appear to be shy of prescribing and describing their policy preferences, but are quick to lambast their opponents for the same offenses, it ought to be made mandatory for each of the political parties and party candidates to take a stand during this electioneering period on what they think of the good work (or poor work, if so) of the national conference and national assembly. It would immediately become obvious that there is really no place to hide for any candidate who may wish to engage in shadow-boxing to hoodwink the electorate at the level of policy. From Boko Haram to corruption, education, industrialization to social welfare, there are provisions in the Constitution that the candidates ought not to be allowed to hedge or dodge. What they say about the provisions may be used to determine their seriousness of purpose. More important, especially for those who wish to come to power before letting us know their minds, we need to be able to measure their current dispositions against what we have known about them in the past.
The process of equalizing conditions across the country, a necessity for transforming Nigeria and dissolving tumours like Boko Haram, must begin with defending the right of all Nigerians to be free of hegemonies, regional or ethnic. In relation to these, it is important to continue to press, as the national conference has commendably done, and to pitch for all contiguous conurbations of the same ethnic group to be in the same state rather than mucking up and cutting a line through an ethnic group, leaving minorities of one in a state dominated by another. Of course, there are few cases where such minorities are scattered across several states without contiguity. But the reason such cases are not being properly addressed is because of the stand of those who think there must be only one kind of solution for all cases. A multi-ethnic state that insists on such fixity of position is pleading a zero-sum approach that can only result in terrorism as norm.
On the contrary, if all Ekitis in the North and Ekitis in the South were brought together in the same state, it would remove the boundary between North and South in that zone. Let Nigeria have a breathing space away from Lugard’s gerrymandering. The same is true if Oyos in the South and Oyos in the North were now to be domiciled in the same state. One critical case concerns the Gbagyi people of central Nigeria who, following some arcane monafiki, are scattered in five different states although they are contiguous enough to be in one state. Frederick Lugard hived off a part of Gbagyi territory to create a capital for the old North in Kaduna. The Nigerian creators of a Federal capital territory took another chunk of the territory in Abuja. Today, the Gbagyi are in Kaduna, Niger, Nassarawa, Abuja with fractions in Kogi. What crimes have they committed against anybody that they should be under the curse of such authoritative mis-allocation of territory? Someone may ask: have they demanded a state of their own? But this is the wrong question. Should a national sense of justice not require that no community be subjected to the trashing of its language and its relationship with culturally contiguous communities simply in order to meet a legalistic requirement of propriety that others are not burdened by?
There is, as the national conference proposes, a need to have up to eighteen more states across the country. As things go, all the eighteen may not pass. But suggestions that they should not be allowed to pass, because they are economically unviable, constitute some of the most disingenuous arguments one can have in a country where what a state can get from the Federation Account is divisible in favour of any parts that may be added or hived off. The minders of the state ought to know that it is their business to create, if not run production outfits, factories and farms, before they can share wealth. In effect, every community in Nigeria becomes a veritable producer of its means of subsistence and survival and hence must stop assuming un-stopper(ed) access to Niger Delta oil as the only route to survival.
At any rate, the idea that existing states are not viable is based on allowing the economics of corruption and the corruption of Federalism to become the norm. Why should every malfeasance in the existing system be retained in the new or amended constitution instead of being stamped out. Surely, something needs to be instituted that the national Assembly and the national conference have made allowance for: the existence of both an Accountant General of the Federation and an Accountant General of the Federal Government. The same goes in the judicial department for the existence of an Attorney General of the Federation and an Attorney General of the Federal Government. Besides, the new constitution does provide for no expenditure without appropriation.
These measures, which touch upon teaching the central bank and the NNPC how to count, could undo corruption at source. Isn’t it embarrassing to have a Central Bank Governor whose inability to count becomes more sensational than the corruption he wishes to unearth? Surely, we must appraise the improvements on the 1979/99 Constitution to see how it provides for a better system. For that matter, if the new Constitution, with a few extra provisions added had been adopted, a year ago, it would no longer have mattered too much the zone that is producing the President. It still does matter today because the 1999 constitution is like the dog in the manger.
By the same token, the fight against corruption does need a new and proper constitutional cover. It is also about the education of the anti-corruption crusader in appreciation of the complex nature of corruption itself. Goodluck Jonathan inherited from Olusegun Obasanjo a hideously corrupt state which is symbolized most rankly by an organization called Transcorp into which the Federal Government has privatized oil blocks and statutory corporations but in which the former President is a prime share holder. This is where corruption is king, as Gani Fawehinmi told fellow Nigerians. It bears a family resemblance to how the minders of the Petroleum Trust Fund, allowed an extra-statutory body, named as a consultancy, to help spend and defray expenses at the PTF. It was simply a case of doing corruption in a less obvious manner than may be proved by the billions that the PTF could not account for. On this, Goodluck Jonathan was right when he made a distinction between stealing and corruption.
Although, he and his men have tried to show that they, too, have jailed as much, if not more than predecessors in the war on corruption, it is really like bragging about unimportant things. Proof of a great or greater commitment to the anti-corruption campaign needs to be shown along the lines of President Jonathan’s admission during the subsidy occupy Nigeria protests, that his government had been overtaken by cabals. He was truly hunting where the antelopes were supposed to be. But who can remember how the anti-corruption crusaders across the country responded? The country shouted at him to release the names of the cabals but slunk with tails between the legs into hibernation once it was done. It showed that fighting corruption is not only about a willing government but an organized, or better to say, a mobilized society that wont slink away in the face of cabals.
Now that General Muhammadu Buhari, once again has his name on the Presidential ballot, shouldn’t we be asking what he has learnt from fighting corruption in those days when, with Major General Tunde Idiagbon, he was overtaken by what some people called an IMF coup? His experience showed that there are more uses to a freezing plant than stocking beer. It can also stock dead bodies, as one Soyinka poem, which our leaders may not be reading, has put it. In essence, the anti-corruption struggle must go beyond the oft-touted need to jail the thieves, important as it is to do so. Ensuring that institutional designs do not constitute an open sesame to structural corruption – the greatest form of corruption of them all – is really the way to escape kleptocracy as label for our country. I must say,in this regards, as I have argued in Taking Nigeria Seriously, that those who jailed politicians of the Second Republic for giving ten percent to their political parties but have never argued for a proper law on the finance of political parties and do not see the need to insist on parties based on subscription are merely shadow-boxing with corruption.
The reality is that political parties of the Fourth Republic, including Buhari’s APC, are obliged to live on corruption because the institutional context in which they operate simply prescribes it. A little honesty is required of our leaders to admit what they have had to do to put their parties on the road. Let the leaders dare to set up a truth commission on the running of the political parties. The results would be out of this world. This is really another way of saying that those who are talking about fighting corruption have first to define it. They are yet to offer a definition that accounts for the real cankerworm, as it used to be called before it went nuclear in the Fourth Republic.
The short of it is that structural corruption, once contrived, creates room for all the other forms. Thieves and loot-sharers come and go but the kleptocrats overcome and overtake institutions even unto eternity unless they are out-organized. Which is why merely talking about jailing the corrupt remains part of a hoodwinking game. That is, until it is conceded that corruption is about organized power structured to ignore the law in favour of malfeasants who constitute the Power.
Necessarily, a coalition of Nigerians beyond the political parties and beyond the people in government is required for the war on corruption to take off in earnest. A dilemma does present itself in the sense that it is only a government that is creating genuine development and creating jobs that can build up the context for such a coalition. A situation where every body looks to a leader in power but none hasindependent organizational format for intervening, outside the command of the leader, soon becomes a joke.
Every such coalition, lets face it, must have the capacity to build production systems that negotiate the field of play. Only a people being actively mobilized to provide the means for people to earn genuine livelihood are in a position to join in the fight against corruption. It is largely about giving people something of their own to defend: jobs, education, health, and pensions.
It is not abouterecting new school buildings without labouring on a proper educational system, or doing heavy road infrastructure as a form of graphic proof of working hard while the core content of party programmes continue to look more like throwing money at problems away from the deeper cravings of the masses. I mean deeper cravings like the establishment of proper agro-allied industries, and return of proper factories as a means of job creation instead of multiplying civil service perquisites, or counting the sellers of recharge cards on street corners as properly employed people – as if they who describe them as workers would like their own children and siblings to be so described.
Anyone who has bothered to look at the prognostications of the new constitution will agree that it offers a social welfare dimension beyond what any of the existing governments in the Federation have challenged themselves to uphold. In a country where education and health have been serious issues in the politics of welfare, the new Constitution requires that items in chapter two of the old constitution on fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy be exported to chapter four and made justiciable. This amounts to proclaiming a social revolution. Issues immediately arise as to how to make it possible, beyond platitudinous approaches, for many state governments that have erected smart primary and secondary school buildings to have meaningful educational systems. What one ought to expect in the circumstance is that the political parties that are interested in the future and not just in power would be retailing how to meet the needs of the new constitutional frame. That it is not happening is what should worry all of us about this election.
Odia Ofeimun is a popular Nigerian poet.