I went to the Bishop Mike Okonkwo’s Scholarship lecture at the Muson Centre, Onikan and was pleasantly surprised and pleased to listen to the insightful and thought provoking lecture given by a gentleman I had previously not heard about, Rtd. Major General Ishola Williams.
He delivered an incisive treatise on the state of the Nigerian nation, chronicling the degeneration of the polity since independence, the unfortunate adventure of the military class into matters of state and the great corruption that has bedeviled this nation State for the past fifty years, crippling it in its entirety virtually to a point of stupor and ridicule. General Williams was completely pessimistic about Nigeria, emphasizing that nothing good or worthwhile could ever come out of this country again without dramatic change, as according to him, and I do quite agree, the situation was getting worse by the day. He peppered his discourse with practical examples and experiences he’d had, pointing out, quite rightly I might add, that the generations we hope might change things are worse than the generations that pulled down the barn in the first place. He therefore, after much negativity and sarcasm, suggested a complete rethink of the attitude of the actors in the nation state and a complete change of the way things are done, in other words, the emergence or establishment of an entirely new SYSTEM.
Two weeks later, or thereabouts, I was at another forum, and a young personable and dapper man, FELA DUROTOYE, sang the same song about the state of our nation, variously lamenting the degeneration of our moral values, the liquidation of our middle class, the pulverization of our economy, the sorry state of security, the erosion of the principles of our value system and the attendant consequences on the Nigerian family, the maniacal kleptocracy we call our ruling class and the massive cancerous corruption that has permeated every sphere of our political, social and economic life in this nation.
I am not necessarily using his words; the words I use express my own anger, indignation and frustration. I listened to this young man talk about how hopeless the state of our nation is at fifty and how the current and past generations of leaders have woefully let us down but he introduced something interesting: collective responsibility. He wanted to know what we all sitting under the sound of his voice had done to ameliorate the situation and went on to talk about himself and the (I must say) impressive work he had been doing to contribute his own quota to the emancipation of our people. He was so optimistic and hopeful about Nigeria which I found surprisingly refreshing after the previous lecture of (Major General Williams’).
Now don’t get me wrong, General Williams said it as it is and I totally agree with him. However, Durotoye was not sounding the death knell on Nigeria. He was saying that we can, in fact, we must fix it. That’s what got me thinking. It’s easy to lose hope in the country Nigeria. It’s also easy to pray and declare, ‘it is well with Nigeria’, and ‘God will deliver us’. BUT WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Fela went on to proclaim something that I had heard him say a few years ago, that God gave him a message that Nigeria would be one of the most desirable nations on earth come 2025. This was the basis of his optimism; that things would surely turn around because the Lord had said so. The common denominator then between both lectures which I had heard within a space of two weeks was CHANGE; STRUCTURAL CHANGE. This is what I want to talk about.
My fellow countrymen, we need to change the political structure of our country if we hope to see the Nigeria of our dreams, if we hope to leave a country worth anything to our children. We have prayed, God has heard our prayers, now we need to insist on the type of leadership we want for our country, even if we have to fight for it. I don’t have any real answers as to how we can change this country in the immediacy, but I dare say I have ideas. Strong ideas. Certainly more ideas than the collective think tank of our ruling classes who have not advanced beyond the level of state creation so that more federal allocations will be granted and consequently, more money shared.
We need to rethink and reassess the feudalistic nature of the political structure on which our democracy is founded. The structure of our polity has to change. Period. Anything short of that, five or ten years from now, we will be back at the ‘drawing board’ singing the same old song again, just like the NFF and Nigerian football. We need to summon the collective will to institute whatever changes are necessary to move our country forward. Now.
No one should ever imagine that we cannot do it. We must because we have no choice. Not anymore. You know why? Any system that can allow a man and his mother to loot the collective wealth of a people in a political contraption called a ‘state’ for eight painful years and then install a puppet and continue to loot that state until his puppet rebels against him, is severely faulted. Any system that can allow a family to loot the commonwealth of a people and run down a state, so called, to the point where the state is comatose, while the people are looking on helplessly, unable to do anything, is a failed system. Any system that allows a man to ‘put’ his son in as governor, granted, the son has apparently done well, and then turn around eight years later and position his daughter to continue the ‘good work’ is a system bereft of morality. Some state governors have even used public funds to purchase oil blocks for themselves. Haba Jemaa…!
Are we blind in this country, mentally retarded or both! Can we not see what is going on? We might even excuse the atrocities committed by several military governments but; ‘DEMOCRACY’?! I don’t want to talk about governors caught with millions of dollars at our airports, nor about other politicians because we have an idea of how bad our polity is. Forget the actors for now. Talk about the structure. Any system that allows this demonic level of odious mendaciousness ought to be scrapped. It ought to be changed. The system can no longer sustain this level of kleptomanic madness. If we don’t change it willingly and in a planned fashion, it will change itself unnaturally.
Yes God has said that He has, or He will bless Nigeria; that we will be the most desirable nation by 2025. That is fifteen years from now. What God did not tell us is the price we have to pay in order to get there. In the Bible, when God showed Joseph a revelation of his destiny, He did not let Joseph know what he would go through in order to get to that destiny. Neither did God let David know what he would go through when he was anointed King. Nor, I might add, did he give me or you fore-knowledge of what we went through the last ten years. God is a God of wonders but he does not wave a magic wand like a magician. He will speak or purpose it and it will come to pass, but you will have to go through the rigors, the process of preparation. There is no precedent in the Bible where he did otherwise. What God has said about Nigeria will come to pass.
Our collective prayers about Nigeria will come to pass but we need to take a leap in the dark. In that wise, change must come to Nigeria even if we do nothing. It will come whether sudden and violent or gradual and painful. I propose that we simply take our collective destinies into our own hands and endeavor or attempt to build a fair and just nation, just like the pilgrims , God bless their souls, did in the United States of America over two hundred years ago.
This system has failed. It is no longer worthy of repairs or amendment. It is fundamentally flawed, not because democracy has failed us but because we have failed democracy. The presidential system of governance in a democratic system has not been adapted to counter the maniacal idiosyncrasies of a poverty stricken and largely uneducated third world people. Our leaders took advantage of our lack of education and sophistication, and our simplemindedness and raped us sore. We can no longer trust them to wield the enormous concentration of power that a presidential system of governance bequeaths on political leaders. We have to neuter them so that they don’t sharpen their pencils to continue the rape with our children and generations unborn. We have to ration their power and their ability to loot and plunder.
The war against corruption in all its ramifications is a hoax and will never succeed. The problem is the system; it needs to be changed. We need to have a system in place that will detect and punish offenders without recourse, completely unmindful of whose ox is gored. We need to totally overhaul and revamp our judiciary- the last beacon of hope for the common man- so that it can effectively and efficiently deliver justice to the people. What completely vexes me is this over used and misrepresented catch phrase: ‘Zero tolerance for corruption’. Zero tolerance for WHAT? Do you know what that means? I ask our leaders. What have you put in place to be able to effect that? Or are you just playing with words? “Let’s say what the peasants like to hear and keep them happy while we feast on their blood.”
It is like a country declaring zero tolerance for robbery without having a police force to enforce the law. How can a man declare zero tolerance for poverty and hunger and then lie on the beach all day long sleeping. Almost all our past and current leaders in various branches of government are billionaires, yet they’ve all declared zero tolerance for corruption with a straight face. (One famously declared non tolerance for unexplained wealth, as if his own stupendous wealth could be explained). Meanwhile there are no indices put in place to effect it. I am not talking about the number of EFCC arrests, but the conclusion and execution of justice; the most important deterrent in ensuring that the people are un-desirous of committing a crime. Not when you arrest someone and share his loot, or you give him a two-year sentence and he gets away with billions.
Give even a reasonable, God-fearing man a billion and he will follow you to Kiri-Kiri for two years, while his children are at school in England. The system must change. We need to have a system that works, not Zero Tolerance. Americans don’t have zero tolerance but their system works, which effectively translates to zero tolerance. We are not necessarily more criminal minded than they are but because their system works, you do the crime, you do the time- no matter who you are. If they didn’t have such a system in place, they very well might be as corrupt as we are, if not more. However, they made a choice not to be like we have become so they built a credible system over the years through thick and thin, through civil war and world war, through struggle and prosperity. What a great country.
Who amongst our corrupt crop of presidential candidates and aspirants can give our great nation the selfless service of biting the bullet and doing what is right even if it costs him his life? Please do not delude yourself that doing the right thing does not involve sacrifice, and I do not mean the type our leaders do; sacrificing other people’s children on Satan’s alter in order to obtain political power such as exemplified by the Okija debacle.
We need a man who is single minded and fearless enough to take the bull by the horn and wrestle it to the ground. He has to be bold enough to this, he has to be selfless enough to do this and he has to be ‘foolish’ enough to do this. But posterity will reward him and his family forever.
A man called Mikail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and changed the system forever. He was elected Chairman of the Politburo, the highest decision making organ in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He was young (early fifties), dynamic, and charismatic and had ascended to arguably the most powerful position on earth. That put him on a footing, parri passu, with the president of the United States of America as the most powerful man on the planet.
However, this man, even before he took over the helm of affairs had his own agenda. He knew his country was going to the dogs and was determined to ebb the tide. It was clear to him that his country could no longer compete with the United States militarily simply because while the might of the US economy could easily underwrite and sustain its massive defense spending, the USSR on the other hand, was diverting valuable and scarce resources much needed in other sectors to military spending. The situation had become so bad in the Soviet Union that basic infrastructure had begun to deteriorate badly, standard of living plummeted and the situation threatened to implode. The consequences would have been chaotic, possibly degenerating into rebellion and civil war. Gorbachev forestalled it all by going for a fundamental change in structure, including the most difficult part, reviewing and amending their ideology. Massive reforms were carried out. A season of transparency, openness and accountability held sway. Glasnost and Perestroika were the order of the day. The mighty Soviet Union was split into independent states called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Autocratic concentration of power was gone for good. The Bolshevik revolution had ground to a halt for all time.
My dear people, we need a leader who will have zero tolerance for corruption, I agree. However, more importantly, we need a leader who will inspire and enfire our people to believe in ourselves and aspire to greater heights. But even more importantly than that, we need a leader who will use the enormous power concentrated in the executive arm of government to change the political landscape in our country forever; to evolve a system of governance and a series of structural reforms which will grow the polity into a more amenable and a more acceptable one. We need a NATIONAL CONFERENCE on corruption and governance. We need to go back to the drawing board today to determine how to structure our polity in such a way, how to adjust our political system in such a manner that we will cut out the excesses that encourage such massive and unbridled corruption as we have witnessed since independence. Anything short of that, then we are not going anywhere. Ever.
We have tried the parliamentary system of government, military dictatorship and the presidential system of government. They have all failed. If we had a benevolent strong man, I would have been the first to jump at autocracy because I have seen how it has turned some countries around for the better. Unfortunately, benevolence is one quality our leaders completely lack. Parliamentary and presidential systems, what I call ‘straight-line democracy’ have failed because such systems hardly work in third world countries. What we need to do now, urgently, is to have a National conference to determine how to tackle our national cankerworm, corruption.
This brings me back to our current crop of presidential candidates and aspirants. Alas all our collective aspirations and all our hopes for the future and whether and to what extent our political system can be changed depend on the quality of people who come out to aspire to political leadership in our country, particularly the top office. The electorate can only choose from the menu of choices given to them. If bad people come out, a bad leader will be elected. However, in as much as I tend not to believe in absolutes, Nigerians have rarely had a good menu to select from. That is why we overwhelmingly voted for M.K.O Abiola, not because he was necessarily ideal, but because he availed us the opportunity to break away from the norm (military rule) and of course he was by far the better candidate.
Now we have three major candidates vying for the top job: Goodluck Jonathan, Atiku Abubakar and Mohammadu Buhari. No matter what, we cannot elect a leader from outside of the candidates availed to us by INEC and the political parties to choose from, therefore, we have to make this choice from what we have available before articulating our singular agendum which would be the establishment or building of a credible political system. There are many more candidates, but the ones I have mentioned, I believe, have credible pockets of followership in the country. Which of these, or any other for that matter, would be best for our country? How do we adjust our system in order to cut out the inordinate excesses bedeviling this ailing system? The tide turned permanently after the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) under the fragile leadership of Alhaji Shehu Shegari led Nigeria into a tailspin of economic profligacy and wanton debauchery with its attendant economic consequence. Catastrophe. We have never recovered since then.
The erstwhile former American Ambassador, Walter Carrington made a remark as quoted in Joe Igbokwe’s book “Heroes of Democracy”, he said; “If Kudirat Abiola and her husband Moshood Abiola, and all the other martyrs to General Abacha’s tyranny are not to have died in vain, then Nigerians must rededicate themselves to the cause of human rights, democracy, true federalism and of government accountable to the people.”
We have to stop paying lip service to true federalism and accountability. This is why we have to sit down and insist upon these. As far as I and a great many Nigerians are concerned, it is more important than running another ‘successful’ general election with about one hundred billion naira. There are some fundamental tenets of civility and governance that need to be restored to our country before we can move forward under any guise.
Nnamdi Nwokedi is the Director of Michelin Nigeria PLC.
