PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Obasanjo’s Agenda for Reform

kudugana@yahoo.com

There is no doubt that President Olusegun Obasanjo would like to go down in Nigeria’s history as its most reform minded leader. Whether it is his politics or socio-economics, our president would clearly like to be seen as Nigeria’s equivalent of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher who pulled all stops to roll back the public sector by privatizing just about everything she could lay her hands on.

At the end of her ten-year reign, Mrs. Thatcher did succeed in taming the labour unions that she regarded as being among the biggest obstacles in her way. However, she had little success in rolling back the public sector; at the end of it all, she was able to reduce public expenditure as a percentage of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product by only a miserable 3%. This was according to a survey of the world economy by The Economist of September 20, 1997. In 1980 at the beginning of her reign as prime minister, public expenditure was 43% of the country’s GDP. By 1990 it dropped to only 39.9. Six years later, it inched back to 41.9.

The main reason for her failure was not difficult to fathom; her grouse against so-called Big Government was apparently not its size as such, but the class of people on which it was spending the preponderance of the tax payers’ money. Thatcher sought power really to redress the balance between, on the one hand, money government was spending on transport, education, health, housing, welfare, etc, for the poor, and, on the other, money government was spending on defense and on generally subsidizing Big Business. All the talk about the lack of virtue of Big Government was really mere rhetoric to camouflage her attempt to shift the balance of government expenditure in even greater favour of Big Business.

In the last four and half years since Obasanjo returned to rule this country, he has trumpeted his commitment to reform Nigeria’s politics and socio-economics on uncountable number of occasions. Henceforth, he always said on such occasions, there will never again be “business as usual”. For the first four years, however, it was apparent that his government was anything but unusual. Indeed, if there was anything unusual about government during the period it was the steep decline from previous levels of just about every index of development – transparency, efficiency, accountability, education, health and other infrastructure, you name it.

Since returning for the second term following the dubious results of the last general elections, the president has proclaimed himself a brand new man who is determined this time to initiate and push through his agenda for reform, no matter what.

On the political front, he has started with an agenda to reform our local government system. And only last week he revisited his commitment to reform the country’s party system. This was during his speech at the opening ceremony of the two-day INEC-Civil Society Seminar on “Agenda for Electoral Reform” which took place on November 27 and 28. 

On the socio-economic front, the president has been relentlessly pushing his policies of monetization of public sector perks, “deregulation”, privatization and pensions’ reform. However, in   politics as in socio-economics, it is apparent that the president’s reforms are proving a hard sale, what with the popular opposition to these reforms.

The question is, will the president succeed where Mrs. Thatcher has failed, and where the New-Kid-on-the Reformist-Block, President George W. Bush, on his current showing alone – barely three years into his presidency, he is already running one of the biggest budget deficits in American history, all in a bid to please Big Business to which, he, of course, belongs – is likely to be a worse failure.

The odds against the president’s success are, I am afraid, simply insurmountable, especially in the area of socio-economics. The president may deny it, as they always do, but his socio-economic policies are simply the gospels according to the World Bank and the IMF. To date no country has acted out those scripts and faired well. The president, I am sure, will remember General Ibrahim Babangida was there before him and in the end the country faired worse. Indeed, the president, I am sure, will remember taking Babangida to the cleaners for listening to the World Bank and IMF even though Babangida had protested that his socio-economic reforms were “home-grown.” Surely, as the president espouses his own socio-economic reforms, especially with Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a senior World Bank official on sabbatical, as his minister of finance, he must be having this feeling of deja vu.

All this is not to say everything the World Bank and the IMF say and do, are, by definition, wrong. Sometimes they are right as when they argue that producing economic goods and services like cars, clothes, air travel, etc are best left to the private sector just as they are wrong when they say that social goods like public transport, health, education, should also be left to the private sector.

The basic problem with the World Bank and the IMF is that they put profit before everything else. Consequently, anyone who follows them blindly, as we have done before and we seem to be doing now, is bound to get lost. Anyone who says social equity – as opposed to equality – is not as important – if not more so – as profit, is hardly ever likely to lead anyone else to the promised  land.

Now, whereas the president seems to have a liberal disposition in his socio-economics, he clearly has a command mindset in his politics.  We have a president on our hands who has said he prefers a local government system which is an administrative unit of a state rather than an elected autonomous unit. This is also a president who is on record as saying he prefers a one-party state, and failing that, a state with no more than three parties.

Whether it is one party or three, this president clearly prefers the narrowing, rather than the expanding, of political choice. Anyone who thinks his command mindset   of his years as a military ruler, at least in politics, in a thing of the past, need go no further than his address last Thursday to the INEC-Civil Society seminar on electoral reform, to think again.

“I have no hesitation”, the president said, “in affirming the view that parties that fail to perform the basic function of aggregating, articulating and representing social concerns should be deregistered, in the same manner that they satisfied the conditions for registration in the first place. Parties which exist only to collect grants from government, or fail to submit to the basic demands for accountability and transparency, or who fail to achieve an acceptable minimum of impact during elections, must be sanctioned by being de-registered where necessary”.

The president expressed strong views on other issues on democracy and on elections as democracy’s most important imperative, but his position on the de-registration of parties, essentially because they fail to win elections, was perhaps his most controversial view on that occasion. This was especially so coming in the wake of a similar position expressed by a National Commissioner of INEC. INEC itself has since denounced the commissioner but the president’s restatement of the same position can only make the public wonder if INEC’s denouncement of its commissioner was not merely an attempt to cover up a hidden presidential agenda for narrowing the political space ahead of the next general elections in 2007. 

The president’s address calls for an analysis all of its own. God willing, the address, along with other major suggestions for the reform of the country’s electoral reform, will form the subject of next week’s column. Today, however, I am restricting myself only to his controversial call for the deregistration of political parties for no worse crime than a failure to win an election.

At least two things are clearly wrong with the call. First, parties exist not merely to win elections. Indeed, winning elections is arguably not even their most important function. Besides, Section 224 of the Constitution which stipulates that “The programme as well as the aims and objects of a political party, shall conform with the provisions of Chapter II of this Constitution” says nothing about winning elections. This chapter lists a dozen objectives and directive principles of state policy. None of these is about achieving “an acceptable minimum of impact during elections”, to use the president’s words. Failure to win elections, or for that matter to even field candidates, cannot, therefore, be a basis for deregistering any party.

Not only is the president wrong to use success at elections as a criterion for the continued registration of parties, he is wrong to assume that parties must be registered in the first place. True, the Constitution provides for the registration of parties, although it is somewhat liberal in prescribing the conditions for registration. However, this whole idea of registering parties, far from being based on sound theory and practice, was merely a reflection of the command mindset of the military which gave us the 1979 Presidential Constitution which has only been tinkered with since then.

The rational for registering parties is that if you allow a free-for-all, the consequence will be anarchy. However, that this is false logic can be seen from the fact that The First Republic, where we had a free-for-all, was no more anarchic than all the subsequent Republics to date. Nor are India and the Caribbean Commonwealth countries like Jamaica, where democratic traditions are deeply rooted despite their ethnic, racial and sectarian divisions, any more anarchic than Nigeria because they have allowed for a free-for-all.

So instead of talking about deregistering political parties because they fail to win elections, we should be talking about modifying Sections 221 and 222 of the Constitution to allow not only for all manner of political parties, but also for independent candidates.

Re: In defence of Local Government Reform Committee

The reader will remember that the recent submission of the report of local government  reform  committee to the president was the subject of this column last week. My former boss and professional god-father, Malam Turi Muhammadu called after reading it to ask if I had a change of mind about the committee, considering my skepticism about the president’s motive in setting it up. Another reader, Jonas Okwara,   was much less charitable. He sent me an e-mail to which he attached my skeptical piece, presumably to prove I was full of “Contradiction” with six exclamation marks!

Well, I have neither changed my mind about my suspicions of the motive behind setting up the committee. Neither have I contradicted myself. My skeptical piece, which was an open letter to the committee’s first chairman, the late Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako, was to warn him to be careful about accepting the assignment from Obasanjo. I did not say he should reject it. After all, one can carry out an assignment in contradiction to the hidden agenda of one’s patron.