Policies, Please!
By
Okezie Chukwumerije
Next
time you see an article on contemporary Nigerian politics, don’t read it
immediately. First find a spit-bowl; then begin to read. If you feel nauseated
while reading, gently relieve yourself into the spit-bowl, which you should have
wisely put beside your reading desk.
Such is the quality of the discussion and debate in the lead-off to next year’s elections. With the elections galloping at full speed towards us, bearing with them the opportunity to call to account our wastrel, feckless, and rapacious governments and politicians, we refuse to seize the opportunity to engage in the kind of meaningful debate about policies and governance that should prepare us to wisely utilize our votes.
What with our thralldom to personality politics, our fixation with the distraction of the impeachment process, and our fetishizing of ethnicity, we have scant time to reflect on the policies and visions of prospective candidates for public office. As astute students of the Nigerian political imagination, our politicians fully understand that what they need in order to win is to saturate the political atmosphere with platitudes – about how we should fight for our “own” people, and how we should checkmate “other” groups and prevent them from coming into, or retaining, power. The great talent of our politicians is obfuscation. Not having concrete ideas on how to stimulate economic and social development in the country, they flood the political arena with trifling distractions, and lobotomize the electorate by appealing to their primordial ethnic and religious instincts.
More is the pity, because the electioneering period should be a time for vigorous debate about the visions and policies of our governments, and the alternative visions and policies proposed by prospective candidates for public office. What better time to evaluate the policies and effectiveness of our governments than in the period leading to an election? What better time to analyze and debate alternative solutions to our national problems than in the lead-off to an election? But amidst the drowning drivel emanating from the national assembly and the visceral reaction of supporters of the president; amidst the chivvying of the rest of the country by Igbos for the election of a president of Igbo origin; amidst our obsession with personality differences between our politicians of evanescent importance – do we even have the time to focus on what should be our real concerns so close to general elections?
Ours is a classic case of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, we complain about our stalled economy and our deteriorating physical and social infrastructure. We give the appearance of being troubled by our lowly place on the scale of human progress. On the other hand, we shy away from the opportunity to dialogue on concrete ways of solving our pressing national problems. We seem to simultaneously believe that we have severe national problems and that we can solve these problems by averting our eyes and focusing on low-order issues.
The period leading to the next election should be the opportunity for the country to evaluate the policies of the present governments, state and federal. Three years, government flacks often remind us, is not enough time for a government to tackle the myriads of problems facing the country. Yes, we know. We are not so naïve as to have expected that within three years the civilian dispensation would have led us into a political and economic nirvana. But three years is enough time for us to determine whether the governments have concrete and effective plans of action for resolving our national problems.
What should be evident from any impartial assessment of the present federal government is that it has no coherent plan of action for the country. Think about agriculture, education, transportation, industrialization, social cohesion, economic revival – think about vital national issues, and ask yourself what you know about the policies of the present government on each of them. Ask yourself the last time you heard a government official make an intelligent statement on any of these issues. Try to fit the actions of the government into a coherent strategy. In place of well-articulated goals with measurable outcomes, we have well-calibrated hype. We have talk as substitute for action. Profession of faith as substitute for compassion. Arrogance as substitute for vision.
Those who fawn all over our president and traverse the country saying that our national security and progress depend on his continued stay in office should perhaps, out of respect for the intelligence of Nigerians, explain to them what policy direction the government has been following in the last three years and why the president needs another term of office to execute whatever plans he has for the country. The same goes for other sitting elected officials. “Four more years,” we hear from lackeys of our sitting politicians. But four more years of what? Four more years for what?
Do we want four more years of a scattershot approach to policy making? Do we want four more years of bloated and ponderous governments that refuse to do what is necessary to properly position us in the new world economy? This should be a period for us to reflect on how far we have come in the last three years and to see whether we are heading in the right direction. Strikingly, matters other than the evaluation of government policies and the consideration of alternative strategies for national development consume our time and attention.
Our latest preoccupation is the threat by the House of Representative to commence impeachment proceedings against the president. The tremulous reps accuse the president of gross violations of the constitution, and our bellicose president accuses them of taking a joke too far. While some may say that the president, who has made a hobby of engineering the removal or seeking to remove parliamentary officials, is getting a taste of his own medicine – revenge is not the purpose of the impeachment process, and the churlish behavior of our president ought not to be the standard of conduct in inter-governmental relations. Try as much as our reps may to give a veneer of legitimacy to their battle against the president, it is clear that the casus belli of the present conflict lies not in some fundamental disagreements on constitutional principles, but in personal differences between the president and some parliamentarians. The facts supporting the so-called charges against the president have been well known to the reps for a long time. Why then the urgency in commencing the proceedings so close to a general election? If in fact the president is guilty of gross violations of the constitution, why do the reps not trust the electorate to hold the president accountable in the fast-approaching elections? Impeachment is not an alternative process for removing or damaging a president whom the reps think themselves incapable of ousting in a fairly fought democratic election.
Rather than focusing attention on the policies of the present government, the threatened impeachment of the president has served to polarize the country between those who feel some visceral loyalty to him and those who dislike him. Lost in all of this is the opportunity to dispassionately deliberate on the concrete policies, or lack of it, of the present government.
The impeachment controversy has also brought to the forefront one of the issues that forestall meaningful discussion of policy issues in Nigerian politics: The tribalization of political debate and political institutions. Going by the response of his ethnic group to the threat to impeach him, you would think that Obasanjo was elected president in virtue of his ethnicity. The Pavlovan reaction of the Yorubas (so-called democracy activists included) is best summarized as follows: this is our son and we don’t care whatever might be his constitutional transgressions; we will stand by him and battle to a stand still all those who threaten to remove him from office.
Discount for a moment the fact that these vociferous supporters of Obasanjo did not even vote for him at the last elections; discount too the fact that had Obasanjo been as conciliatory and classy as Shagari, no one from his party would think of supporting the impeachment process – what is gained by threatening the nation with doom and destruction because a president from one’s ethnic group is threatened with impeachment proceedings? What is more unfortunate is that these ethnic champions braying about the dangers of removing Obasanjo do not even bother to marshal concrete policy arguments in support of his presidency. I don’t want to be misunderstood: while I think it is an abuse of the impeachment process to seek to remove a president so close to an election and without any compelling charges against him, I condemn the tribalization of the dispute, the consequent diminishment of the presidency, and the opportunity lost to reflect on the effectiveness of the present administration.
Another aspect of the tribalization of the presidency and the consequent loss of opportunity to reflect on policies is the campaign by Igbos for a president of Igbo origin. Calling forth their aeons of resentment for their unfair treatment in Nigerian politics, the Igbos maintain that this is their “turn” to produce the president. The clamor for a president of Igbo origin has become a shibboleth for Igbos. One is almost considered a self-hating Igbo for refusing to join the chorus. Well, I refuse to sing, and I am Igbo, and I am not I am not a self-flagellant.
I may be naïve, but I think the presidency should not be a sop for past injustices. There are other ways of redressing the injustices, which are real. The presidency should not be an affirmative action position. If there is one office that should be filled based entirely on merit and character, it is the office of the presidency. It may not seem so going by our diminished presidency, but the office of the president is an embodiment of the sovereignty, the spirit, and the promise of our nation. When we look at the presidency, we should see a simulacrum of what we are as a nation and what we seek to become as a people. Consequently, in searching for candidates to fill the office, we should seek foremost those who best reflect the promise and potentials of our nation.
I am not suggesting that no Igbo person has these qualities. Far from it, there are thousands of Igbos that are qualified for the office. But if one of them must fill the office, it must be because having looked all over the country and having evaluated our national problems and goals, we chose the particular person as the suitable candidate. To me, it matters little whether an Hausa or an Effik or a Yoruba or a Nupe or an Igbo person rules Nigeria, provided we all – everywhere in the country – have good roads, good education, good health care, decent housing, etc.
A president that will serve the interests of their particular ethnic group is, of course, what advocates of a tribalized presidency want. A president that will lavish political largesse on his or her ethnic group of origin and stuff the seats of power with people from this group. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president that will ensure that most privatized government companies end up in the hands of “our” own people? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to strip other parts of the country of industries slatted for them and reallocate them to “our” own part of the country? No, it wouldn’t be nice.
The president ought to represent the whole country, not just one ethnic group. In this regard, the national assembly should be commended for its effort to remind Obasanjo that the country is more than the constituent parts of Afinefere. If we have a broad-minded president, it shouldn’t matter that he or she is not from our own ethnic group. Moreover, if we are fair, we must acknowledge that prioritizing the needs of one ethnic group above those of the rest of the country is not just inequitable, but it will ultimately widen the dangerous cleft of distrust that has developed among the constituent ethnic groups of Nigeria.
The obsession with ethnicity prevents us from focusing on concrete government policies and results. This is why most Yorubas are out fighting for Obasanjo without giving much thought to whether or not he is actually doing much for the country. It is for this very reason that sections of the North continue to defend the venal government of Sanni Abacha even though it is clear to everybody but the dead that he bled the country dry.
The Igbo campaign for electing a president of Igbo origin similarly fogs the political environment and blurs what should be the primary subject of discussion at this time: the visions and policies of candidates. Instead of carping about past treatment and seeking to use it as a baton to beat the rest of the country into submission (as the Yorubas did during the last election), Igbo leaders should be encouraging their politicians to make the effort of drafting and marketing well-articulated policies and strategies for reviving our country. While they are at it, they may also want to ask themselves where they were during the last elections when Igbo states became saddled with the least performing and the most cantankerous group of governors.
Another issue that precludes the meaningful discussion of policy matters is our obsession with personality politics. Nothing pleases us more than to gossip about disputes between politicians. Did you hear what Anyim said about Ogbe? Did you hear what Nwobodo called Nnamani? Did you hear that Babangida refused to honor a dinner invitation from Buhari? On and on it goes. With personality conflicts we can all have opinions. We don’t need to think. We don’t need to make the effort of studying and understanding government policies and issues of governance. Take the controversy involving Anyim and Ogbe. Most of the discussion was on how their differences arose. Did the president instigate it? Was it because Ogbe ordered new ward elections in Ebonyi state? Very few commentators focused on the most troubling aspect of the issue: the fact that a party official had the temerity (in a government that claims to be in the vanguard of the fight against corruption) to write to the Senate President requesting funding, to the tune of millions of naira, for a party conference, fully aware that the only way his request could have been honored was by the Senate President doing something dishonorable and probably illegal.
This problem of focusing on personalities, rather than policies, has denizened among us. In Abia and Ebonyi states, for example, federal government officials who should be busy addressing pressing national problems travel home every weekend to foment trouble and destabilize their states. In other parts of the country, state assemblies are at loggerheads with governors. In very few of these instances are the disputes policy based. Invariably, they reduce to inconsequential personality differences or disagreements about the division of the spoils of office.
Finally, if we refuse to engage in serious discussions about the policies of our governments and the visions of those campaigning for public office, we should not continue to bewail the poor health of our country. Our country is clearly sick and in desperate need of attention. We can tend to it and discuss ways of nursing it back to health, or we can continue to focus on third and fourth order matters. It is time for us to begin to engage in a debate on the future policy directions of our government and to analyze the policy positions of prospective candidates. The voter registration process is currently underway in the country. As we register to vote, perhaps we should also remember that with the vote come certain responsibilities. They include the responsibility to be fully informed about the policy and strategic issues facing the country. It is to waste a vote to use it without having discharged the responsibilities that attach to the privilege of voting. What more, it is an abuse of the right to vote.
Okezie Chukwumerije
San Francisco, California