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Maintenance Culture And Continuity Among Cashnivores

June 29, 2010
Image removed.My friend and fellow columnist at NEXT, Tolu Ogunlesi, once defined Nigeria as a way of doing things incompetently or leaving things undone. This witty and apt definition passed unnoticed because Tolu penned that essay in the early days of NEXT – before that newspaper gained the sort of national readership it currently enjoys. I love the “leaving things undone” part of Tolu’s definition. It explains why the phrase, “lack of maintenance culture and continuity”, has become a national leitmotif.
The reality it captures defines us and is central to our collective experience of nation-ness. To be a Nigerian is to be conditioned to expect truncated initiatives and stymied dreams because a new oga is now “on seat” and must erase every trace of the existence of a predecessor – never mind the billions that the said predecessor may have sunk into projects that must now be jettisoned to create room for new contracts. This accounts for the dizzying succession of “pet projects” by the overbearing First Ladies disturbing our lives. Every new madam must deck her gele a tad higher than her predecessor’s and erase every reference to the previous gele. In national discourse, our congenital lack of a culture of maintenance and continuity is often brandished as an all-encompassing explanation of fifty years of comatose infrastructure and the curse of Sisyphean beginnings in every aspect of our lives.

Although the cashnivorous characters who rule Nigeria at all three tiers of governance are largely responsible for the entrenchment of this national malaise, their world is paradoxically governed by a very rigorous culture of maintenance and continuity. Witness some of the rationalizations of Dimeji Bankole’s ill-reflected personal choices by his spokespersons and handlers. The young man came to office bearing the hopes of an entire generation of Nigerians. With him, we dared to dream of the possibility of a renaissance of ethos. We expected a noticeable departure from the beaten paths that have gotten us to where we are.

We got a tragic generational flop instead. Ogbeni Dimeji Bankole has been a huge disappointment. He simply settled into the regular PDP muck and morass around him. Such has been his own culture of corruption – he’s been swimming from scandal to scam and scam to scandal – that one now looks nostalgically past the so-called Oxford degree and the annoying Britico accent into what has decidely become the far less corrupt era of the hair dresser. When I began to observe the sad perpetuation of the usual culture of corruption by the Speaker, I wrote a series of articles in NEXT and here at Sahara Reporters. The nature of the responses I got from the Speaker’s spokespersons is what first sensitized me to the existence of a warped form of maintenance culture and continuity among the cashnivores of Abuja.

My submissions in those essays hinged on the need for Mr. Bankole to begin an ethical revolution in small personal doses. He could, for instance, demystify power by shunning the obscene culture of convoys. He could reduce the ostentatious appurtenances of office and gradually begin to expose Nigerians to the ordinariness of power deployed in the servive of the people. He could subsequently build on such initial symbolic gestures by cutting back – no matter how minimal - on his own allowances. Bla, bla bla, I went on in those essays.

Mr. Bankole of course went in the opposite direction and soon landed himself in the convoy scandal that revolved around the purchase of extravagant bullet-proof SUVs. When figures began to run riot in the media, Mr. Bankole’s office promptly reassured the nation that only seven SUVs - or thereabouts – were bought and not all of them were bullet-proof. His spokespersons also explained that the number of vehicles in the Speaker’s convoy is not determined by the Speaker. They mentioned some yeye appropriation office I don’t even care to remember now.

In essence, the Speaker’s hands were tied! He was merely practicing maintenance culture and continuity by insisting on an ostentatious convoy. Poor Bankole! I assume he’ll be arrested and prosecuted by this convoy-appropriation office should he commit the unspeakable crime of not disturbing our people in Abuja with a convoy! The same logic of maintenance culture and continuity was also applied to the rationalization of those jaguda and jibiti allowances that make President Obama look like a poorly-paid office clerk in comparison to Nigerian lawmakers. The sing-song here is that the allowances are the handiwork of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission. Fixed policy! Mr. Bankole would incur the wrath of this powerful RMFAC should he, God forbid, kick against maintenance culture and continuity by voluntarily relinquishing a certain percentage of those immoral allowances as a symbolic gesture of leadership.

Enter Goodluck Jonathan and his ten billion-naira 50th independence anniversary lootapalooza. The Presidency is yet to issue an official statement on this outrage since the scandal broke out but there is already sufficient unofficial Abuja chatter to convince me that Nigerians will sooner or later be treated to the maintenance culture and continuity logic by the cashnivorous characters who came up with the mad budget in the first place. I have heard the argument that poor President Jonathan and his people had no hand in the thing at all at all. The budget had already been prepared by the Yar’Adua people and all President Jonathan did was to present it to the National Assembly as a supplementary appropriation bill in the spirit of maintenance culture and continuity in governance and policy! One day go be one day...

Footnote
Cashnivore (kashni-vôr)
n.
1. A cash-eating or cash-guzzling variety of Homo Sapiens.
2. Natural habitat is in Abuja, state capitals, and all local government headquarters in Nigeria, West Africa.

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