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Nigeria 101 for the Canadian Policy Maker By Pius Adesanmi

March 25, 2011

(Lecture delivered to the Africa Study Group, Ottawa, March 23, 2011)

First a confession: Dr Paul Hitschfeld did not serve me well by sending a very casual email asking if I would accept to address the Africa Study Group on the way forward for Nigeria, especially after the important election coming up in about three weeks. Africa Study Group? Some graduate students, I thought, and filed his email casually in my “to read again sometime down the road” list. Dr. Hitschfeld was persistent, sending reminders without really letting me in on the membership of your group.

(Lecture delivered to the Africa Study Group, Ottawa, March 23, 2011)

First a confession: Dr Paul Hitschfeld did not serve me well by sending a very casual email asking if I would accept to address the Africa Study Group on the way forward for Nigeria, especially after the important election coming up in about three weeks. Africa Study Group? Some graduate students, I thought, and filed his email casually in my “to read again sometime down the road” list. Dr. Hitschfeld was persistent, sending reminders without really letting me in on the membership of your group.

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He probably didn’t imagine that there could be anybody into the business of Africa here in Canada who hasn’t heard about the Africa Study Group. Alas, I hadn’t! Still believing it to be any of the student groups springing up in Carleton University due to the Africa-friendly predisposition of Deans John Osborne of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and John ApSimon of the Faculty of Public Affairs who are jointly funding the only full-fledged Institute of African Studies in a Canadian University, I finally sent an email agreeing to give this talk.

It was only after I had made a commitment that Dr Hitschfeld phoned me to describe the membership of your group and I almost had a heart attack. I almost thought of telling him that I had only just come down with a bad bout of the flu that would regretfully not allow me to make this presentation! For how was I to know that I had agreed to address a prestigious Africa advocacy group with membership comprising retired Canadian Ambassadors and High Commissioners who had served in Africa and, also, actors in the public service and business sectors? How was I to know that your powerful group had been founded by the great Robert Fowler, Canada’s former Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General to Niger Republic? How was I to know that past speakers in this  series include Joe Clark, a former Prime Minister of Canada, and Elinor Sisulu, a NOMA Award winner? My colleague, Professor Blair Rutherford, Director of Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies, did not help matters when he sent an email to congratulate me for the privilege of being invited to address your very exclusive group. Blair, faithful Blair, wouldn’t have any of my incipient stage fright. He assured me I could do it, telling me to go have fun!

Blair’s reassurance led me to the second part of my agony. An advocacy group of Canadian heavyweights – you are men and women of timbre and calibre in Nigerian English - whose words, I am told, gain entrance into the ears of the Canadian government, potentially influencing the Africa policy of a Western power, has asked me to give them something about Nigeria to work with. You have asked me to justify why Nigeria should continue to lay claim to any space in your Africa advocacy work when there are better suitors such as Ghana, Benin Republic, and Botswana who reward your commitment with visible and credible performance in the areas of democracy, infrastructural development, and responsible statehood. After all, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, former US Ambassador to Nigeria and a key figure in US-Africa policy circuits, had fired a warning shot that Nigeria could no longer continue to take her relevance to Africa and the international community for granted. Says Ambassador Lyman:

“I have a feeling that we, both Nigerians and Americans, may be doing Nigeria and Nigerians no favor by stressing Nigeria’s strategic importance. I know all the arguments: it is a major oil producer, it is the most populous country in Africa, it has made major contributions to Africa in peacekeeping, and of course, negatively, if Nigeria were to fall apart the ripple effects would be tremendous. But I wonder if all this emphasis on Nigeria’s importance creates a tendency to inflate Nigeria’s opinion of its own invulnerability. Among much of the elite today, I have the feeling that there is a belief that Nigeria is too big to fail, too important to be ignored, and that Nigerians can go on ignoring some of the most fundamental challenges they have – many of which we have talked about: disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the Niger Delta, the failure to consolidate democracy – and somehow will remain important to everybody because of all those reasons that are strategically important. I am not sure that that is helpful.”

Precisely because I share Ambassador Lyman’s sentiments and the belief that Nigeria should either shape up or ship out of continental and international relevance, I agonised over what indices or readable benchmarks of progress to present to you on the shaping up side without appearing to be reading a script from the Federal Government of Nigeria, an irredeemably corrupt and zero-performing government to which I am vehemently opposed in my career as a public intellectual and national columnist. After all, if you wanted an official version of the Nigerian narrative, you could easily have invited my friend, Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Canada, to make this presentation.

As Dr. Hitschfeld had hinted that your membership has considerable knowledge of and expertise on Africa and that you are all plugged into current affairs in the continent, I also secretly hoped that none of you woke up this morning to read Nigerian newspapers online, preparatory to attending this lecture. For there I was, rounding up my revision of a presentation in which I am supposed to read the tea leaves for positive indices to justify your continued confidence in Nigeria’s ability to get her acts together, only to scan the headlines and stumble on the habitual screaming spectre of bloody political violence: “War in Akwa Ibom”, screams Daily Sun. Some other newspapers called it a bloodbath and the body count was still coming in chaotically from various sources as I rounded up my revision and headed out for this presentation. Needless to say, today’s headlines are the rule, not the exception. Hardly a day passes now without news of pre-election violence and the wanton murder of hundreds of Nigerians in the build-up to national elections in three weeks.
We’ve been down this road before. Every election, since Nigeria’s chequered return to democracy in 1999 after almost twenty years of uninterrupted military rule, has been marked by violence and denominated in heaps of corpses, mostly authored and supervised by the country’s national nightmare: the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of President Goodluck Jonathan. This political party, described most appropriately by Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate for Literature, as “a nest of killers”, does not just revel in actual body counts but has proceeded, since 1999, to etch the language and the entire imaginary of democracy in violence. Hence, its leaders and spokespersons have never come to the table of national construction with ideas and a belief in the value of intellection and the power of vision. Rather, they speak of “capturing political power” or “conquering seats in the National Assembly”. To capture. To conquer. The language of war. This is the underlying siege mentality that would later account for the party’s political philosophy of democracy and elections as “a do or die affair.” The only problem is that the PDP always does the doing, and Nigerians in their thousands do the dying.

It is therefore paradoxical that the first index of change and progress lies in a noticeable shift in the nomenclature of political violence in Nigeria. In 1999, 2003, and 2007, all egregious instances of rigging and killing by the PDP, the violence that the party orchestrated in those elections were largely unreplied acts of intimidation and domestic terrorism. Not this time. The sort of violence we are witnessing now devolves from a generalised culture of resistance to the ruling party’s culture of domestic terrorism. Nigerians are no longer allowing themselves to be run over or intimidated by the PDP. The general national sentiment now seems to be: no, not this time. Hence, across the country, the ruling party is finding out the hard way that an awakened citizenry is ready to respond to what used to be a cakewalk of violence and terrorism. That is the imperative of riposte that has given us Akwa Ibom this week.

To account for this new and auspicious investment of faith and hope in the democratic process by an awakened citizenry, we must look beyond easy explanations such as desperation and the fact that Nigerians have been so terribly worsted by the adversarial circumstances foisted on the country since 1999 by a fiendish ruling party that they have nothing else to lose by not fighting back. Truth is that the political process has now thrown up a far more diverse range of credible actors and competitors who not only command considerable intellectual and political capital at home and abroad but have also added quality and content to the democratic process such as we have never seen before.

The enrichment of the political field is a consequence of the collapse of elite consensus in Nigeria. Elite consensus has functioned until now in such a way as to allow the most rapacious, most charlatanish, and anti-intellectual fragment of the elite to establish a stranglehold on the polity while the more cerebral fragment of the elite simply demissioned from politics and went about its business. Pushed to the wall, this cerebral fragment of the Nigerian elite has suddenly discovered the wisdom in Edmund Burke’s aphorism that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Hence for the first time in our short democratic history, we are going into a presidential election in which the space of democratic transactions is being defined by the cerebral presence of candidates like ANPP’s remarkably articulate Ibrahim Shekarau (I now take him extremely seriously), ACN’s Nuhu Ribadu, CPC’s Mohammadu Buhari, and of course, candidates of lesser known political parties such as Pat Utomi and Dele Momodu. The Vice Presidential candidates of these gentlemen – John Oyegun, Pastor Tunde Bakare, and Fola Adeola – are equally indicative of this shift towards a democracy of ideas as opposed to the arid, gunboat democratic ethos and primordial brigandage of the ruling party. Admittedly, Buhari, Utomi, and Oyegun have been around for a while but they are now operating in a vastly cerebrally superior presidential atmospherics as opposed to the situation in the last three elections.

This rejuvenated political space, crowded by credible people with local and international capital, has shattered the myth of the invincibility of incumbency in Nigerian presidential politics. I never knew that I would live to see the day when it wasn’t fanciful, far-fetched, and downright stupid to imagine the possibility that an incumbent Nigerian president was defeatable. In the world of the PDP, such stupidity as an incumbent losing an election only happens in Ghana. A combination of corruption, electoral violence, and wanton rigging by the ruling party since 1999 had created a national sense of submission to the inevitable “victory” of any charlatan the PDP puts forward as its candidate. The increased awareness of the vulnerability of the ruling party due to the presence of so many credible candidates plays a considerable role in awakening our citizenry and giving it renewed hope that it is possible to take Nigeria back from our traducers and chart a new national course with the forthcoming election. For the first time since 1999, the PDP is not just vulnerable and defeatable, it is manifestly seen to be so.

The reinvention of Nigeria’s political space preparatory to the forthcoming election is also imminent in the high rate of non-return of so many of the risible characters who have turned the National Assembly into the most dangerous traducer of Nigeria’s democratic aspirations since 1999. Time and space will not permit me to go into the many sins of the National Assembly, better known as an institution where the worst among us gather to share cash and put obstacles on the path of genuine democratic culture and governance. Most of you here are sufficiently plugged into Africa and already know the tragic story of Nigeria’s National Assembly anyway.

Today, the race to the Senate and the Federal House of Representatives mimics the presidential race in terms of the richness of options available to Nigerians. Many of the assembly members who have come to be nationally identified with retrogression simply did not make it through party primaries in their respective local constituencies. On a personal note, I am excited by the National Assembly candidacies of Sola Adeyeye, Wale Okediran, Uche Onyeagucha, and Temi Harriman. And there is already Abike Dabiri who represents a popular Lagos constituency in the House. You may find it curious that I am using just five names as a pathway into the kind of National Assembly we would love to see in Nigeria. Well, one has to start somewhere. And if the good Lord would not destroy the city for the sake of ten righteous people, he may yet look kindly on the den of thieves and moneychangers that is our National Assembly for the sake of these five people!

The possibility of change in the orientation and predilections of the National Assembly makes the election into parliament just as important as the presidential election in my opinion. Domestic and international stakeholders place way too much premium on the presidential election at the expense of National Assembly elections and that is an unfortunate attitude.

 Many of the fault lines that have prevented Nigeria from meeting the challenges of responsible statehood and nationhood since 1999 are issues that can be resolved only by a parliament that is alive to its responsibilities: the Niger Delta, resource control, restructuring, constitutional reform, Federalism, sharia, and so many other vistas of national discontent.

Because the National Assembly has been home to half-illiterate charlatans since 1999, and even later became the retirement home of failed governors from the ruling party, the general attitude has been to play the ostrich with these fault lines on the one hand and to criminalize the mere mention of same on the other hand. Intellectual laziness and the zeal to maintain the status quo would make them recoil and treat these issues as “no-go areas” even as the consequences of non-engagement of the issues continue to smoulder in every nook and cranny of the country. What we have now in the emerging political map is a real possibility that a new and far more cerebral National Assembly could emerge after the elections that would be willing to tackle head-on the fundamental issues bordering on at least debating and discoursing the terms and bases of project nationhood.

The states have not been left out of this spectre of change of personnel in Nigeria’s democratic space. You are already aware of the enormous gains recorded in states like Lagos, Edo, Ekiti, Osun, and Ondo. Five performing and credible states out of thirty six may seem like a discouraging result after twelve years of continuous democratic rule. But the demonstrable results that have been coming out of those states in the areas of human and infrastructural development are having an infectious effect on other states in the polity.

I have gone to this length to show the futility of President Obama’s Accra gospel especially with regard to Nigeria. President Obama is on record as saying that Africa needs strong institutions, not strong men. This philosophy seems to be at the centre of the Africa policy of so many Western countries. It certainly informs the sort of Africa-speak that I encounter here in Ottawa as I move in the circuits of Africa policy makers in the Canadian government. You hear of the need to enhance capacity building in Africa; you hear of trips to Africa to assess institutional performance and to “identify areas where we can help”.  In the case of Nigeria, I have even heard talk here in Ottawa about the need to help strengthen the judiciary especially in the area of post-electoral justice dispensation.

But if your name is Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), or International Development Research Centre (IDRC), what sort of institutional or parliamentary capacity building can you encourage, fund, and support in a programmed-to-underperform and directionless National Assembly led by prurient characters like David Mark and Dimeji Bankole? What sort of capacity can you build in states governed by charlatans like Abubakar Idris (Kogi), Gbenga Daniel (Ogun), Bayo Alao Akala (Oyo) or Ikedi Ohakim (Imo)? What sort of institutional enhancement can you fund in a judiciary in the hands of Mohammed Adoke and Aloysius Katsina-Alu? Funding institutional development in a polity run by this sort of characters is flushing money down the toilet. You would simply be fattening the Ghana-must-go bags of unscrupulous officials. That is what I keep telling Canadian government officials and development agencies.

Truth is: Nigeria’s postcolonial story is a graveyard of strong institutions ruined by less than stellar characters appointed to run them by mediocre rulers. The little specks of successes ever recorded – the EFCC under Nuhu Ribadu, NAFDAC under Dora Akunyili, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s celebrated economic team, the Central Bank under Lamido Sanusi, INEC under Attahiru Jega – have come only when the polity has surprisingly allowed cerebral people to run those institutions. INEC was a very strong institution under Professor Maurice Iwu, a thoroughly scurrilous character who transformed it into a parastatal of the PDP and conducted two of the most horrible elections in the history of Africa. The same INEC has at least so far – despite considerable weaknesses – acquitted itself well under the leadership of Professor Attahiru Jega.

This explains why the international community should shift from the festishization of institutions and capacity in Africa to an equal consideration of how to enhance the civil society from which credible actors emerge to run those institutions. In the case of Nigeria, organizations such as yours, as well as Canadian international development and funding agencies, must evolve a philosophy of targeted engagement to replace the current regime of inter-governmental partnerships and bilateralism which encourage blanket capacity building and institutional interventions irrespective of who is running the show in Abuja.

By targeted engagement I mean you must evolve scrupulous and meticulous of identifying credible and performing actors in public office in Nigeria and zoom in on the institutions such people run for encouragement.  I recently encountered two very brilliant EFCC agents here in Ottawa. They were in Ottawa for a capacity training course that Nuhu Ribadu had negotiated with Canada when he was Director of the EFCC. As much as I liked those two EFCC officers, I couldn’t help wishing that they weren’t returning to an EFCC run by Farida Waziri – where all the expertise they acquired here in Ottawa, paid for by the Canadian tax payer, would not be optimally used because she is a misguided errand lady of the ruling party. If, on the other hand, I hear that a Canadian funding agency has identified the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) as agency they want to help with capacity building and staff training, I would ask them to please go for it. I would recommend the NERC very vigorously. And this wouldn’t be because Dr. Sam Amadi, the Director of the NERC, is my good friend in whom I am thoroughly pleased. It would be because Sam Amadi is one of the very best that Nigeria has to offer. Apart from his unimpeachable academic achievements, he will not loot and he will capitalise on whatever help Canada renders to his commission to do more work for the Nigerian people.

Of course I do realise that when we ask you not to do business with treasury looters and the irresponsible rulers hosting Nigerians hostage in their own country, it is our responsibility as Nigerians to take our destiny into our own hands and vote in credible people who will work for us. It is our responsibility to give you credible partners in the context of Nigeria-Canada relations. The current political landscape in Nigeria shows that the Nigerian people are playing their part in a long-drawn struggle to rid our land of those who have made such a thorough mess of our lives. Nigeria is quite close to the end of a very dark tunnel. Don’t write us off just yet. We shall surprise you.

Thank you.




 

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