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April 2007 Elections: The Civil Society and the Moment of Truth in Nigeria By Adagbo Onoja
The Nigerian civil society is up in arms against the conduct and outcome of the April elections. That is what the communiqué of its meeting at Abuja on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 suggests. The long list of the organizations involved in that meeting made the communiqué a source of excitement. This excitement is not because they are protesting the elections vigorously but because the fact that so many are sufficiently pained suggests the possible return of the old fire to civil society politics. This should excite all of us given the way that old fire virtually disappeared from the politics of civil society these past four years. It so much disappeared that its anti-third term campaign was, by previous standards, miserable, with meetings marred by civil society kingpins excusing themselves from one task or another because they are committed to superintending one aspect of the reform programme of the Obasanjo regime or another. That appears to have changed, what with the fire fighting it is now capable of.
The question though still remains whether such fire-fighting will go anywhere beyond secret dinners with regime do-gooders like Nasir el-Rufai and possibly followed with some concessions. In the next few days, we shall see if it will be otherwise. That is if the regime does not order NTA to start playing some tapes which would completely de-legitimize the civil society leadership because of the way such tapes will embarrass the leading lights of the civil society. That is also if the PDP has not arranged its own counter rally to the opposition protests, hoping to checkmate the potentials of that opposition methodology.
I know that many elements in the civil society associate my position with their own presumption that my association with Alhaji Sule Lamido has put me in a situation where I cannot say anything against the PDP. Ordinarily, it is not worth responding to such wind-bagging, given that 70 % of my journalism, from my columns in Daily Trust, then The Comet and now in The Nation have been against the reform programme of the current regime. Sule Lamido has never called to ask me why I wrote whatever I have written. This is probably because he himself ran even more caustic comments against the West in its relationship with Africa, (in other words, the reform) when he was the Foreign Affairs Minister from 1999-2003. Listening and observing him at every forum, from ECOWAS to OAU/AU, the Non-Aligned Countries, G-77, UN, etc was always like listening to a Nigerian student union leader in the mid 1980s. So, there is nothing to apologize about my relationship with someone like him still using concepts which many of us have been sufficiently intimidated by our funders to abandon. More so as far as my claims above about Lamido and my own records of anti-reform journalism are available for perusal, from Nigerian newspapers of the period to search machines. In other words, there is no problem of opportunism or myopia on my part arising from that relationship, a claim which a bulk of my fellow travelers in the civil society cannot make, both at personal, institutional and movement level, given their neck-deep consultancy involvement with the regime through the stars of the so-called reform such as Okonjo Iweala, Oby Ezekwesili, Nasir el-Rufai, Charles Soludo, etc. There is nothing wrong in getting and executing consultancies and one is not a money - hater either. It is just a matter of, principle, if you like.
There is a sense though in which I am PDP minded and which I have made public in my reporting ever since. It has to do with my soft spot for Umaru Yar’Adua solely on account that he was an activist of radical nationalism in his campus days and had association with the PRP in the second republic. Now, this is significant in so far as there is no disagreement in Nigeria that the PRP is the tallest approximation of the radical impulse in Nigerian politics. This orientation, like Lamido’s, might have been diluted from the distortions, aberrations and temptations of Nigerian politics but it cannot be so without traces in his sub-consciousness unless time proves otherwise.
But I am not with anybody in a way that will blind me to danger signs in the system. I am also not committed to anybody as not to join forces with like minds in compelling a remedy of a great bungling especially in this particular case which involves an election, the bedrock of constitutional democracy. The debasement of election is something that should pain anyone because it is a major problem of democratization in our clime. But even then, every contradiction must have its context, the recognition of which should be the take-off point in any reasonable struggle. This is what the civil society protest programme has not done and it shows in its studied response to this election.
The civil society says that the April elections should be cancelled because the PDP rigged massively. The communiqué canvassed a series of unobjectionable civic, political, religious and judicial activism against the rigging because, according to it,
The first issue of interest here are the expressions such as ‘the will of the people as the basis of the authority of our rulers’, ‘By these extreme acts of impunity our people have lost control of the forces that govern them’, etc. These expressions suggested to me that those who drafted the communiqué have been talking and listening to themselves about the dynamics of Nigerian politics for too long. Otherwise, how can they be saying this in the eight year of a regime in which people in power at every level of government have exceeded all the excesses imaginable? It ought not to be this election that we would, therefore, be realizing that our people lost control of the forces that govern them. That happened the moment President Obasanjo started to implement in earnest what he called a reform program. As every one knows, the reform program as developed and supervised by the World Bank has no place for human beings but big foreign companies and their profits. Since then, it has been hell for the average Nigerian. The Obasanjo reform was compounded by the insensitivity and callousness of the technocrats imported to superintend it. The disempowerment, poverty and alienation created by their handling of the reform are what have really infuriated Nigerians against the regime and, by implication, the conduct of the election. It is not the election per see since all elections in Nigeria have been rigged, and by every participating political party relative to its capacity to rig. This was what General Buhari told us in 1983 and General Buhari is a man tested and trusted in telling the truth.
It is, therefore, intriguing that the civil society is pretending to be shocked, talking about rigging in 2007 being unprecedented. Why should we just be shocked when a substantial number of the members of the out-going National Assembly came in not even by rigging in 2003 but by name substitution?
Do not the leaders of the civil society find any contradiction in rejecting the results of the April elections which is the political side of the economic brigandage called reform in which they have been participating enthusiastically? Is it possible that it has never been clear to civil society leaders that the impulse which propelled the economic side of the reform would also define the conduct of the election? Have we seen any departing reform regime allow a free and fair election which would bring its enemies into power with the risk of review and or reversal of sale of SOEs? Is this not why reform everywhere in the third world is a tunnel which leads the implementing countries into war?
Did this civil society reflect thoroughly on why it has been possible for the rulers of Nigeria at various levels of power to commit all they have committed in the last seven or so years, of which this election is just one of them? Does the civil society think it can reverse the results of the election without first questioning that entire superstructure that produced it?
And are we not shouting too late? Was it not the time we should have shouted that we were busy holding workshops and seminars eulogizing Ngozi Iweala for her great wisdom in introducing Fiscal Responsibility Bill or Oby Ezekwesili on NEITI Bill and so on? Have we forgotten how we simply rejected the argument that the FRB should be predicated on a Social Bill of Rights at the Kaduna Session on the Bill organized by CISLAC? Any third world country whose civil society began to celebrate the emergence of World Bank technocrats as its Minister of Finance, Central Bank Chief, Head of Budget Office, Debt Management Office, etc should keep quiet when elections are rigged except if it precedes such retracing of footsteps with a serious soul searching and public admission of naiveté. It is true that the civil society is neither a homogenous entity nor a national liberation political organization but Nigeria is not the only place where the civil society is a force in politics. In the other places, they have maintained a social movement character, even in industrial economies but especially in third world countries where most of the educated elements today, born on top of leaves being children of poor peasants without access to clinics, should be more sensitive to unbridled market reform in a basically pre-literate society like Nigeria.
It is our informed distance from social movement politics that makes us wait to condemn the outcome of processes that other forces defined and set in motion, turning us into professionals in preparing ground for some other strange forces to hijack the fruits of civil society’s mobilisational competencies. For, even the apolitical civil society rapidly replacing the era symbolized by NANS, NMA, ASUU, WIN and the NLC in the 1980s should see how forces completely strange to the struggle came and took advantage of the bush clearing by the Campaign for Democracy inspired protests in the June 12 crisis.
It should be clear by now that unless you stage a coup today and successfully dismantle the Obasanjo regime, it will be difficult to dislodge Umaru Yar’Adua from consummating his victory. Although there are bound to be contradictions between certain key individuals in the politics of making Yar’Adua president, all of them in there appreciate the dangers of disordered departure and they will rally round the president-elect, hoping to settle their quarrels internally up to a point. They have no choice if only because they have too many enemies. They manufactured so many enemies because of OBJ’s essentialism that the trouble with Nigeria is its colonization by power cliques who proceed to hand out bounties to friends, followers and faithfuls. The only way for the country to make progress is to cut-off such people permanently from access to power, something that OBJ and his disciples believe only OBJ can accomplish. Hence Ribadu would say that thieves would never rule this country again and things like that without taking into context that such pronouncements have its alienating consequences. But those in government know how to stabilize the system through some in-class reconciliation process even as we assume that the Nigerian power elite is too diverse in their diversity to have a constitutive interest.
That diversity is there but it nevertheless has certain individuals who have come to symbolize major fractions of it such as General Babangida, Atiku Abubakar, to mention just those. These are individuals who, somehow, have large members of the power elite following them, and can restrain or inflame them.
To the extent of this iron law of class politics, there should have been more caution before the civil society opened fire on the presidential election result. Failing that, it has merely placed a demand without distinguishing the primary from the secondary contradiction and without any substitute arrangement other than an interim government to which popular interest will equally not be an issue.
How would the interim government implied in the communiqué be an alternative to the people of Bauchi, Plateau, Jigawa , Niger , Kano , Abia, Sokoto, Lagos and the FCT where the election, warts and all, have produced fairly popular and acceptable winners? Would Buhari, for example, be able to convince the ANPP governors and governors-elect now to renounce their mandate and join him in insisting on a re-run of the elections? And is the civil society not siding one faction against the other instead of one ideological camp against the other? These are some of the contradictions that the April elections have already thrown up but which it seems civil society’s rejectionism thought about.
In the same way that it has also not thought about the point made by Raila Odinga, the veteran opposition politician from Kenya who monitored the April 21 presidential election in Jos, Plateau State . He told the VOA that opposition parties in Nigeria are no more than election parties and they lack the coherence to defeat an incumbent in a transition election. This is an observation we should take very seriously, for journalistic, sociological and political reasons unless there are undeclared objectives for the anti-rigging protest.
I am still to be convinced that the various layers of opposition to the conduct and outcome of the election are united by their distaste for rigging. It cannot be so since many of those opposed to the election result have done nothing but rig elections throughout their political career. I am more inclined to believe that much of the opposition is to the assumption that as an OBJ nominee, Umaru Yar’Adua would be like OBJ. This is a sound fear but it is still only a fear. Some of us are assuming that Umaru Yar’Adua’s education and sense of self would not allow him to sustain an uncooked reform on the country. But this too is speculative. What is not speculative is whether he will replicate OBJ or not will depend substantially on the quality of opposition politics, the civil society and the media, among others. There is nothing that would stop power from degenerating if these three main actors do not, individually and collectively, pose a qualitative counter to political power. And they cannot pose anything qualitative if they do not define and mobilise around clear issues or agenda capable of own defenders.
There is thus a challenge to pose a truly popular agenda beyond dry concepts from the World Bank. Such would determine civil society’s relationship with the state. My contribution to the search for such a popular agenda is still my advocacy for the developmental state. The concept of a developmental state is one which frightens people because of its extreme human rights violations. But an African state desirous of transformation cannot avoid it. I still have no better articulation of the imperative of the developmental state than the one done by Dr. Peter Ozo-Eson, Chief Economist of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, who has argued that
Ozo-Eson’s response to the claim that we need reform to cure corruption and mismanagement in government companies is that if the problems were those of non-performance, corruption, political interference, patronage and all that, why isn’t the reform about changing the way we operate, so that Nigeria too can run public enterprises well such as the wholly state owned South African energy company now branching out and even bidding for Nigerian state owned enterprises, (SOEs).
Without heeding this advise, what one has said about past Nigerian leaders would apply to Yar’Adua in the end. That is that, auctioning government property without building any new ones will get him into the structural context in Africa which makes the good leaders “simply those waiting to get into those very positions that eventually turn them into bad rulers”. One had wondered what OBJ’s national and global stature today would have been if he had concentrated on only Ajaokuta steel mill since 1999. With about 23 industries synchronized, with by-products of one serving as raw materials for another, Ajaokuta complex could produce not only steel but also fertilizer, industrial gases, rail-line castings and just about any other things. That made it the hub of the industrial take off of the country, harmonizing agriculture and industry.
That is industrialization. The point about industrialization as the most rapid way to develop is that it never fails: industrialisation means employment, employment means paying wages, standard wages means income stability which means raising standard of living, urbanisation and the pluralism (appreciation of differences, sense of moderation and tolerance for' otherness', human rights consciousness, etc) that marks modernity.
Industrialisation means that you don’t disaggregate development into parts and begin to prioritise, bedevilling it with emphasis on electricity, roads and hospitals as if they are separate kettles or bowels. We rarely inquire if there is one thing which we must get first and which can bring all these other ones concurrently with it.
For, in practice, there is an automatic connection between industrialisation and any arena of development. Infrastructure development, for example, is tied to the industrial pattern. Giant factories must have water supply. They either build their own water system or they put sufficient pressure on government to put a water system in place. This water system must be maintained at a functional level because otherwise, the factory cannot function.
This is the same connection between industry and education in that industries generally require quality manpower. To produce quality manpower, there have to be schools well organised to achieve that. So, an educational system emerges whose end products can think on their feet as far as the law and order requirement of the industrial society is concerned (which means producing good sociologists, criminologists, policy science products that can function intelligently in the police, Customs, inland revenue, prisons, etc), as far as marketing of goods and services are concerned (which means producing good graduates in accounting, insurance, marketing), as far as factory production itself is concerned (which means producing people who can be administration, commercial, production managers or supervisors and run the industry to profitability and market leadership).
Additionally, the children of the workers that an industrial plant has brought together in a particular location must go to good schools and this has to be provided for, either by establishing a staff children school or some special arrangement. Either way, this improves the educational system in the society. It is the only reason why education is always one of the biggest beneficiaries in all industrial societies.
In Nigeria, the problem is that we decide to increase or decrease universities, for example, on political terms, not on the basis of industry driven demand for them. It is not surprising that our universities are just mere prestige things, merely producing unusable materials simply because they have no mass end users such as industries that would insist on minimum quality of higher school products.
Today, we are endlessly quoting of Malaysia or Singapore and other South Asian countries without indicating that the only reason they are so quoted is because they are industrialised. But according to Richard Synge in the 40th anniversary edition of Africa Confidential in 2000, (p.14)
The argument, therefore, is that the problems of Nigeria, from real income crisis to infrastructure decay to prevalence of infections or of crime and violence, unemployment, infrastructure collapse, slums, troubling pattern of rural-urban drift, collapse of culture and values, corruption, land degradation, escalating maternal and infant mortality rates and violent conflicts, are typical of semi-industrial economies all over third world countries of Nigeria's type. Some of these countries manage their resources better but all of them who have failed to industrialise face the same problems. That is why slums in North American countries like the USA or Canada are different from slums and the ghettos of Lagos, Laos or Bogota.
The point about industrialisation as the starting point in development was very well appreciated by all the regional leaders of Nigeria in the first republic. That was how industrial estates sprang up in Ikeja and Kakuri based on agricultural commodities in which the regions had comparative advantage. In the case of the North, the Textile industrialisation alone, for instance, gave farmers income stability, it created jobs for their sons in the emergent urban centre Kaduna, the Textiles served as training ground for the production of manpower, particularly of managers and supervisor grades. So, there was something for everyone-the peasant farmers and their children, the "working class", the business elements (marketers, middlemen, transporters, bulk breakers, etc) and, above all, the investors.
The fact, though, is that the industrialisation strategy of development during the first republic took place within two particular constraints- the conflictual domestic context of Nigerian polity and the import-substitution-industrialisation strategy that was its global context. The outcome, even if the government was not overthrown, would still have not been sustainable because it is problematic.
Still, in bringing back the issue of development to the agenda of politics in Nigeria, the emphasis should not be in trying to do so by creating different committees or bodies on water, on roads, on agriculture, on education, etc. There should be adopted an industrialisation strategy which automatically takes on board agriculture and, therefore, human security.
Codifying and pushing this as a minimum seem to me to be a more worthy point to fight than remedying musical chairs like election rigging in itself. I do not think a civil society can successfully fight a major manifestation of social decay like election rigging without some attention to its systemic background. It is worse if it is a background we closed our eyes to its dangers earlier. Unless we want to be like Nuhu Ribadu who wants to eradicate corruption from the society completely relying on a law and order approach! But while Nuhu may be excused for relying on the professional motif of the policeman, the Nigerian civil society cannot be excused because it has an enviable concentration of the most politically educated middle class elements in Nigeria, more than any political party in the country. Therefore, it has no excuse not guiding this society in dialectical reckoning with reality and in more advanced management of contradictions.
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