A Presidential Hopeful and the Future of Nigeria

By

Lawrence .O. Obibuaku

lobibuaku@yahoo.com

 

 

Recently, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, Nigeria ’s former military president granted a press interview to Newswatch (Newswatch June 14, 2004 ) in which he declared his interest in the 2007 presidential election. He made wide-ranging statements on issues affecting the Nigerian nation and added his voice to the persistent calls for a national conference. He identified issues that should be discussed during the conference and these included; revenue allocation formula, the relationship between the state and federal government, resource control, the question of ethnic nationalities and of course a hint that he might contest the presidential election come 2007.

 

The General suggested that President Obasanjo’s reluctance to institute a national conference was his fear that it might lead to a break up of the country. He however, added that the fear might be allayed if there are some “no go areas” in the agenda of the conference. This demand, in my view, is unacceptable to Nigerians because it not only constitutes an insult to the intelligence of eminent men and women that will attend the conference but will make nonsense of the entire exercise. All the problems that that need to be considered should be tabled and if in the mature opinion of Nigerians issues such as ethnic and religious conflicts are unresolvable, then refusing to call a national conference will only amount to postponing the evil day. No person can claim to be wiser or more patriotic than a representative group of Nigerians.

 

 However, I do not believe that right thinking Nigerians will opt for a break-up of the country for obvious reasons. A break-up may dismember the country into tiny unviable entities. A nation is often as important as its geographical and population size, especially if it is able to develop a large and robust middle class. China and India are increasingly important countries in the globe today, in part, because of their large size. Even Western Europeans who historically have valued their ethnic separateness are now finding ways to cooperate as larger economic and political entities as depicted by the European Union. For these and other reasons, it is therefore unlikely that a national conference will lead to a break up of the country.

 

To achieve our objective of building a strong and prosperous nation or merely continuing as one country, the problems of ethnic and religious conflicts must be sincerely discussed with a view to finding mutually agreeable solutions. Many people believe that the frequent inter-ethnic and religious disturbances now threatening the existence of Nigeria are traceable to the machinations of our elite. Notable among such crises are the frequent Kano riots, the latest and perhaps bloodiest of which occurred in 2004. Others are the Kaduna and Jos riots, and the incessant Urhobo, Itchekiri and Ijaw conflicts. The question is, why do these upheavals occur and who is behind them? A look at Nigeria ’s history will reveal that the country is made up of discrete independent nationalities woven together by the British with astute nation building brinkmanship. Soon people learned to regard Nigeria as their country and so elements from various nationalities crisscrossed the entire land and settled in other localities to pursue economic activities of their choice. In the process they formed economic and friendship ties and some even contracted inter-ethnic marriages and lived peacefully together in major cities throughout the country. 

This happy and progressive condition suffered a change with the emergence of party politics after the country’s independence when the elite exploited the differences between our ethnic nationalities. The masses were encouraged to feel more loyal to their tribes than to the country. General Babangida was forthright in assigning responsibility for this unwholesome development. Said he, “if you observe, the problem we have in this country is not always from ordinary people. They are never the problem. Today, you can go to Banga near our border with Cameroun and you will find, Kanuri, Yoruba, Efik-every tribe you name it. They live together in peace. They just don’t think of their differences. The problem is rather from the elite class.”

 

If the General’s statement is correct, it is reasonable to suggest that since the elite are the root cause of the problems, they too should be able to find a solution to them. The starting point is for them to undergo a complete re-orientation to see themselves first and foremost as Nigerians. And since the national conference which the General now supports will be an assembly of the elite, the question of ethnic nationalities, that is the question of mutual accommodation will now take the from burner. The issue will not be that individual ethnic identities, namely Igbo, Hausa, Ibibio, Yoruba, Tiv and other will disappear, but that we will have an incentive to give less prominence to the things that divide us.  The way we identify with our country and the passion with which we do so speaks to the maturity of our nation state. If asked, where are you from, our answer should be Nigeria ; what part of Nigeria ? Enugu State , Rivers State , Kano State . Where an individual Nigerian has decided to settle, pay taxes and contribute their quota to society, should assume a greater prominence in the person’s life than his tribal origin.  

 

To further clarify the above point I would like to refer to what obtains in the United States from where we borrowed the present system of government. In the U.S. if a person is born in New York State , for example, he is automatically from that state regardless of where his parents came from. If a person moves from Texas to New York and settles for a period of at least two years, he becomes a resident of New York provided he is a citizen of the United States . Such a person is entitled to all the privileges and obligations to which the original settlers of New York are entitled. All these are provided for in the laws that govern the state.

 

 We should borrow a leaf from the United States and include in our laws forward-looking provisions such as the above. A situation in which a citizen of this country lives in one of its states for upwards of twenty years paying taxes, providing services and is still regarded as a foreigner and is denied privileges such as job opportunities is indeed a bad one. Worse still when it suits the elite they instigate the idle and vulnerable youth against those regarded as strangers in their state.

 

General Babangida shares the view that Nigerians should be treated as Nigerians wherever they are found. He believes that the type of mayhem that recently occurred in Plateau and Kano states arose because we did not address vital issues affecting our mutual relationship. This implies that our current laws do not adequately define how the various nationalities should relate to one another. He called attention to Nigerian history and cited cases in the past in which people from other tribes played major roles in areas other than those in which they were born. He said, “In 1959, a man from Sokoto was the mayor of Enugu . It didn’t matter then. Later we had a Kanuri man who represented a constituency in Benue state. That is the vision I have for Nigeria .”

 

The General’s vision constitutes a welcome change- a shift from ethnic persuasion to true national appeal. Ethnic politics is one of the principal factors that have done incalculable harm to the progress of Nigeria and is likely to undermine our democracy.

 

If the General sincerely believes in divesting Nigeria of ethnic/ religious politics and accepts merit as a precondition for holding high office such as the presidency, he should not talk of or uphold the idea of power shift or zoning which his party now advocates because that would contradict what he calls his vision for Nigeria. And I understand that vision to mean, in addition to detribalizing Nigerians, to be able to choose the best man for the job and that would avoid ethnic, religious and geographic balancing. In the view of the General, the elite are the spoilers. According to him, “it is they who would tell you how ministers should be appointed to reflect geographical consideration. If you succeed in balancing in terms of religious factor, then the question is how do you relate to those around you.”

 

The General is talking from experience and we better listen. This balancing has impeded our progress all these years. It has often led us to put square pegs in round holes and the result is retrogression. The balancing takes different colours and appears in everything we do. If it is not quota system, it is federal character. Even in constituting our national football team the same idea is evoked with disastrous consequences. In politics it is called zoning, a concept that is synonymous with ethnic balancing and is used in determining where the president, governor etc. will come from.

 

The purpose is to ensure that the Presidency in any particular election year goes either to a Hausa Fulani, Yoruba or Igbo. While the elite know what they derive from this game of zoning, the common man gains nothing from it. The Hausa-Fulani group has dominated political power in our country since Nigeria ’s independence. In what way has this fact changed the life of the common man in the North? Is he not part of the sea of poverty that surrounds tiny islands of affluence dispersed throughout the North? Also, President Obasanjo has ruled Nigeria more than five years not including his earlier tenure. In what way has this improved the life of the ordinary Yoruba man? Is he not a participant in the agonizing suffering to which the masses of Nigeria are now exposed? The ordinary man has listened to the drum of ethnic politics for too long but has derived little benefit from it. May I inject here the thoughts of the greatest thinker and teacher the world has ever known-Jesus Christ himself. He told the Jews the story of a man who was on a journey but was attacked by robbers who beat and wounded him and left him unconscious on the roadside. His fellow Jews including a priest passed by and did not help him. A Samaritan, a non-Jew, saw him, pitied, picked him up and took him to an inn. There he dresses his wounds and left him in the care of innkeeper promising to pay back all that he might spend on the man. Who is the wounded man’s brother, his fellow Jews or the Samaritan? The answer to this question will suggest to the ordinary Nigerian which way to go. It will help him to realize that a Nigerian, be he Yoruba, Efik, Hausa, Igbo, or Gwari, that assists to make his life more comfortable is he true relation.

 

While the General’s vision on the problems of ethnicity and religion is commendable, his answer to a serious question posed by Newswatch was revealing. The question: “If you have an opportunity of providing leadership for this country again, what kind of changes would you like to seeking regarding the way things are done?

 

His answer, “To be very honest with you, I believe that what we have done so far (and when I say we, I mean the federal government) is enough platform for this country to be strong. Everything that needs to be done has been done and everything that needs to be said has been said. The government has an objective, which its programs are meant to achieve. We should stick to that objective. The effect of it may not be easy for people, but later on they will get to understand why they did things the way they did.”

 

This answer raises a number of questions. Does the General believe that Nigerians are so naïve that they do not know what is good for them? Or is he sincerely unaware of the massive problems which currently engulf Nigeria some of them threatening the very existence of the country? One would have expected him to identify problems such as the country’s derailed economy, the frightening lack of security of life and property, the neglect and consequent decay of our educational system, the defects in our health care delivery system, corruption which repeal local and foreign investment, and high unemployment rates. If the General is unaware of the existence of these problems, which are the main features of Nigeria ’s underdevelopment, he is most unlikely to proffer solutions to them.

 

By endorsing the performance of the present administration, he is telling Nigerians that he cannot do better. The present economic policies that he admires are suffocating the people. For example, every Nigerian feels the pinch of the current policy on the price of petroleum products. While the government appears to revisit this policy on a daily basis, no thought is given to its effects on the lives of the people. Official records show that the inflation rate rose from 11 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in April 2004. The increase in the inflation rate is sequel to the increase in the price of petroleum products and consequent hike in production and transportation costs. These again are reflected in the high price of consumer goods that creates severe hardship for the ordinary people and the poor.

 

Similarly, the present policy on education does not seem to him out of step with the advances of the 21st century.  President Obasanjo whose policies he extols declared in at a speech at the University of Calabar in 2000 that university lecturers did not contribute to development. As if he did not shock Nigerian’s enough, he allowed all the country’s universities to remain closed for more than six months. The consequence of this type of neglect, now and in the recent past, has been a continuing nose-dive in our standard of education. Today, the products of our universities, who prior to the Babangida and Obasanjo administrations were rated world class are now suspect in advanced countries and indeed within the more sophisticated companies at home.

Nigeria needs leaders who value education, who understand what brainpower, can achieve and not those who pursue money as an end in itself. Our leaders should curtail the frequency of their visits to such places, as Washington DC , New York and London for such visits appear to get them dazed and confused. They should instead visit places like India , and ask the leaders there, “how do you do it?” They will learn, for example, that India which in the fifties and sixties could not feed its people, spent enormous amounts of money on education and research institutions and consequently came up with the green revolution programme, which indeed revolutionarised her food production. Furthermore, those institutions have been recording impressive scientific and technological breakthroughs. In the year 2000, India ’s software exports (products of the brain) constituted 12 percent of the country’s total exports. Her brainpower is tantalizing American companies, although it is at the same time intimidating American labour. According to Business Week of December 8, 2003 , “the remarkable tech rise of India is a much less told tale than the ascendancy of China . Yet its impact might be greater.”  India is now a major base for developing new applications for finance, digital appliances and industrial plants. American companies that employ high technology man power from India argue that by augmenting U.S. highly skilled labour with a sampling of the 260,000 engineers pumped out of Indian schools each year, they can afford to throw more brains at the task and speed up product launches, develop more proto-types and upgrade quality. Nigeria needs leaders whose vision for education and for science and technology will compare favorably with that of Indian leaders.

 

In view of his limited vision of the problems of the country, it is not yet clear to Nigerians why Babangida wants to run for president in 2007. Is it because his performance as Military President is adjudged as pre-eminently good and effective and therefore needs to be re-enacted? Or does he genuinely believe that Nigeria is bereft of presidential material? If he believes any of the above, he is grossly mistaken. He led the country for eight years as military president during which time he wielded absolute power with which he could have taken the country to any height he desired. His performance then is now history and I believe Nigerian do not want a repeat of it. Nigeria is endowed with millions of intelligent men and women dispersed both at home and in the Diaspora. We should at this point in time give these people a chance to try their hands at the country’s governance.

 

Finally, it is pertinent to remind the General that in the sixties, Nigeria , along with countries of Asia China , India , the Koreas and Taiwan were classified as developing countries. Today, these Asian countries (without the advantage of Nigeria mineral wealth) are emerging from the club of developing countries to that of the developed world. On the contrary, Nigeria has indeed been downgraded and according to the United Nations rating is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is now imperative that anyone who has a hand in our sorry state or played a significant role in past governments that led us to the squandering of our promise as a country should steer clear of its future leadership. Nigeria has lost enough time and should henceforth look for messiahs regardless of what region of the country they come from. Now is the time for our present leaders to realize that the latitude for exploiting people’s ignorance is shrinking fast and that they may not for long contain the fury of the frustrated, hungry and unemployed youth of our country.