Nigeria

Nigeria: the Need for Two Presidents

Abdullah Musa

I am prompted to write this article by the Tuesday column of Daily Trust newspaper of 27 February 2007, which was written by Muhammad Al Ghazzali. Right from the onset let me make it clear that I do not subscribe to the value of the likes of Wazirin Mopa and that of Wazirin Fika to our contemporary world.

This position can only come from one who is not seeking any form of power in Arewa of Nigeria. For the likes of Alghazzali, who may want to be tutored on the ways and the ideology of the North, it is highly recommended to make one a familiar figure in the homes of these illustrious sons of Arewa. We are not in any way foolish enough to look down upon those who had the opportunity to hold public office and yet came out untainted by either mediocrity or corruption. In that respect I salute the two gentlemen and wish that their Creator accepts their deeds from them and forgives them their errors.

But that is the point of departure. Whereas the two old men are permitted to look back and yearn for their comfortable past, Alghazzali, if not within their age bracket should study his own era and understand the way “the wind currents” of his time are blowing. To wistfully look towards the era of Awonoyis’ which has gone, to wish it into the present, ala ‘sugar candy mountain’ of Animal Farm; to me that seems like pure escapism.

It is illustrative to peep into the mind -set of the likes of Awoniyi. Alghazzali was fascinated by the heroic act of the revered Chief, where as one in charge of Northern Regional Government’s aircraft fleet, he had cause to inconvenience the then Premier to try and bring a critically sick civil servant to Kaduna for medical attention by diverting the only available plane to Idah instead of allowing it to carry the Premier to Gusau.

We are not interested in judging history. But the question that comes to my mind is this: was such course of action sustainable? Could it have been done for an ordinary citizen, one who for instance voted the NPC of Sardauna to power? As Northerners we are hardly comfortable challenging the actions of our elders, indeed in some cases father-figures. But in this case the future is at stake.

When we look back we can see how our elders got their world-view, a world view, which to my thinking is incompatible with current realities. They were groomed by British colonial administrators, who happened to see themselves as some kind of fatherly figures to an otherwise ignorant and in certain cases, foolish natives. They had their own tradition that they imbued from the type of schooling and other forms of training they received before being sent to the colonial outposts. There were airs; there was the feeling of racial and mental superiority. This, the likes of Awoniyi and others copied and believed in some form or the other. The civil servant then was really not a civil servant; he was an administrator, a power holder. This was so because they had worked with the colonial authorities who, were not elected officials, but acquired their powers by subjugating the traditional power holders, (the emirs and chiefs) and imposing their own way of doing things.

The parliamentary system of government, with its House of Chiefs and very small participants in the political power structure, ensured that not much conflict was there between the now new civil servant and the new politicians who entered into the shoes of the white men. The types of the two Waziris were called bakaken turawa!

Accountability, respect for law and order were observed for the authors were not far off. Yet, how could one justify the gift of 250 pounds by the Premier to our revered Chief in current circumstance? Was there not recently one Minister, whether Anthony Ani, who had to return some dollars being ‘gift’ to him by the then Head of State, General Sani Abacha?

We can see that the world in which our two Waziris served and excelled is gone. The then Regional government was then run like a kind of family affair, with the late Sardauna as the father-figure. We are not discountenancing the relevance of history. What we seek to flee away from, as it were is the inclination to wish for a past; a past whose reconstruction may take a millennium even if it were possible.

Folklore has its relevance, where for instance we learn of the release of a genie from the bottle: having tasted freedom, the genie would not willingly go back into the bottle. The Nigerian civil servant has tasted the power of wealth. The military class also had its days of glory, when its members either military Governors or Presidents came to find themselves in stupendous wealth. Selfless service to the nation; spending one’s most productive years in one form of service or the other; to only end up as a miserable, sick pensioner is not a scenario that is appealing to most upstarts.

Power or more appropriately, absolute power must of necessity engender corruption. Our system as obtains concentrates enormous power in the hands of a few. What is worse, an un-elected civil servant may be in a position to siphon off colossal amounts of money without being found out. The wealth would be apparent to the common people within whom he may choose to reside, but they had never been oriented to challenge power. With such resources at the ‘civil master’s’ control, the process of law would seem to be such a feeble fortress to turn to for defense or recovery of the ill-gotten wealth.

The seeming hopelessness of the situation as hitherto painted is not our objective. Our objective is to draw our attention to the series of transformations that had taken place over the years, some with irreversible consequences; such that it would seem as an act in escapism to take as model one who was sired in a completely different setting; and whose prescriptions may in the end come to be seen as ‘empowering the robber all the more’.

Our struggle with the yearning for the secure, predictable, and comfortable past may be seen as a corollary to the situation the Britons found themselves with regards to the Americans. The Imperial British were the gentlemen; refined in character, speech and comportment. The welfare system, (financed by the rape of colonies?) ensured for their communities a stable and predictable life.

The Americans on the other hand, whose ancestors were robbers and plunderers, came to have the upper hand; for they had unleashed the greed of man, legalizing it to explore, create, and horde. Not that it is idyllic to be a monster. What it shows in a much more refined presentation however, is that humans show their best when they compete. Whether the rules of competition are fair or unjust is another story altogether.

The appetite to own and possess your output can only be subjugated to the commonwealth by values such as the ones espoused by religion. This in itself may not be purely altruistic, as the believer is promised a greater reward in the life to come. Is it not ironic that a staff or contributor to the Daily Trust, which came to justly replace the government –sponsored New Nigerian, would now want to whine for a return to the heydays of NN when the likes of Adamu Ciroma held sway at the then authoritative and highly reliable New Nigerian?

I used to have a telephone (landline) serviced by NITEL. At that time, a service centre of theirs in Kano located at Ibrahim Dabo road was a kind of mosque. Subscribers to Nitel who had technical problems had to be there early morning, begging as it were the ‘holy’ technicians to accept their ‘prayers’ to follow them to rectify the anomaly. What of today? One passes the place without even looking at it. The reason for this development is not farfetched: the advent of GSM technology, courtesy Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

It is usually apparent that those who yearn for the past are not after the past as illustrated by the NITEL story. They would love to have an honest civil servant able to discharge his/her obligation to the best of one’s ability without discrimination, without corruption. That to me should still be sought after, but definitely within a changed context. This changed context presupposes that Government should be pre-occupied with services that cannot be efficiently provided for by the private sector.

One may argue that in all sectors you will find private sector participation: Education, Communications, Health, Aviation and so on. The challenge is to segregate them into planes, where the government may choose to operate on higher planes that require colossal amount of capital and/ or research.

Two Presidents: the lengthy digression is justified on the grounds that we need to illustrate the presence of two mindsets within the Nigerian federation. On the one hand you have the old guards in the form of the Waziris and those receiving tutorials from them in the form of Alghazzalis, and on the other you have the likes of Chief Obasanjo, the El Rufais etc. One believes that the past must be the model for the future, while the other believes the present must be studied to model the future. Left to me alone, the northern part of Nigeria needs a different kind of leader from that suitable to the South. Soludo has the basis to say that the ten poorest states are in the North, while in Jigawa State 95% of the citizens are poor. The developmental needs are different, the aspirations are different, and even the language of addressing the populace must be different. The difference is not whether one is addressed in English and the other in Hausa. The difference is in what each one of them wants to hear. The average Northerner is not aspiring to be a global player. He is deeply rooted in his past, and shows great abhorrence to the ways of the West. The Yoruba elites swallow Western development models hook, line and sinker. Yet you find some Northerners who are perfectly in tune with such models, but they are few.

It thus beats my imagination that Afenifere is rooting for Buhari, who by his mien, conduct and antecedents is wholly of the old vanguard; without of course the propensity to loot.

These two segments of the country are distinct and disparate, such that a unified structure such as the one we operate harms and retards all the component parts: all are retarded; none actualizes its vision of existence. Of what appeal is Pat Utomi to a member of the 95% poor who inhabit Jigawa? Utomi is of the Lagos Business School; he comes alive in the Western capitals of the world, and may want to steer an export-driven manufacturing economy. They would speak the same language with El-rufai, Ezekwesile, and even Nenadi Usman. But the peasant would want someone like Bukar Abba, or even Modu Shareef, who dips his hands in the pocket and gives him ‘dash’.

Without jesting, we may consider restoring Lagos to its colony status, separate from the mainland; where the reformers would be free to join the global capitalists’ economy; that is if the likes of Tinibu would move inland with their hordes of Adedibu’s thugs in tow. As things are today, we have: ONE NATION, NO DESTINY!