At 52, Nigerian patriots cannot but speak truth to Nigerian power? Why is Nigeria a failure and a failing state? Why has Nigeria remained a national and global embarrassment as its huge national endowments (human and natural) cannot be reconciled with the status of its socio-economic and political achievements?
At 52, Nigerian patriots cannot but speak truth to Nigerian power? Why is Nigeria a failure and a failing state? Why has Nigeria remained a national and global embarrassment as its huge national endowments (human and natural) cannot be reconciled with the status of its socio-economic and political achievements?
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Why is it that the sixth or eight largest exporter of crude petroleum, with huge petro-dollars, remains part of the 10 poorest nations, with some of the worst statistics in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Human Living Index (HLI)? Why is the existing reality of the Nigerian State still revealing that the more petroleum dollars it earns, the worse the economic misery, deprivation and poverty of the people remain?
Why is it that most Nigerian Public Officers and Officials (both military and civilian) have not exhibited honour and integrity in public offices, to the extent that their greatest numbers are usually devotees at the altar of inordinate power, rapacious greed and selfish interest? The list of politically exposed persons – Governors and Ministers and members of National Assembly, whose criminal prosecution have been stalled through undue influence on the Judiciary, remains a national disgrace.
Why is the Nigerian state ever a lie to itself in that while it proclaims to be running a Federalism, it is in truth and practice crippled as a unitary and centralized state? And why is it that Nigeria exports what it does not have and imports what it has (e.g. free and fair election, and petroleum respectively)?
Why is government office so lucrative to the extent that the political jobbers and political contractors are willing to do anything and everything (including murder and assassination) and contrives falsehood so as to be awarded electoral victory? Their awarded elections have always empowered them to have unhindered access to state and national fund and resources, which they loot, misapply, misuse, and corruptly appropriate for their personal and group purposes.
Why is Nigerian politics the most lucrative globally and why do our politicians earn even much more than political office holders in the USA and in most states in the European Union earn? Our ruling elite have expanded the base of government with too many departments and posts, yet Nigerians experience very little productive governance? By the current statistics, Nigeria now spends about 80% of its total earning to run the political bureaucracy. This over-bloated public service as well as high-level corruption leads to underdevelopment. The USA, with the biggest economy in the world, is being run with less than 25 secretaries (ministers). In the First Republic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo ran the Western Region (now broken into eight states) with 14 Ministers and 14 Parliamentary Secretaries.
Again, why is it that Nigerian rulers carry on business as usual and yet they expect different results? Also, why is the Nigerian state so contemptuous of its citizens, with our leaders usually rejecting the popular wish and demand of the greatest majority for their selfish agenda? When will the popular wish of the electorates become the guiding signals of public policies? For example, the Nigerian state continues to shun the clamour of the greatest majority of our people in the last quarter of a century for the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference to discuss and resolve the National Question and thereby repackage the lopsided national structure, which is the main reason for our retardation, stunted growth and development.
Why is the Nigerian state refusing to change course when it has long found out that Lord Lugard’s 1914 forceful coupling together of many ethnic nationalities christened Nigeria by his mistress is not sustainable and has deepened mutual suspicion, mutual hatred and mutual animosity, thereby making the forceful union a failed project?
Why are our political office holders pretentiously behaving as if they can continue to force their unity agenda when the reality is that there are deep cultural, traditional, religious and customary differences between and among the many ethnic nationalities in Nigeria, differences that have led to our very deplorable socio-economic and political conditions?
Why is it that our leaders’ hypocrisy about our “forced unity” daily manifests in variety of different choices, preferences, and perspectives? For example, is it not a fact that while some ethnic nationalities are willing to spend their fortunes on their children to acquire quality Western education, some others have cynical regard for it? In fact, there are at least a dozen core northern states that have imposed Sharia law, thereby subjecting people of other faiths to be forcefully governed by Islamic legal system. To further highlight our incredible national contradictions, the BOKO HARAM phenomenon has descended upon us. The violent group has declared that it will only lay down arms whenever the Nigerian state decides to adopt Islam nationally. BOKO HARAM followers don’t want to be governed by our Western-style constitution, Western-style government, Western-style civilization and Western-style education. Period.
On another level, why are members of the Nigerian elite swimming in vain glory, annually spending over N500 billion on their wards’ education overseas and in neighboring Ghana? Why is it that the ruling political elite conspired to under-fund education so that the quality and quantity of education in our country in recent times has been on the slide? It is to our national shame that since the United Nations Education and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) prescribed to member nations that they should spend 26% of their national budgets on education in the 70s, successive Nigerian Governments have never spent up to 10% on the sector. In fact, it got so ridiculously low that education at a point received three percent of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s budget. The result is the current deception being called education as offered by Nigerian government. Many Nigerian graduates are unemployable and a significant number cannot even write a presentable Letter of Application. Our government is devoting a measly amount of resources to education, perhaps their children are not beneficiaries of public education.
Equally true is that in the last five years, the results from WAEC and NECO have revealed that less than 30% of school leavers (many of them eyeing admission into tertiary institutions) score a pass in the mandatory English and Mathematics. Our tertiary institutions too have not delivered on their core values. I don’t know of any of them that is using its theoretical and applied research to radically change old crude methods of doing anything e.g. agriculture. An individual private engineering firm in Lagos has radically packaged a technology that makes it possible to pound yam within 45 seconds. The old method of pounding yam that takes a great amount of sweat and energy has been revolutionized.
Furthermore, can our ruling elite explain why Nigeria sits pertly in the Third World class, whilst nations like Malaysia, Singapore and India (our old 1960s classmates in the development agenda) have grown so well that they are today rubbing shoulders with Western nations? One interesting example to illustrate one’s agony is this. The Nigerian Defence Industry (DICON) was set up the same year with the India Defence Industry. The Indian institution has been producing about two-thirds of its army’s domestic weapons requirement, and even selling to interested foreign buyers. Meanwhile, its Nigerian counterpart (until recently when it had Gen. T.Y. Danjuma and Brigadier-Gen. Buba Marwa supervising its operations) succeeded in only producing salt and furniture, with no remarkable production of weapons. How can we explain the disparity DICON and its Indian equivalent?
At 52, Nigeria and her political office holders must provide honest responses to the numerous WHYs above if we are ready to turn the page in order to reclaim our country. As far as some of us are concerned, the most important reason for our national failure has to do with its structure. The current lopsided national structure has created a dubious ruling elite, a class that has usurped the Nigerian commonwealth, while reducing other citizens to beggars and spectators. The fact of our national history reveals that Nigerian security leadership has been monopolized by a particular section of the country to the disadvantage of others. This reality, perhaps, can be the explanation for the fact that there remain highly lucrative categories of public offices that are preserved for some sections of the country.
Whichever side of the argument you may be on, it may be much more than cynicism for anyone to deny the fact that our 52-year old forcefully delivered baby became deformed before its sixth birthday. Little wonder that our country is always treading the path of opposites like a crab, with no end to its zigzag journey?
The impact of corruption on our socio-economic and political life has been very negative. A very significant portion of appropriated money ends up in private pockets. Rampant corruption is evidenced in innumerable abandoned projects, wasteful white elephant projects that the promoters never wanted to completely execute from the beginning.
Nigerian leaders have deliberately refused to establish comparable medical centres of excellence in Nigeria for the care of the majority. But our privileged few spend fortunes to take care of their medical needs abroad, sometimes ferried our abroad in air ambulances. It’s not a secret that some poor Nigerians today die because they cannot afford 500naira to buy their necessary drugs. The nouveau riche patronize qualitative medical centres in the Middle East, Great Britain, the United States of America and others, while a large pool of their highest class in government enjoy free medical care in Germany courtesy of Julius Berger.
Again, the fact that our country at 52 lacks basic social services, like power supply, good road networks and functional railway, is a painful reminder of the reality that we have been governed mostly by a succession of opportunists and perverts.
We remember that on January 1, instant, the Nigerian state announced another hike in petroleum prices. The spurious reason the central government gave was that fuel subsidy was unsustainable and that it was negatively impacting on the national budget and finance.
Nigerians, in a rare display of public anger and disapproval, organized civil protests to vent their disgust and discontent with President Jonathan’s Greek Gift on New Year Day. The Nigerian Labour movement and civil societies united to make open statement, asking government to revert to the old 65 naira per litre or face civil action. Government, the president, his economic team organized several propaganda public relations and talk shows to attempt to convince Nigerians, but they failed abysmally.
When the Labour/Civil Society street action commenced, the protest took on a life of its own, it became very popular and significantly successful to the extent that local and global communities became interested in the civil societies’ rare determination to reject an obnoxious public policy.
For a week, the various strata of the Nigerian public thronged the centres of the public campaign against the price hike. Nigerians steadfastly displayed their opposition until the leadership of the Labour/Civil Societies committed a blunder by suspending the campaign at the weekend to enable protesters “refill and re-strategize.”
The Nigerian state typically and forcefully drafted a contingent of soldiers and mobile policemen to occupy both the venue of the campaign (Gani Fawehinmi’s Park) in Lagos and the road leading to the venue.
That President Jonathan misused the state apparatus of coercion to prevent Nigerians from resuming their protests is illustrative of what civilian dictators are capable of doing to enforce their oppressive policies on their citizens. President Jonathan current’s inappropriate statement that the people protesting his anti-people’s price hike were sponsored by his political enemies and exposed him to ridicule and showed that he is significantly disconnected from the people he governs.
The Nigerian Parliament, particularly the House of Representatives took up the gauntlet by conducting a public hearing on the so called unsustainable subsidy on petroleum. The revelations contained in the report of Honourable Farouk Lawan’s ad hoc committee were very spectacular. And readers will remember that they included among others, that:-
i) Many oil marketers falsified their records. Quite a number of them claimed subsidies for PMS they did not import, or in excess of the quantity they claimed to have imported.
ii) Many business men and women who had nothing to do with the petroleum business were sponsored and approved by friends and associates of the PDP in power.
iii) Nigerians were being raped and forced to pay for a non-existent subsidy.
iv) Nigerians were being asked to pay for demurrage due to criminal neglect and gross deficiencies of government services. And more.
Nigerians expected the Jonathan Presidency to officially apologize to Nigerians for imposing a punitive policy on them on a very spurious claims of subsidy when in fact, the former 65 naira itself was comparably higher than what citizens of other oil exporting countries are paying for their domestic oil usage. The expected policy government should have adopted was to reverse the unjust 97 naira price hike to the old price of 65 naira. When it does this, then this government will be truly legitimate, and recognized as governing in the public interest.
To make matters much more worrisome, the Nigerian government is busy implementing the favourable recommendations of Chief Aig-Imokhuede, the ACCESS BANK PLC’s Chief Executive Officer. One wonders why the Jonathan Presidency is regularly and typically tactless and miscalculating in its choice of people saddled with one job or the other. Is it that the presidency is unaware that some oil marketers with huge subsidy claims are ACCESS BANK Customers? How can the CEO of such a bank find faults with its customers indicted by the Farouk Committee?
I believe that President Jonathan is wrong to imagine that the multi-dimensional cases of inequality before the law, the fact that many nationalities have limitations for their national aspirations while some are even permanently disempowered have long been settled. There is no opportunity yet for democratic discussion and resolutions of the many cases of mutual mistrust and suspicion that can convince many nationalities that they are co-owners and joint inheritors of the national wealth.
That is why it happened that even though Nigeria earned enormous petrol dollars because of the crises in the Middle East, yet Nigerians’ living condition, since the period of Obasanjo’s presidency, has quickly deteriorated. It’s a fact that Obasanjo grudgingly gave a minimum wage, but that was just a small fraction of the huge petroleum dollars the country earned at that time. You will also remember that Obasanjo failed to build any refinery during his time. And because he based domestic consumption of refined petroleum on importation, he regularly hiked prices depending on the prices at the international price levels.
The USA remains the largest market globally. If the government of the USA decided to inject 20 billion USD into any of its national social services, be it, on education, health, road, power supply etc, the impact will be visible to Americans and visitors. Why must you sustain this wicked structure that only benefits a tiny cabal and their collaborators? Mr. President, seize the initiative now to dismantle the perverted structure that has held Nigeria down, painfully making it an embarrassment to the Black Race whose destiny has been placed in Nigeria’s care for progress and development.
What Nigerian leaders must appreciate is the certainty of the unalterable laws of life, part of which is the legal maxim that: You cannot build something on nothing. Nigeria remains in peril because of its artificial creation and forced existence. Perhaps the ruling elite and the preponderance of its middle class, who are mostly fun seekers and pleasure lovers, will turn around for good –given the desperate state of Nigeria’s socio-economic and political outlook today. WE CERTAINLY CAN DO BETTER THAN WE ARE DOING NOW.
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