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Rebranding Prof. Dora Akunyili

December 4, 2009

Image removed.When the verdict of Transparency International about the worsening corruption situation in Nigeria was announced, I felt pity for Prof. Dora Akunyili for three reasons. First, it may well be that the Professor of Pharmacology has good intentions that her efforts would help reduce the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), but now she knows her efforts are not good enough.


Secondly, being a Professor of Pharmacology, she might have been deceived that the impressive success she achieved at the National Food Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC), which is a mere regulatory body, would translate to her success in the most troublous Ministry of Information. She was mistaken. Information dissemination and management requires a different kind of expertise because peoples’ perception of an event or government policy cannot be manipulated in a true experimental setting. Pharmacology thrives on experimental research and so for Dora, information management is a not familiar turf.

My greatest sympathy for the Minister is that when she appeared on a national television to field questions, she said she was oblivious of the criteria used by Transparency International to rank the 180 countries out of which Nigeria ranked 130th. If I were at a speaking distance, I should have stopped her from confessing her ignorance. It was at this point I saw beads of sweat hanging around her chin — an indication that she was tensed — up and a further affirmation that she needed rebranding even before the failed nation – Nigeria. The aphorism “Good people and a great nation” is an empty mantra because Dora herself knows that Nigeria is not great. It is even a starker reality that because of the decrepit educational system about 39 million Nigerian graduates are unemployable while more than 75 per cent of the 140 million population lives below the globally acceptable poverty threshold. If poverty is harassing the stomachs of a great many of people, perhaps the rebranding should start by abolishing hunger. But this itself is difficult to achieve because Nigeria is the greatest importer of rice in Africa and the second greatest importer of rice in the world.

If people are hungry Dora’s message of rebranding may fall on deaf ears; in fact the message might even incur the odium of the hungry masses. So if the present strategy is not working, Dora needs to consult professional image makers-who can make a humpty-dumpty out of a scraggy skeleton. Better still, Dora Akunyili can adopt the brown envelop paradigm of rebranding — put some money in “brown envelops," organize a “bazaar” then distribute it to all Nigerians, then they would chorus “Nigeria, good people, and a great nation”. Would that poverty alleviation paradigm abolish hunger in the land? Certainly not, because in the cause of distributing the envelopes, so much would be stolen by the same class of kleptocrats. In fact, kleptomania has been so entrenched that it is near impossible for any public officer to live without one form of peculation or another. Kleptomania has become a brand name for Nigeria.

Analysis of the slogan is necessary to understand the rebranding strategy adopted by the Ministry of Propaganda. It is true that Nigerians are good people in all its ramifications but when there is no good leadership the “goodness” of the people automatically diminishes. A people are as good as the leadership they get. The consequences of lack of good leadership are legion. Today, the most vibrant segment of the Nigerian populace — the youths are scattered all over the world like the Israelites in Diaspora. Some are summarily abbreviated owing to xenophobic attacks in South Africa; many of them are in underground gulags in Libya; in Malaysia, Singapore and China, Nigerians are either tortured or hanged for sundry offences ranging from drug trafficking, 419, forgery to armed robbery. Nigerians who commit drug offences in Saudi Arabia are promptly hanged, but sadly that is where Nigeria’s President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua performs his lesser hajj.

Back home in Nigeria, the people have no reason to be good because even well-educated and able-bodied persons are unemployed. Because of the inclement investment climate, most of the hitherto vibrant companies are winding-up; many are relocating because of the poor infrastructural base of the nation. Amidst this poverty, our baptized “re-branders” are assuring Nigerians that Foreign Direct Investment is being attracted to the country. When we combine the trinity of high Corruption Perception Index (CPI), poor infrastructure and low level of industrialization, it is only natural that the misery index as evidenced in mass unemployment, investment insecurity, lack of accountability and good governance are just the necessary corollary.

These are the facts driven home by the United States Secretary of States Mrs. Hillary Clinton when she visited Nigeria and passed a sordid verdict of governance failure as epitomized in official corruption; the deliberate narrowing of the political space and the legitimacy crisis facing the polity. At that time the Senate President Rt. Hon. David Mark passed a counter verdict. "David Mark furiously said thus: How can somebody be sitting in the United States and be telling us how to solve serious problems in this country”. Hilary Clinton and all Civil Society Organizations were wrong; only Senator David Mark was right. How can the Senate President be wrong in a nation commonly referred to as a truculent African tragedy?

As a nation, Dora Akunyili herself is persuaded right down to her bone marrows that Nigeria is only a potential giant. No doubt, the nation is endowed with immense natural resources but these resources are controlled by a few buccaneering comprador class and economic fifth columnists. For example if Nigeria were a great nation, why has the nation spent 50 years visioning without any concrete result? Why are we visioning in the dark without power supply? Why is poverty so endemic and pervasive that the youths who should constitute the “locomotive” of development are emigrating to greener pastures abroad? The nation’s educational system is so decrepit that our intelligentsia have all been brained — drained to develop other lands. Now, there are no brains in Nigeria to drain. Dora Akunyili would largely concede that with these ugly statistics, Nigeria’s rebranding exercise is fraught with confusion.

We have exalted materialism at the expense of other higher values including intellectualism. A few persons who engage in intellectual endeavours are treated with contempt. After all, it is when knowledge is converted into tangible wealth that it becomes intellectual property. In extreme cases we explain their passion for knowledge, research and scholarship as a mild psychological disorder. At the level of the community, intellectuals are looked upon with some pity as people who pursue theoretical irrelevances that are far away from the real world. That is why in Nigeria intellectuals are merely tolerated and never respected. We seem to have forgotten that the gap between Nigeria and other developed countries is our inability to engage in science, research and knowledge.

Nigeria cannot rebrand in vacuo because in Nigeria there is no marketable sector of the economy. This is why the Minister of Propaganda needs to be rebranded to understand that no nation is competing with Nigeria because our corporate culture and values are inverse and not permeable to norms of civility. Unfortunately, Dora is yet to appreciate the fact that Nigeria is not “rebrandable," rather Nigeria needs a surgical operation, a revolution of sort, that would overthrow the decadent order. When a cloth is too dirty such that the detergents available cannot wash it clean, the best alternative is to replace it. Nigeria’s image has been significantly dented and damaged that a total replacement is the only option.

In the foreign policy scene, there is consensus that Nigeria’s foreign policy is unprogressive and stagnant because the leadership has not been able to define what constitutes Nigeria’s national interest. Critics posit that Nigeria’s domestic ecology does not support her foreign policy posturing as ‘giant of Africa."” Nigeria has been benevolent to other nations while Nigerians are humiliated even among the contiguous States, subjected to xenophobic attacks abroad amidst apathy on the part of the Nigerian government. Nigeria exhibits false generosity abroad in order to create a wrong impression that the political economy is healthy. In Africa, Nigerians suffers rejection and even maltreatment wherever they go. The thinking is that because of the leaders’ inability to define her national interest, the nation has lost its competitive edge in African diplomacy.

 Presently, Nigeria does not have a “rebranding” mechanism; past administrations had. The Ethical Orientation of the Shagari era; the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) of the Buhari – Idiagbon era; the War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC) and the Mass Mobilization of Economic Recovery, Self-reliance and Social Justice – MAMSER of the Babangida era. The existence of these structures showed some seriousness. But none exists now in Dora Akunyili’s rebranding scheme.

The Nigerian political landscape is tainted with near absence of ethical values and common etiquettes and this affects the behaviour of public officers. Because of the rascality of the power holders, and the aura of invincibility they exude, privileged Nigerians are constantly engrossed in the struggle for political power and its attendant paraphernalia of high office. We have a group of self-chosen watchmen who apply tricks and treachery to shoot their way to what in other lands are humble positions. Nigeria cannot move to the next level with a cabal of self-serving leaders. How can we successfully rebrand when these vampires are still walking tall in our midst? The only window to dispense with these people is a complete change of the existing order.

Since the “rebranding” Propaganda has neither direction nor destination, I would move very strongly that rebranding should be decentralized, that is, it should be the responsibility of the States and Local Government Councils. Perhaps a better way to get around it is to rebrand Prof. Dora Akunyili to understand that, since we are implementing neo-liberal economic policies, it would be proper to deregulate rebranding like the down-stream sector of the petroleum industry so that there would be a healthy competition among States, with a price tag. If we adopt this strategy, the results would outweigh the sacrifices. But whichever way we look at it, the arrow head of rebranding must first be rebranded to understand the truism that Nigeria may not 'rebrandable' until there is a complete generational change coupled with the introduction of a new ideological orientation and the inculcation of the right values. There is now consensus among  Nigerians at home and in Diaspora that Nigeria is becoming a gargantuan liability to the African continent and the entire human race.

 
Idumange John (MNIM, CBA)

Is a University Lecturer & Activist 

 

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