Sunday, January 21, 2007

The sad story of Nigeria By Reuben Abati

Those who are currently seeking public office through the 2007 elections (with the notable exception at the Presidential level of Professor Pat Utomi and Pastor Chris Okotie) give the impression that what matters most is the thrill of the chase and the eventual prize that they seek. They want power as an end itself, and as a means not for service but for vain self-glorification. They need to be in power in order to pursue selfish interests and not the common good. This disconnection between self and society is one of the major problems that we face.

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Since independence, we have had leaders that are not prepared for office, leaders that find themselves in the public arena by accident, leaders who suddenly become important because someone has told them that it is profitable to be in government since in any case, it provides an opportunity for bending public policy to your own advantage, or at best leaders who become leaders because someone else wants to use them to achieve a particular purpose (self-preservation, ethnic superiority, business positioning). This is not the way of countries that wish to make progress. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, an icon in the eyes of Nigerian students of growth and development has told the sad story of his encounter with Nigerian leaders in the 60s.

He writes: "My next visit to Africa was in January 1966. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had called a special meeting of the Commonwealth leaders in Lagos to discuss the unilateral declaration of independence by Ian Smith, the then Prime Minister of Rhodesia. I left Lagos after the meeting was over. Two days later, while I was in Accra coup took place in Lagos. The Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was killed. So also was the Finance Minister, Chief Festus Okotie Eboh. I will never forget Chief Festus. We had sat opposite each other at a formal dinner at the hotel where we were all staying and where the conference was held. He said he wanted to leave politics soon to devote more time to his business that of a shoe factory. He also said that he had increased taxes to protect the viability of the shoe factory".

The point was not lost on Lee Kuan Yew: he and Okotie-Eboh are from different parts of the planet. More than 40 years later, this example has been reproduced so many times, the story has been told many times over. The world never forgets Nigerians. We are over 140 million. And we have a knack for making impressions. Our leaders are insufferable. They bend public policy and programmes to their will thus sowing the seeds of future ruin. They can't see the big picture. They are ego-driven. Something has gone wrong with our value system, our leadership creation and recruitment process, our sense of history, our understanding of our place in the world and on all these fronts, many things are still going wrong. Is it not amazing that three months ahead of the 2007 elections, the election results are already being announced, a priori, in certain quarters?

One fellow was presumably analysing the Nigerian situation the other day and he had added cynically that in fact, a cabinet list for the next government at all levels is already being drawn up. There may be changes between now and then, but everything has been worked out. If you want to be charitable and then assume that some of our compatriots are given to exaggerations, but how about the public declaration by the President that he will be succeeded, willy-nilly, by Governor Musa Umar Yar'Adua of Katsina state. A breakfast meeting was held the other day in Abuja, "to set up a development team for the future", and to brainstorm with Baba, the President had his own children and the Obasanjo Farms on the invitation list and if that was not enough, he reportedly did most of the talking! The other people at the Breakfast meeting were too glad to have been invited, to have been noticed at all out of 140 million Nigerians, and so I doubt if anyone had the courage to ask Baba any useful questions. If Lee Kuan Yew were to visit Nigeria today, he would wonder whether Nigeria is still on the planet, or we have taken our country to the end of a strange land identified by Ursula K. Guin in a memorable narrative as Omelas. But for how much longer can we live with this rot, this part-animal, part-human reality, without a sense of guilt, without shame, and without a determination to transform our lives? This is where the challenge lies.

It seems to me that as the Obasanjo government begins to wind up (I hope it is winding up) and as we prepare for the next elections ( I want to assume that we are preparing!), what we need is a kind of reality check. We, the people must begin to ask the hard questions about our lives. There are no easy answers, though. Our life as Nigerians is one long interim report, there is also no lack of knowledge about our problems, but the questions must be examined again and again. How for example does the world see us? What are the strengths that we possess, the weaknesses that tie us down? Are we serious at all? Do we know where we are going? Have we learnt any lessons? What do we have that we can leverage to achieve greater possibilities? When outsiders visit our country what do they see? What insights do we gain from an aesthetic distance and emotional memory?

Unfortunately, no auditing process is going on. Nigeria is about to turn a new page in its history (transition from one government to the other, the end of the Obasanjo era...); you would ordinarily expect that this would require careful planning and collective reflection, but oh no, the entire country is blundering towards that future, the election is taken as yet another festival, and like drunken sailors at a feast, there is so much ribaldry, cat-calls, rivalry and no meaningful stock-taking. If care is not taken, President Obasanjo will leave Nigeria in as much a confused state as he met it in 1999.

No country can make progress without its people. It is regrettable that we have spent eight years of democratic rule without placing the people at the centre of the reform process. Nigeria's greatest asset is its human capital but it is also its greatest burden. Nigerians are gifted, they have boundless energy, they want to do things, they love freedom, they want to express themselves; they are assertive, boisterous and ambitious. But like people in all societies, they need to be managed, their energies need to be channeled constructively; they need heroes who can define a vision for the community and a mission for the populace. We are a nation in search of such heroes. This is why every Nigerian is a product of self-help. Too many people are living in personal countries of their own, and so they belong only to the empire of the self. They are not part of any social process of agglomeration or aggregation. We cannot continue to have a country in which people prosper in spite of the country. Every country that has made progress began the process by developing its people: through education, through mission statements, through a sense of nationalism. What is the legacy of the past eight years: the thinking that the people do not matter; the belief that every man is on his own, the conviction that you should not expect government to do anything for you because the people in government are only interested in themselves; the widespread conclusion that government is irrelevant to the people's lives. If democracy must serve our purpose, the cynicism of the people must be brought to an end through due recognition of their relevance to the development process. Who will do this? Will this result from an evolutionary or a revolutionary intervention? Candidly, I do not know.

Second, we need infrastructure. This again is the missing link of the past eight years. The average Nigerian now goes about with a toy called a cell phone, so perhaps communication is now easier, but we have done nothing other than handing over toys to the people. The country wants to industrialise, make progress and raise its competitiveness ranking. But our level of infrastructure is quaint. We don't have quality schools that can produce the strong breed of human beings that can compete with the best from any part of the world in terms of skills and ideas. To get quality education for your child, you need to send him or her abroad. We want foreign direct investment, but our roads are bad, there is no regular electricity supply, the railway is dead. The starting point for any development agenda is the provision of infrastructure.

This will help to enrich the quality of life and make everything else easier. I have often wondered how foreigners manage to do business with Nigeria. It requires too much courage. The ports are underdeveloped, goods have to be moved on the roads, and then there are no enough facilities for tourism, and to worsen matters, travel by air inside Nigeria is an act of faith. We like to cite the example of the Asian tigers. Those countries began to grow by dealing with these same issues. But here, we have heard only excuses from all quarters. Gestation period. I have been told times without number that to modernise infrastructure in this country, Nigerians have to be patient because many of the projects have a gestation period. Even when something is gestating, there will be benchmarks and evidence of growth. I don't see how the power sector is growing, for example. I don't see any assurance that the rainy season will no longer be a threat to our roads with those thin layers of bitumen. I am not convinced that buildings won't still collapse, or that the fire service has improved, or that air travel will no longer be hazardous. The problem is not gestation; it is the quality of leadership.

Third, whoever takes over in May (or are they now talking about October?) will also be inheriting unfortunately institutions that have not made any substantial progress in the last eight years; institutions that continue to cause much anxiety. Institutions, institutions, institutions! There is nothing new about this. This was the same mantra that the leadership elite mouthed in 1999 and again in 2003. But they have not allowed the institutions of state to function efficiently because this would have made it difficult for them to hold as much power as they do. It is as if the chief task of governance has been the frustration of public institutions. The effect has been the flowering of the politics of personality with too many so-called leaders wielding the powers of life and death and sounding like the oracle on subjects in which they lack knowledge and competence.

Fourth, no country can grow if its people lack discipline. Nigerians don't want to hear any such thing. For them, the only place where discipline comes before the word, progress is in the dictionary. There is a reign of impunity in the land, sheer recklessness, unbridled dalliance, and idleness. National productivity is at an all-time low. Ordinary Nigerians often like to complain about the Asian and Lebanese employers of labour in our land, the difference is that it takes a lot of patience to endure the laziness of the Nigerian worker. The Nigerian worker is forever feigning sickness, people are always dying in his family and he has to attend every funeral, his children are bound to have one problem or the other, and if not, he would use the traffic as alibi for his regular late coming, and on those days when he manages to get to the office on time, he is busy either loitering or carrying tales from one office to the other. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer At Ease, members of the Umuofia Progressive Union, Lagos Branch did not hide the fact that they are in Lagos not to work but to make money. That novel was written before Chinua Achebe was thirty, he is now over 70, and the situation has not changed, the Nigerian is still not interested in work, he wants money, and when he gets that money, he squanders it on aso ebi, concubines and additional wives, parties, houses that look like art works and so on...

No Longer At Ease was written in 1960. In 2007, forty-seven years later, and eight years after our return to democracy, we have turned full circle, we are back to the beginning of our future, life is still "no longer at ease here", nothing has changed. It is the same old question: Who will shoot the elephant and rescue us from shame?