A major feature of the practice of politics in Nigeria since 1999 has been its glaring departure from the norms of its professed purpose and the difficulty or important implications for scholarly criticism.
The veneration in which the pre-independence era politics was held in the days of the Herbert Macaulay clan has disappeared and the prompt book for the continuation of its mores, practices and strategies for the immediate post-independence period has been lost even as its shadows vainly attempt to restore authority or project hope. It has been largely impeached and discarded.
Whereas the professed purposes of politics include the requirement to promote and put forward leaders who are humane, selfless, public-spirited, considerate or sensitive to the needs of the people; who are passionate about the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy; and who are themselves models of equity, impartiality and integrity, the Nigerian picture is lamentably odious.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between the view of politics as a purposive insight and its view as the realisation of the given. Does the contemporary practitioner of politics, prankishly referred to as politician, remind us of what we used to perceive as the imaginative intercessor respecting our public affairs i.e. the one who appears deus ex machina to resolve our existential crises in spite of ourselves?
Our sense of truth as the province of systematic thinkers is disturbed as we observe our politicians as crass propagandists or as Area Boys. In popular speech, propaganda is applied to doctrines viewed “as pernicious and spread by men whom we distrust”. All sincere, responsible politicians are obligated not to be propagandists as every propaganda is programmed to hypnotise the public and its presentation targeted at seducing the innocent. The recipient of a piece of propaganda rather than experience a release or relief from perverse emotion is instead incited unto unreasoned response to the subject matter.
Many divisive stratagem have been devised by the Tinubu administration buoyed by the nation’s tribal, ethnic, religious, sectarian and regional faultlines. The government’s propaganda team, decidedly bloated in both content and intent, has been deployed to combat the regime’s reputational capital deficit even as the people are reeling under the negative economic consequences of a mis-conceived reform agenda, namely the knee-jerk removal of fuel subsidies and the un-scientific devaluation of the national currency.
The Tinubu media team has been struggling to substitute the vacuous Emilokan theology for a desired national ethic. The presidency has been bungling from one mis-chance to another mischievously ignoring the fact that its Emilokan creed charade is willy-nilly programmed to follow the path of earlier governance misadventures trod by its ungainly predecessors.
There is today the requirement to interrogate the existing institutional apparatus that the nation’s grundnorm has imposed on the people. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) has been wrought to unleash on the citizens a fait accompli involving the foisting on the polity of an irreversible arrangement for State Capture by which buccaneers or political robbers insidiously acquire state power even as they arrogantly ignore the hallowed responsibilities of governance.
The pursuit of sensuous individual or private pleasures under a system that discounts accountability to the people is the avowed mandate or goal of the captors of our commonwealth. Nigeria’s problems popularly identified as corruption, poor leadership, and dwindling moral values have peaked under the APC governments of Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu. The constitutional role of government for the security of lives and property has taken a back seat as government appears helpless in tackling headlong the ravages of a nationwide insecurity evidenced in the devastation, destruction and of laying waste the institutional pillars of the polity.
Corruption stalks the entire gamut of governmental operations even as governance has assumed the toga of private enrichment and of care free stupendous lifestyle by officials of government. Poor leadership is exemplified in the enthronement or nomination of the worst among us for the pivotal offices of state.
The legal apparatus has been crafted for imposing on all of us the intellectually-inapt, the ideologically-befuddled or inept, and the socially-irrelevant or morally bankrupt among us to assume the commanding heights of our political economy. The result that is visible for all to see is the concomitant dysfunctional state of affairs.
The complicity of the educated elite in this miasma is baffling. It has further compounded the gridlock. The hallmarks of Nigeria’s misgovernance noted as social insecurity, anarchy, infrastructural decay (ably epitomised in agriculture which tops the list of our infrastructural decay and which neglect has ensured hunger as a national reality), the recurrent fuel scarcity or irregular price hike conundrum which highlight the corporate irrelevance of NNPC as constituted have combined to question the change agent qualification of the elite particularly of the public intellectual.
In the midst of the general malady in which the country is embroiled, the nation is at the mercy of “social vultures” that are capitalising on our dire situation and have hijacked the country’s processes for obnoxious personal purposes. The essence of government is lost when its purposive functions to promote the socio-economic wellbeing of the people through reasoned economic and political transformation programmes are not carried out in the public interest or are carried out outside of the mandated purposes.
Government is established to do good as contained in its aide memoir or in the grundnorm. The legitimacy of government is questioned when it veers off the public good. When a government does not have the mandate of the people for designing or crafting particular policy changes underpinned by a broad consensus for their execution, the failure of the reform is as sure as nightfall.
The so-called radical reform programmes of the Tinubu presidency have not been informed by a conscious consensus building panoply as is being witnessed in what appears yet as visceral opposition of the North to the Tax Reform bills now under consideration by the National Assembly. The absence of an underlying electoral mandate and the cavalier manner of building genuine national consensus on matters of national importance to governance have aggregated to make the reform proposals unpopular.
Even as Chief Obafemi Awolowo identified power as flowing from a leadership that is sustained by the will of the people, freely articulated and given, the national consensus building parameter is aptly paraphrased in his thesis. In Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution, Awo made an incontrovertible suggestion:
“We have said, earlier on, that to make a success of their difficult assignment, Nigerian leaders should possess comprehension, mental magnitude, and spiritual depth. By comprehension we mean the ability of a man to appreciate and grasp the salient details as well as most of the practical and temporal implications of a given problem or situation.”
This recipe for effective or efficient leadership is glaringly lacking in Nigeria today and is not being consciously sought after. Leadership in Nigeria is assumed on conditions that are at variance with established or time-honoured philosophy of election or selection for governance.
The Nigerian people always looking askance seem to resemble what Mark Twain (1835-1910) said of a people: “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without an address on it?”
Rotimi-John, a Lawyer and Commentator on Public Affairs, is the Deputy Secretary-General of Afenifere. He can be reached via: [email protected]