The Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese, Most. Rev. Matthew Hasan Kukah, has raised the alarm over the abnormally high number of abandoned projects in the country.
Kukah, who is the Secretary of the General Abdulsalami Abubakar-led National Peace Committee (NPC), made the disclosure in an interview with Sunday Vanguard.
The respected cleric, while dissecting the nature of Nigerian politics, noted that violence will continue to surround our electoral process until politicial office is made less attractive.
He further lamented the situation where candidates are “selected” by few powerful interests, making nonsense of the will of the majority.
Comparing politics in developed nations to what is obtainable in Nigeria, Kukah said:
“Being in power or out of power in Nigeria have severe implications. There are about 11, 000 abandoned projects across this country, and on just four projects our government has spent almost what we have and (incurring) foreign debt. Also, there is what is called the instrumentation of politics in Nigeria and its pretty challenging because, as a journalist, you would have gone through a period of mentoring. A lawyer would have had to go through law school and a priest through seminary. Politics in Nigeria is the only game that you don’t need any qualification. So what that says about our system is that it is only in Nigeria that people rule by experimentation.
And the system is not even resilient for citizens to ask any of those aspiring to be the President of Nigeria, ‘can we have a sense of your antecedents?’ There are so many carpet baggers who can say ‘we have the money, let us key you in’. That is why when some people get into power, they start asking, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ We never ask those difficult questions?
In my view, I don’t think what we have on the ground qualifies enough to be called democracy because a lot of the focus for us is elections and this is not what democracy is all about. And like somebody said, in our own case, what we have are the electorate and the ‘selectorate’. The ‘selectorate’ may be a governor who decides who is going to be the next governor, the ‘selectorates’ may also be those who decide who is going to be our President.
And if you look at the trajectory of our Presidents from Buhari down to Tafawa Balewa, it is very difficult to find one person that didn’t come in by accident. So the kind of intellectual rigor that is required to scrutinize the environment and what you are committing yourself to is lacking. Former US President Barack Obama, for example, after being President, is a bloody good lawyer, he knows what to do with his life but, in Nigeria, you ask yourself after being President or governor, what next? This is why there are very few people who are no longer governors not living in Abuja.
It is very unlikely to find many governors going back to their communities trying to see what they can do, running law firms, going back to their engineering professions among others. Everybody is in Abuja because that is where the cake is. To me, we are a little bit still far away because it is a pretty long journey for us to come to a point when we can talk about democracy in its pure form. Kark Marx once said “you have to settle the issue of bread and butter before you can write poetry.” So we are not there yet in the sense that our system does not have a mentoring system for young people to figure out if they follow so and so people, where will they end up tomorrow?
The system is so unsteady and, if you look at the last three, four years, people who were in PDP suddenly decided to change party by moving to APC and they expected members of their villages to move to APC. All of a sudden they made tons of money and they found that they could not realise their ambitions, and they moved to another party and they expected their people to also move with them. The volatility as a result of the inefficiency of the system means that it is very difficult to have an environment where democracy can actually grow and be nurtured, that is, where young people can learn from the elderly ones. What we have is largely a transaction.”
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