BEING PREPARED

Don’t let your lack of planning be my emergency. The “fire brigade approach” is synonymous with Nigeria. In fact, it is who we are and what we have come to stand for. There is nothing new about our laidback worry-about-the-consequences-later approach to problem solving or ignoring. We need to start doing things differently or the consequences will catch up with us and surely faster than we imagine.

After the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, was characterized by doping in the ranks of Team Nigeria, a wave of negative emotions ran through our sports administration and the Nigerian citizens alike. We were ashamed; our dear country was embarrassed.  We thought our sports authorities owed the nation the duty of ensuring that come Glasgow 2014, our athletes would come clean; win proudly or lose honourably. Signs of our fire brigade mentally began to tell when athletes could only camp for two weeks before the games. We spent weeks to prepare for an event others spent years to prepare for, yet we expect results! Team Nigeria was conveyed to Scotland in small batches, in one of the most bizarre travelling arrangements we can imagine. Then, we were queried concerning our lack of uniform team kits for our athletes; we couldn’t even get that right. When the curtains fell on Glasgow 2014, doping scandals marred the modest successes Nigeria recorded.

The story is similar as regards the outbreak of Ebola. When the virus was first announced in Guinea in March and started spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s minister of information, Labaran Maku, came out to say that there were measures already in place to prevent Ebola from entering the country. He even went further to state that even if the virus found its way into Nigeria, our health system had vaccines for treating it, as well as designated health facilities.  Five months later, we are a people in disarray over the virus. We even drink and bathe with salt.  It took the death of Patrick Sawyer, a visitor to Nigeria from Liberia, for us to wake up to the reality of a deadly disease.  Let us put this irony into perspective: a country with porous borders and poor medical facilities, with a population of over 170 million resides within a region where a deadly disease is spreading like wildfire and yet our doctors are on strike and the government thinks that that is OK. It speaks volumes about our psyche.

  

Our lack of preparedness and poor emergency response mechanisms are visible and equal in proportion in all ramifications. Whether in delivering social services, lawmaking, security, poverty eradication, job creation or politics, we just don’t tackle problems head on.

We have elections rapidly approaching, however, the election commission is never fully prepared and the country is always thrown into a state of insecurity. In both Ekiti and Osun where elections have just been concluded, many Nigerians were disenfranchised because INEC failed to provide them with permanent voter’s cards. The police force has been shown to be unprepared as the government had to draft in the army and the SSS in large numbers. One wonders who then is doing all the counter intelligence or fighting our war in the north east, when they are busy chaperoning election officials or keeping rival political parties at bay. Considering that these are just two out of 36 states of the federation, how do we expect free and fair 2015 general elections if the experiences in Ekiti and Osun have already proved less than salutary?

What happens in 2015? Already we put on the TV every morning and listen to various political parties making inarticulate sounds and drawing reactions from the security forces who only show their immaturity by reacting in public to the sad comedy show we see enacted on the news. It seems that our security chiefs cannot get enough of the spot light these days, whilst their operatives mask their faces in an apparent attempt to remain “under cover”!

We have 33 more states to conduct elections in. Where are we going to get the show of force that we have seen used in the last 2 elections? Will we revert to our usual practice of employing thugs to make up numbers and thereby create another copycat group like Boko Haram? It seems that we are making a habit of deploying soldiers, have we thought of its implication on the fight against terrorism?  Are we really prepared to withdraw troops from the battlefield and deploy them to secure ballot boxes, and what message are we sending to the military?

Eventually people must learn that mistakes are meant for learning and not repeating. We need to prepare or prepare to fail; this is remedy to our current state of unpreparedness.

A PARTY CONSTITUTED SYSTEM

Our funny party system is at the heart of our political failings. Today, one is a member of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), tomorrow he is in the “opposition” ranks of the All Progressives  Congress (APC), the day after he is yet again a member of the PDP.  One can also be a founding member of a party, only to switch lanes to another party before the blink of an eye. There are others whose party membership depends on what time of the day it is.  Yet others, like Governor Okorocha, hold the title of the “most travelled decampee”, having tasted almost all possible registered political parties in the land!

Not even in football would one find the dearth of ideology as is present amongst our political parties. Cristiano Ronaldo cannot “decamp” to Barcelona this week only to return to Real Madrid the following week. It is not that easy because each club is founded on certain fan/community loyalties. And this even applies to a foreign professional, who is paid.

It is lack of political awareness that is clogging our democracy. It is the reason why PDP is APC and APC is PDP.  It is why both – and all others – are failing. Ideology, a way of life, a belief system, a sense of belonging is what should make someone like Oyinlola stay in the PDP rather than to cross carpet to the APC days before the governorship election in Osun State. It is OK to argue and agree or agree to differ but parties and their constitutions must be strong enough to operate within a set of rules that all the members can respect and trust. In saner political climes, one’s membership of a party is as a result of a genuine alignment with its set of principles and beliefs.

So, those who move from one party to another are reflective of our poor political culture. The party is a brand, and brands command loyalty. The brand has a clearly stated goal and manifesto and promises to the electorate are drawn from a list of deliverables put forward by its management. A peep into the so-called manifestos of the PDP and APC tells an appalling story – the one reads like a poor copy of the other. This is why individuals are bigger than the party. Party supremacy is a hoax in the Nigerian system because its structure is so weak that it cedes power to its members elected into public offices as soon as elections are over. The president controls the machinery of his party at national level; the state governors do so at that level. Smaller parties with little national presence, such as the Labour Party and APGA, concede party supremacy to their respective governors in Ondo and Anambra. This way, we make emperors of our president and governors; power simply slips away from the hands of the people to the hands of their elected representatives, who are supposed to be servants to the people and representatives of their party’s creed.  

Our politics is immature, and this is why we have turbulence in the land. But there is hope. Al-Makura’s impeachment in Nassarawa has failed; hopefully, a herald of sanity. Whenever we thwart the will of a would-be dictator, we expand the boundaries of freedom.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is not true that a governor cannot be impeached for cross carpeting. I am particularly buttressed in this view by the fact that a fundamental and qualifying step to becoming governor is that you must belong to a political party. It is part of the laziness and apathy of the PDP and APC that they have failed/refused to test this concept in impeachment proceedings. By the way, it is actually a travesty of justice when, in the name of immunity, allegations of a criminal act are not investigated. There are too many ironies in the provisions of our laws.

The summary of my position is that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. Any provision which protects potential criminals and postpones the legal process, whilst allowing the accused to continue to exercise functions of a state, is not only unconscionable but also inimical to the concepts of justice and democracy. It is this absurdity that makes elected officers jostle to tighten their grips on party machinery. This way, political power belongs to them, as well as the means of gaining it, so that they could operate above the law without the fear of being voted out as long as they are with the right political cohorts. 

We have to be citizen activists if we wish to properly enforce our laws. “The man dies in all who fail to act in the face of injustice,” said Soyinka. 

NIGERIAN APARTHEID

Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State thought he had the solution to Nigeria’s security challenges. So he purportedly proposed an identity pass regime similar to that in Apartheid South Africa, where Nigerians in their own country would carry IDs to identify who belongs to what state or region. The statement credited to Okorocha is a fantastic idea coming from a state governor, only that the country’s full official nomenclature is the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We should be reminded that a federal system of government guarantees that any part of Nigeria is home to every Nigerian.

Sadly, the Imo State governor is not alone in this narrow-mindedness. In 2011, the Abia State governor, Theodore Orji, directed all state ministries, departments and agencies to compile a list of non-indigenes on the payroll of the state with the intention of sending them back to their states of origin. Governor Orji said then that he wasn’t sacking those people but transferring them to their various states so that public service slots would be freed up for Abia citizens. Many of the “redeployed” workers had lived all their lives in Abia. They had contributed immensely to the development of the state, paid their taxes, exercised their franchise during elections, carried out their civic responsibilities in different sectors of the state, and suddenly somebody remembered that they were not from Abia after all.

Last year, it was Lagos State government, perceived as one of our more “progressive governments”, which intended to clean up the megacity by targeting purported misfits, rounding them up on the streets then shipped and dumped them in their “states of origin”. That had to be the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World! People who had committed no crime, because they were poor had to be categorized and “deported” within their own country under an obnoxious destitute transfer policy without respect for their fundamental rights and privileges as citizens of a federation. Even within individuals, we discriminate against one another. One of my staff who was searching for accommodation was asked what tribe he was by a landlord. It is that appalling. 

         

How long shall we see ourselves first as the state and ethnic group we come from, the religion we practice and the social class we belong to? Where lies our loyalty to the nation and the unity that such loyalty nurtures? We have some institutional policies put in place to engender inclusiveness but which have turned out to be counter-productive. The Federal Character, for instance, is a policy that has been hijacked and converted to an instrument of mediocrity and incompetence. An unqualified and incompetent citizen is awarded a position while those who merit it are rejected because of where they come from.  It is this misjudgment that leads to dedicated columns for “state of origin”, “local government”, “religion”, “tribe”, etc on documents and forms in Nigeria. Of what productive value is asking about someone’s religion or local government in, say, a recruitment exercise?

Our brand of apartheid takes its root in Nigeria’s most perennial question: the indigene-settler policy. The indigene-settler question has done nothing than further divide us along geo-ethnic lines. It is a paradox that we live in a federation where an indigene-settler policy is actually enshrined in our constitution. Nothing turns us against each other and breeds suspicion amongst us worse than the issue of indigene-settler. We are concerned that each time there is political distress or contestation for the national cake, people recede to the cocoonery of tribe, geo-political zone and religion. These reductionist tendencies cloak national integration and perpetuate underdevelopment of the country. While Nigeria is one geo-political expression, centrifugal and centripetal forces have coalesced to deny its residents their Nigerianess.

Forging national consensus has been Nigeria’s most enduring issue since 1914 when Flora Shaw contrived the noun that depicts the ‘land around the Niger River’. Early nationalists started the rat race that institutionalized ethnicity in the build-up to independence and on issues of regional governance. The military further polarized the people with the creation of states at unusual intervals. Each of Nigeria’s over 250 ethnic nationalities till today seek ‘self determination’, in what has become a regular mantra for ethnic jingoists. This becomes a self-imposed limitation for the country at a time when the world sees itself as a global village. Even matters that should ordinarily evoke patriotism and collective bargain have become mere expressions of ethno-religious pettiness.

We cannot have leaders who fuel division rather than foster unity. Any politician who cannot uphold …one nation bound in freedom, peace and unity is not fit to, and should not, lead us at any level.