PEOPLE
& POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Great Siege
Going by the spate of banditry and killings in this country of recent it should not surprise anyone if, in a not too distant future, the level of insecurity in Nigeria catches up with its dismal record as the second most corrupt country in the world. Even on its current showing alone, Nigeria seems to have become a country without law and without order. Since the beginning of this year alone, the country has witnessed so much killings, President Obasanjo himself has been forced to admit that its level of insecurity has discouraged foreign investors from coming. The president, talking from my own first hand experience, can say that again. As a victim of banditry, my family and I are veterans of sorts. Since 1992 we have been robbed, burgled and stalked at least nine times, four of them at gun-point. The last one was two Friday’s ago when I lost my two-months old top of the line KIA Optima to armed bandits at about 10pm on the busy streets of Abuja. It was my most traumatic and painful experience so far; the hefty boss of the bandits who snatched the car had his cocked pistol right on my head as he forced me to lie on the back seat for what seemed an eternal drive around the streets of Abuja before they finally and mercifully dropped me off in the vicinity of the National Mosque. As for the car itself I bought it only after selling off my 11 year old Honda Accord to which I had become sentimentally attached but which was making too many trips to the mechanics, plus also after mortgaging a piece of land I had in Abuja. I had the option to sell off my somewhat under utilized Freelander jeep, but the buying price was so ridiculous I was better off parking it in the garage. The week I lost my car two friends lost their jeeps, two more had their homes raided, one at the unlikely 07.30 hours of the day, and two hapless motorcyclists were gunned down in broad daylight in the course of a futile attempt by a group of bandits to steal a parked jeep, all in the same Kaduna. This is a far as ordinary Nigerians go. When it comes to prominent politicians, the story seems to be even more dramatic. In the first of this month alone, the convoys of two governors in different parts of the country have been attacked by bandits in a most brazen manner, while in Kogi state the interim Chairman of a local government and the chairman of the state’s electoral body were murdered in apparent cold-blood. Nigeria, last week at least, seemed for all intents and purposes, a country completely under the sway of bandits and killers. Obviously, no sensible person would put his money in such a country. The question on everybody’s lips these days are what is the cause of all this? How do we stop it from getting out of hand, if it hasn’t already? The first time I visited an expatriate friend of mine in his office in Kaduna and told him of my ordeal of two Fridays ago, he said I only have myself to blame. “Who do you think is to blame?”, he asked jokingly. At first I didn’t catch his joke and his point. Then he repeated the question and pointed at his old but functional banger through a window with a view to the car park. It was then that I got the joke and we both laughed, he, somewhat nervously, apparently not being sure I took it in good faith. I did. Matters may be somewhat more complicated than my friend’s simple diagnosis of the siege of the country by bandits and killers, but he was essentially right to say that people should not expect to go riding around in fancy cars and living in fancy homes, etc, in a country where there is so much poverty and unemployment and not expect to be robbed. This, my friend said, was why he had decided long ago that he would never ride a fancy car in Nigeria. Matters, as I have just said, are of course not so simple. First, it is not everyone who rides a fancy car or lives in a fancy home that must share in the blame for the poverty and unemployment that seems to have spawn so much banditry and so much killings in Nigeria. Second, just like there are criminals by nurture, there are also criminals by nature. However stripped of these and other complications, I believe my expatriate friend’s joke contained the seed of the solution to the serious problem of insecurity facing Nigeria. I believe the level of violent crime in Nigeria today has a direct link with the most wasteful, irresponsible and callous manner in which the vast majority of our politicians at all levels of government in the country – federal, state and local – have spent the country’s huge oil fortune of the last four years or so. Matters are essentially that simple. Two weeks ago on these same page I referred to an editorial by the New Nigerian of June 29, 1974, in which it predicted the outcome of our profligate ways of the seventies, a period during which a former head of state purportedly said money was not an object but how to spend it. That editorial, I dare say, is the most prophetic any paper has written in this country. “How”, the paper asked in the editorial aptly titled Oil money: Honey or Poison?, will an economic historian 50 years hence explain the relative expenditure on agriculture and on various forms of so-called ‘culture’; All-Africa Games, Black Arts Festival and all the rest of it? HE MUST CONCLUDE THAT WE HAD TAKEN LEAVE OF OUR COLLECTIVE SENSES”. (Emphasis mine). Well, we still have more than 20 years before New Nigerian’s metaphorical historian makes his assessment of what we did with our oil fortunes, but even now it should be pretty obvious to anyone with even half an eye that the New Nigerian hit the bull’s eye. At least three times after the paper warned Nigerians of the bitter wages of profligacy, waste and corruption, we were offered oil windfalls, but each time we blew those windfalls. Of the three windfalls, one each under Presidents Shehu Shagari, Ibrahim Babangida and Obasanjo, the third and the latest is the biggest and the longest running. Indeed the windfall is so big we had the paradox of our president complaining the other day that virtually the only commodity he has on offer was too expensive at over $30 dollars per barrel! Nearly twenty eight years after the New Nigerian condemned our relative expenditure on entertainment and on irrelevancies, history seems to have repeated itself with a vengeance. For, while those we trusted (as if we had any choice) with our public treasures willfully neglected our roads, hospitals and school, etc., they spent vast fortunes on COJA, on CHOGM, on personal aggrandizement, and above all on buying the votes of Nigerians or where that proved difficult or impossible, the politicians simply robbed them of the votes every which way. The result is that instead of using our latest oil fortune to eliminate poverty and unemployment in our midst, we have merely used it to create very few small islands of what the New Nigerian called “soulless opulence” inside vast oceans of poverty. As any sociologist would tell you, nothing breeds crimes, especially violent crimes, like inequity in the distribution of wealth. Every society will always have its few rich and its many poor, but the wider the gap between the two, the greater the spate of crime. This apparently, explains why America, as the world’s wealthiest country but a country which ignores equity in the distribution of that wealth, has one of the highest crimes rates in the world. Yet President Obasanjo more than any other leader before him, seems to have decided that we must follow America’s path to greatness. Worse, not only do we seem to believe there is no alternative to the American way, so far we have copied the Americans in the most wasteful, incompetent and corrupt manner. The big question, of course, is what is the solution to The Great Siege? Even though we seem incapable of knowing how to catch the oil windfalls we had been offered in the past, it is never too late to correct our profligate, wasteful and corrupt ways. The first thing to do in correcting our bad ways is to have a budget. Under President Obasanjo we have not had any to date. Of course you cannot blame the president for what has gone on in the states and local governments where unaccountability has been worse, what with, say, state houses of assembly being worse rubber-stamps of executive arbitrariness than the National Assembly. However, while the president is not to blame for goings-on at other levels of governments, he should be The Great Exampler as the country’s leader and one who sits on the single biggest share of our revenues. He cannot therefore escape vicarious responsibility when things go bad, as they have, just like he will take much of the credit if they go well. Not only must we begin to have budgets, they must also be sensible budgets. Budgets that neglect our infrastructure and even neglect adding value to government’s virtually only source of revenue – oil – cannot be considered sensible by any stretch of imagination. After we have taken the elementary step of having sensible budgets, we must then re-examine our current economic reforms. With due respect to President Obasanjo’s economic team, his reforms, which are essentially IMF and World Bank injunctions, can never solve our problems. They have never solved those of any other country and we will not be an exception. None, repeat none, of say, the so-called Asian Tigers developed by heeding IMF and World Bank strictures. Quite the contrary. They developed precisely because they ignored much of IMF and World Bank advice to cut back on education, on health, on subsidies to their farmers and to sack their workers. Ask Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Lauriet for Economics and the World Bank Chief Economist until four years ago. He has, as you probably known by now, written a powerful book, Globalisation and its Discontent, in which he has emphatically denounced IMF/World Bank economic formulae as a cure-all for every country. Ask George Monbiot, whose best selling Captive State and The Age of Consent have demonstrably shown that despite Adam Smith’s say-so, there is no where in the world where market forces are allowed complete free reign. Ask Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew – his book From Third World to First – The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, should be required reading for our politicians - or Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed. Both eliminated poverty in their countries within a generation by challenging IMF/World Bank orthodoxies. If we persist in our spendthrift ways and if we insist that America’s path to greatness is our only option, what we have seen of violent crimes in recent times will soon seem like child’s play. ____________________ WRITE-BACK Dear
Mohammed, In
your Miscellany of March 3, you named me among those who had
commented on the "dollarised " ministers. Perhaps
you were referring to the piece in The
Guardian by Dr Dare Olatunji, who clearly identified himself as an
IT Consultant based in California. I
hope you will correct your error in the next installment of your column. Olatunji Dare, Peoria, Illinois. ********* I stand corrected. Mohammed Haruna Dear Mohammed, I read your interesting article on gamji.com. People like you belong in politics. However, it appears you do not want to join. How then can Nigeria or your state move forward if competent people like you refuse to serve? I urge you to consider joining politics. It is not enough to be an "armchair" critic. Nigeria and Niger state need action not write ups! I have been a regular reader of your articles since the late 80s and I think you are a very good writer. However, don’t you think it’s time to join them? Amina Ado |