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Let the People Judge By Dr. Wunmi Akintide
Less than a month from today, Nigerians would be going to the polls again in a 4 year ritual to pick our next set of leaders. I still have a premonition, however, that the election can still be canceled or postponed at the last minute. Regardless of what happens, I think It is time for us to revisit and to start brainstorming what ought to be the role of Government, and whether or not the PDP and their President and his estranged Vice President have met those criteria, given the reality of the ground today.
The first and most important role of Government is to improve the lot of the governed. That is why you hear political leaders in the Western world always asking the rhetorical question as the most effective way to judge the performance of the Government in power "Is the nation better off today than she was four years earlier?" If the resounding answer is "yes" the party in power has the chance to win, and sometimes win with a bigger margin of victory. If the answer is "no", that becomes a justification to try the opposition for a change. In the ideal democracy we all crave for Nigeria that ought to be the bottom line for picking on which party deserves to win That, in a nutshell, is the beauty of Democracy, and that is why the system has trumped all other systems of Government the world over. It is by no means a perfect system but it works better than Communism, Feudalism or any other form of Government known to mankind
If we go by that prism and if the ruling party will conduct a free and fair election starting from April, there is no way that the PDP can win the next election with the same kind of majority they have recorded in 1999 or 2003 when in most states and especially the home base of the President himself, the total number of votes cast was far bigger than the number registered. That result tells you right away that something went wrong along the way. That observation is going to repeat itself this time around again in a more egregious fashion if the inertia of the current INEC is anything to go by. If in eight years the PDP Government has failed to effect a change in our electoral readiness, that should be seen as an index of failure
The mere fact that the President and the Vice President are now sworn enemies and the mere fact that the ruling party has lost most of its original members and founders to other parties is a clear indication that a lot of things have gone wrong. If the Party is so divided and polarized that the legislature controlled by it, has now voted to indict the leadership of the party, what more evidence do the voters need to prove that the PDP has woefully failed? If their own members and Legislature have cast a vote of no confidence in their leadership what credibility do they now have to impress the majority to vote for them. Definitely a party that is not able to put its own house in order, can hardly impress anybody, and least of all the opposition to come to their rescue.. It is that simple.
There is something we all can agree on with reference to General Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar. They were certainly not elected to go engage in business either directly or using surrogates and proxies to establish and carry on lucrative businesses while they are supposed to devote all of their energy to serving the nation. Usually anybody who is lucky enough to become President or Vice President of an oil rich country like Nigeria cannot be expected to go out of office in abject penury. We all understand that. By the same, token nobody expects the two candidates to go plunder our nations's treasury to an extent that the two of them are now a hundred times richer and more financially buoyant than they were eight years ago. No one would expect them to completely abandon what they were elected to do and to start diverting the wealth of the nation to start building their own private financial empires at the expense of the nation.
One can understand military leaders doing that kind of thing, not elected leaders. The Military usually takes over power by force and they are not answerable to any one but their colleagues who put them to power and can remove them using the same barrel of the gun in a heartbeat. Military Government by nature is an illegality. They came to power by breaking the rule and setting aside the Constitution, to begin with. Their failure could easily have meant instant death thru a firing squad. They knew that going in, and that is why they usually don't feel bound by any public interest, regardless of what they might be saying to the contrary. IBB and Sanni Abacha are two fine examples of that. Both of them have treated the state like their own private estate. No wonder, they both left office with more money and assets than they can ever need, even if they leave for a thousand years.
They both exercised power of life and death over their people The key to the nation's treasury was in their hands and they allocated oil drilling permits which account for 98 per cent of the total revenues of Nigeria to anyone they like. They imported merchandize free of charge without paying a Kobo thereby encouraging serving Custom officials under them like Atiku and the rest of them to start pocketing most of the revenues that should be going to Government. They enriched people they want to enrich, no questions asked. That was how come reckless dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko in particular was once named as the richest man in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records.
I recall visiting Kinshasa in 1981 as a member of a delegation of a CAFRAD (African Training and Research Center in Administration for Development) based in Tangiers, Morocco. The delegation was led, at the time by, Chief Oluyemi Falae as the first non-Moroccan Chairman of CAFRAD in more than 40 years of CAFRAD's existence Our delegation was sent to persuade Mobutu not to reject the appointment of one Thomas Kanza, an Oxford trained intellectual who was, at the time, a visiting Professor at Harvard before applying to succeed Dr. Kariuki who was leaving CAFRAD after six years.As a delegate representing Nigeria in the CAFRAD Board of Trustees I was privileged to serve as Chairman to the recruitment panel that picked Professor Kanza as the best candidate to succeed Dr. Kariuki. My panel wasn't going to accept the decision of President Mobutu to veto the appointment, simply because Professor Kanza was labeled an enemy of Zaire by Mobutu because he was part of the opposition or Government in exile fighting to topple Mobutu. We made a case thru a resolution and won the majority that insisted that President Mobutu must not be allowed to have his way. A delegation had to be sent to Zaire to explain our position to the President in deference to protocol.
Unfortunately our delegation arrived in Kinshasa at a time Mobutu has declared a one week holiday for the entire country to enable him swear in some 122 handpicked citizens he had nominated to serve as his Parliament in response to too much pressure from the opposition in Zaire.. Mobutu had invited the whole world to witness the facade by spending billions of dollars to celebrate their swearing-in ceremony at the "Palace du Merchand" in downtown Kinshasa. The dictator had ridden to the stadium in an open four door Mercedes Benz bullet-proof Limousine accompanied by his wife and her identical twin sister.
Mobutu was seated between the two smashing beauties holding a carved crocodile as his staff of office. I have never seen anything remotely close to that spectacle not even with the Queen of England. Mobutu's limousine was surrounded by 68 escort riders dressed in full ceremonial uniform and with their head lights turned on in broad day light. Not even Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah or Napoleon himself could have pulled up such a spectacle. I have never seen anything like it.
I couldn't help but whisper to Chief Oluyemi as we were ushered into the stadium as part of the guests of Mobutu. I was asking Chief Falae if he had ever seen anything like it and he said "hell no". I followed up that question by wondering aloud how much it would have cost to put the whole nation on hold for a whole one week, quite apart from the millions of dollars the President was going to bill the nation for masterminding such a spectacular show. After the swearing-in ceremony, the more than a thousand guests were driven back to a lavish entertainment by the President at his home village in Gbadolite in the outskirts of Kinshasa. The multi-million Taj Mahal was a crawling mansion of so many chalets with every chalet and the main building built with pure marble, including the 10 feet fence with a golden gate that was far more expensive than what you will normally find in Elise Palace or the Buckingham Palace. I was dumbfounded. I knew there and then the man would rather die in office than quit office ,even with a gun pointed at his head. Having gone that far in life, it was not easy to give it all away as Obasanjo's insistence to foist a third term agenda on Nigeria must have reminded us. I think Maslow got it all correct in his "Hierarchy of Needs" when he predicted that as one set of needs are being met, a different set of need emerge until the self actualization phase sets in for all human being.
I recall this story to show why another military take-over in Nigeria should be seen as an abomination our worst enemies cannot even wish our country. Mobutu Sese Seko used to own everything that is worth anything in Zaire just like our Obasanjo and Atiku are trying to do today by reason of all they have acquired in their eight years . I am aware that Atiku as a retired Deputy Head of Customs in Nigeria before going into politics was filthy rich already. But was he satisfied? Hell no, I would have to say. I thought Obasanjo, the guardian angel and champion of honesty in Government should have known that before tapping Atiku for Vice President in 1999.
It is not enough to just go around telling people you are fighting Corruption in low and high places when you daily surround yourselves with pen robbers and criminals who would stop at nothing to do our nation in.
The two of them, Obasanjo and Atiku virtually own Nigeria today, because they have bath sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I truly believe they have failed the nation, and most Nigerians would never know the true ramifications of their damage to the nation until after they have left office. It is a prediction.
I am only going to concern myself in this article with their competition to establish private Universities of their own at a time most of the Federal Universities in Nigeria are collapsing and falling apart due to abysmal neglect. It makes no sense at all that our two national leaders have now joined the likes of Igbinedion to start building their own private Universities presumably with funds stolen from the same Federal Government.
Who does not know that establishing a university is a capital intensive project that can only be floated by individuals who have reached a point in their financial well being and stability that they can no longer be intimidated by a downturn in their fortune.. Instead of investing money on public education like Azikiwe, Awolowo and Sardauna Bello had done when they established Nsukka, Ife and Zaria for the benefit of Nigerians, Obasanjo and Atiku were falling over each other to see who would beat the other in setting up their own Universities.
Obasanjo tells the world his Bell University would be among the best in the world while Atiku names his own University ABTI formed from his first name "Abubakar" and "Titi", the name of his first wife. Ordinarily speaking, there should be nothing wrong with any Nigerian setting up as many Universities as they can afford, but they have to also think or agonize on how to absorb those graduates once they graduate..
With so many Universities in Nigeria today, it is common knowledge that the standard of education is falling. Most of their products are half baked graduates who cannot write simple English. Most of them have poorly equipped Libraries that fall far short of the research needs of their lecturers and students across the board.
I recently paid a visit to my alma mater the University of Ife and I could not help but recall the good old days of Professor H. A. Oluwasanmi who made the University the envy of all Nigerians. The University Library that bears his name is today an empty shell. Unbelievable.. I could almost cry. When I asked the Librarian about what could be responsible for this development, all he could tell me was Government neglect and mismanagement and the abject indiscipline of the students themselves who indulge in stealing away most of the books. The University is so starved of funds that it cannot afford to replace many of those books. Compared with ordinary community college libraries in the United States, the University of Ife Library has become an effigy of its old self.
Obasanjo and Atiku by their initiative are indirectly telling the nation they have lost faith in our university system and all they now want to do is build their own Universities as a counter force or competitor to public university system. I know some will praise their effort as an investment in Nigeria rather than taking their wealth abroad. Such people definitely have a point to say that, but my point is that there are other areas of need that the two of them should have addressed their mind to. I recall Lateef Kayode Jakande's civilian administration in Lagos and the decision of his Government to build LASU for the benefit of the general public.
The same Jakande had initiated a Mass transit system that would have profoundly transformed Lagos in a heartbeat. The best that a blind military Governor of Lagos State named Lawal could do, was to summarily cancel the project as a sheer waste of money. That project would have cost only a fraction of what it would cost today, and it is a complete misplacement of priority, if you ask me. Many of our leaders and especially the present duo of Obasanjo and Atiku are the worse culprits of the same mistake.
I am not at all impressed when I hear Obasanjo boast of how much Nigeria now has now stockpiled into her foreign reserve account, as we speak. Keeping that money in the foreign reserve while our oil refineries are in total state of disrepair and our universities and teaching hospitals across the country are rotting away is a tragedy. This spectacle reminds me of the Madeline Albright's doctrine of military power and supremacy when he tells America it makes no sense for America to have the most sophisticated military arsenal in the world, but are so scared to use it when the nation's security interest is threatened or jeopardized.
That observation informed her advice to President Clinton to try and resolve the Bosnia/Herzegovina/Kosov/Croatia crisis thru massive air power that brilliantly ended the conflict unlike the Pyrrhic victory that might now be the legacy of American quagmire in Iraq, even if Americans pull out of Iraq today without losing one more American soldier. Why is Nigeria amassing foreign reserve it can not deploy to solve many of the nation's critical problems. Much of that foreign reserve could predictably lose its value and worth by the time we are ready to spend it. In any case, that foreign reserve could be easily frittered away when a more callous Government than the one we currently have, come into power again, just like happened when the Umaru Dikkos and the Henry Akinloyes of this world quickly blew away the foreign reserve left by Obasanjo in 1979. When is Obasanjo ever going to learn his lessons?
That said, I want to address some of the things that Obasanjo and Atiku could possibly have spent their stolen money upon, if they really love Nigeria like they profess. I congratulate Dokpesi of Aganabode for his effort at setting up the Nigeria equivalent of the CNN in the African sub region. Rather than Obasanjo Government working in tandem with Dokpesi to use the African Independent Television to lay a more solid foundation for Democracy to thrive in our country, Obasanjo seems more interested in using the AIT as a propaganda machine in support of his foolish and ill-advised third term agenda. He was even prepared to take AIT off the air, because Dokpesi would not play ball.
If Obasanjo truly loves Nigeria, he would even have gone a step further than Dokpesi to set up a body or encourage the private sector to set up a body like the C-Span station in America which is privately run in the United States. If Obasanjo and Atiku had diverted much of their stolen millions into establishing such a body, they would have gone a long way to consolidate the gains of our nascent democracy . Having a station like the C-Span would have made it possible to cover most, if not all of the debates in both Houses of our Legislature. That would have put on the spot so many of our legislators and senators who only go to Abuja to share their loot and take kickbacks offered by the Executive.
How could Obasanjo and Atiku run a transparent Government if most of the decisions of the Legislature are held in secret. Such a station would have made it possible to organize debates among candidates running for Chairman of Council. Governor or Senator and President in our country. If Obasanjo has debated Oluyemi Falae in 1999 just like Alhaji Tofa was compelled to debate M.K.O. in 1993, our nation would have been better served.
Yar 'Adua, another reluctant candidate is running for President today and he is hoping to win without telling anybody what he plans to do, and how he is going to be different from Obasanjo, the man who is imposing him on the whole country. I continue to say that if Obasanjo's modus operandi is accepted as the gold standard for governance in the future, our country is in deep trouble. I consider myself a stakeholder in the enterprise called Nigeria and that is why I feel so concerned.
One good thing coming out of the Atiku/Obasanjo encounter is the fact that Atiku himself may not fully appreciate yet. Call Atiku any name you want, he has earned my respect and the respect of most Nigerians by standing up to this President and forcing him to retreat from his third term agenda. Atiku has proved himself to be a rock of stability in making Democracy thrive in our country by rising up to the attempt of Obasanjo to create a one Party dictatorship in Nigeria.
That was one big battle worth fighting and Atiku has proved himself to be the number one leader of that War. Atiku may have lost the battle for now. If he stays the course, he may, jolly well, win the War when all is said and done It is true that he may have been irredeemably damaged to be a force to reckon with in the coming election, even if he wins his case against Professor Maurice Iwu and his sectional INEC. There is still something going for him that could predictably make him President in the foreseeable future if he lives long enough. Even if he never again becomes President, he has led a movement that posterity will never forget.
I honestly believe he was terribly underrated by Obasanjo going into this War. Atiku has recorded a lot more victories in the Court of Law to make him the future of democracy in our country, if he stays the course. I think History would be kinder to him when all is said and done.
I rest my case. Dr. Wunmi Akintide.
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