Most of those on the saddle of leadership in Nigeria if carefully screened may not be the desirables but mere opportunists due to so many factors.
Majority are in leadership for personal aggrandizement not for the public service delivery they promised and always tempting to fool the God they so much claim to worship by taking an oath that they woefully fail to abide with.
Except for anyone living in a veritable fool’s paradise, the stark truth is that Nigeria today is in free fall. The existential conditions of millions of Nigerians are horrendous. To have a better understanding of my point a visit to several localities will convince any doubting mind on the existence of hell on earth.
The first sign of abject poverty and malnutrition is what stares one glaringly. The people are so wretched, abandoned, malnourished, disorganized and threatened by socio-economic and security challenges artificially created by clueless leadership in collaboration with heartless bandits and murderous corrupt elements in high positions.
There is total absence of basic necessities of life in most Nigerian localities as if those localities are exempted from benefitting from the yearly budgetary allocations of federal, state and local governments. The localities are abandoned to fate by those that survive on their franchise.
Various periodic Intervention Programmes and palliatives from the Federal Government are for a selected few in the localities if at all they reach the fringes of those localities and cornered by members loyal to particular politicians in power, while those in opposition parties are proudly and mockingly denied, insulted, teased, tantalized and even threatened from accessing what rightly belongs to them.
Several federal constituencies are failed projects under their present representatives. Abnormality, Kokoribite and abracadabra are the brand of politics on display and subjecting the people to the hara -kiri, and yet the impoverished and marginalized people are expected to lend support to the failing system to flourish to satisfy those responsible for their artificially created suffering.
Those with the guts, confidence and temerity to challenge the abnormality are rated by hangers-on, bootlickers, and those children from the breadlines as troubleshooters and even addressed with derogatory titles to please the bosses for a taste bit of the loot. What a pity!
In the present set-up, for a decent mind to access political patronage no matter how highly qualified, it has to change to indecency and clownishness to please the gods at the top.
The country stands at the very precipice of disaster threatening to implode at anytime with an amazingly distracted political class inexplicably incapacitated to do anything about. This is certainly not being an alarm but a reality.
For instance, the World Bank stated that poverty reduction has stagnated over the last decade with more and more Nigerians continuously falling below poverty line. The number of poor Nigerians was projected to hit 100million by the end of 2024 going by the state of the economy.
Beyond the coldly informal figures offered up by economists and statisticians, the reality and pervasiveness of poverty stare Nigerians in the face on a daily basis. Inflation spirals and urban food prices particularly spike relentlessly. In the face of what has become the latest incident in a repeated cycle of national grid collapse, the entire northern region was in recent weeks plunged into virtual darkness. Following the inexcusable paralysis of the governing class since 1999 to ensure an efficiently and transparently run petroleum sector predicated on functioning domestic refineries, the prodigal importation of refined petroleum products scarcity crisis, a situation worsened by the importation of contaminated fuel for which there is obviously no intention by the authorities including the national assembly to sanction those responsible.
The irresponsibility of the governing elite and the resultant import-dependent petroleum sector has made the country ill-prepared for the implications of the Russian-Ukraine war with the consequent skyrocketing of diesel and kerosene prices. This is in turn having ripple negative effects on critical sectors of the economy particularly manufacturing with further deleterious consequences for already astronomical unemployment figures. Even as the political class, Governors, Senators, House of Representatives and State Assembly members and Ministers for instance, are decidedly focused on the pursuit of power and political offices come 2027 to the marginalization of meaningful governance, the bandits, terrorists, and assorted criminal elements including those in public offices are decidedly focused on their dastardly mission of killing, stealing, looting and destroying an objective towards which they are continuously varying their modus operandi.
In relegated sleepy areas of the country where survival is near impossible with bearing consequences, leaders have refused to see a reason to vacate the seat honorably for the failure of deliverance. They hypocritically, greedily and erroneously believe they are justifying the mandate they enjoy. But a careful study of their stewardship raises blood pressure and sends shocks to destroy the immune system.
Donated palliatives from the federal government are tagged as the personal efforts of those in leadership, most especially members of the national assembly. Most Nigerian lawmakers are mere parasites on the federal government’s largesse, including constituency allowances and other unmerited incentives.
In several federal constituencies, majority of towns and villages have no access to clean portable water, no functional health facilities, no access roads and above all, no sustainable source of livelihood to the majority. Even the periodic federal government-disbursed social intervention palliatives are not evenly distributed if distributed at all. The situation is what is termed as the blind leading the one-eyed.
Former Ekiti State Governor, John Kayode Fayemi, hit the nail on the head in his response to a terrorist attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train when he said: “First, as leaders, we owe the unfortunate victims and their relations an apology as these unwarranted acts of violence are becoming too regular and they basically question our collective capacity to govern.”
True, the flames of Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast have been considerably doused while the hitherto fiercely marauding killer herdsmen appear to have been checkmated to a reasonable degree. But the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna rail and the attendant deaths, injuries, and kidnappings; the breach of the Kaduna Airport by terrorists who even prevented an aircraft from taking-off indicated that the criminals were extending their tentacles beyond roads to make other avenues of transportation as unsafe and hazardous as the roads. Beyond this, as those in power adamantly and obtusely keep the country’s security architecture unitary and inflexible for a complex, plural polity, considerable swathes of space succumb to the sovereignty of the denizens of the underworld as pervasive armed robbery, kidnapping, banditry, rape, endemic ritual killing, communal upheaval, and cybercrime among others become the norm.
The gross devaluation of human life and fragility of property across the land makes nonsense of the otherwise claimed impressive strides of the ruling APC in the modernization and expansion of infrastructure.
When he appeared on a Channels Television programme penultimate week then as Kaduna State governor, Nasir Ahmed El-Rufa’i was asked if, given current socio-economic and political indices, the APC had not disappointed most Nigerians as regards its promised change in 2015. He admitted that the party had indeed not largely lived up to the expectations of Nigerians but expressed optimism that a majority of the people would still prefer the APC when its performance is compared to the failings of the PDP in the preceding 16 years when the seeds of the current malaise were sown.
On his part, former governor of Rivers State, Nyeson Wike, when he featured on the same programme few days after, wondered why, “if the PDP was as bad, incompetent, and corrupt as portrayed by the APC in 2015, the latter has filled its critical party and elective offices with PDP defectors who were founding members, trained and occupied responsible positions in government on PDP platform.
What, he then asked, what has the APC done to remedy the alleged wrongs of the PDP after almost eight years in power, reasoning rather that conditions in the country have worsened under the ruling party (APC)”.
It is an ultimately sterile debate, an unproductive journeying in cycles. As the fluidity with which their members move from one to the other in a ceaseless game of musical chair shows, it is obvious that both parties are two sides of the same coin. Apart from astonishingly cloning the PDP structurally, stylistically, and philosophically, the APC has scandalously squandered the opportunities to impact positively on governance and the wellbeing of the majority in the last nine years just as recklessly as the PDP allegedly did in the preceding 16 years. That is why I have severally argued in the past that rescuing Nigeria from her current free fall from grace to grass cannot be accomplished by the present APC.
But since there is no other party reasonable enough apart from the PDP within sight with an organizational spread, political strength, experience in managing democracy and structural reach capable of effectively competing with the APC as is in power, for now, the only hope of salvation for Nigeria is the emergence in 2027 polls of intellectually sound and experienced candidates on the platform of any registered political party that has sincere vision, internal party discipline, competence, demonstrated network, courage and proven track record of capacity to run an inclusive government, think creatively, strategically and out of the box as well as do things differently. From my own personal rating of those presently rumored political gladiators on the political turf for the presidential ticket, the cap fits Governor Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State of the PDP. If Bala Muhammed scales his party’s hurdle for the 2027 presidential race, it will be a keenly contested contest between candidates not parties or geo-political zones because he has the courage blended with experience.
In the alternative, the APC will continue with their game of unproductive musical chairs, succeeding each other after a number of electoral cycles, with the country pushed closer and closer to the brink due to incompetent and venal governance until there is an implosion and final blackout. Or the impotence and imperviousness to change of the behemoth may worsen to the extent that progressive social forces including labor, activist civil society groups, the impoverished peasantry, and radical academia are compelled to coalesce and organize politically for power through the ballot box. Their last national convention confirmed that APC is essentially a vast election fighting machine which special interest perennially struggle to capture in a bid to remain in power at different levels with little or no detailed policy plans on how to utilize such power to achieve radical socio-economic and structural transformation of the country. It has almost 10 wasted years with little to show.
The PDP came on board as a political party in 1999 to displace and replace the military. It had no notion of what to do differently with power. The party for 16 years implemented the same neo-liberal structural adjustment economic policies pursued by preceding military governments. The APC was hurriedly cobbled together as a coalition just to dislodge the PDP at the centre in 2015 without a workable blue-print. Once it achieved that objective, there was little it could offer differently from the PDP in terms of fundamental policy change. The APC has been largely served by the same economic technocrats and advisers that the PDP relied on while in power. Above all, APC is now under the leadership of PDP defectors including the national chairman, senate president and other key figures in government. This signifies the absence of capable hands within other components of the mega-merger that birthed APC in 2014.
Efforts by the executive and legislature of various governments at the national level since 1999 to find solutions to the country’s multi-dimensional crisis have hardly made any meaningful headway. This is because their actions and policy initiatives hardly sprang from well-defined party platforms and manifestoes embodying a clear ideology and philosophical framework. The input of the party as the most critical factor in policy conceptualization to which governments elected on its platform must be bound was the secret of Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and Peoples Redemption Party (PRP)’s phenomenal successes in the first and second republics.
Organizing and running a political party is no tea party. A party organized to win political power without a distinct and well thought out plan of what to do with it in terms of rigorously articulated policies and programmes is no party but a rally of frustrated vultures and societal grave diggers which APC has proven to be undoubted.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
