It is clear, therefore, that scepticism about the prospects for reforming Nigeria and of smoking out entrenched corrupt interests has turned into cynicism and cynicism has in turn bred despair. Reforming the unreformable, as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala puts it, has suffered a comprehensive mission creep and a definitive setback.
Have you considered the paradox that the more the critics of Nigeria’s current unfortunate condition shout, the more acts of perfidy are committed in government circles? To paraphrase Karl Marx, moral outrage has become the opium of Nigeria’s longsuffering citizenry. Criticism is therapeutic but it brings no change in the greedy actions of public officials.
A sampler: There was a hue and cry about the sharp, upward revision of allocation for constructing a new official residence for the Vice-President from N7bn to N16bn a few months back. But that has not prevented the Federal Capital Territory Administration from budgeting a bonanza N4bn for the First Ladies’ Mission House. We can multiply the examples but the theme is the same. The critics can have their say, but the footloose, windfall spending of public funds gone gaga, not to say banditry, must go on. In some tragic instances, such as that of Police Pension Office Assistant Director, John Yusuf, a staggering N27bn can be carted away with only a light, legal reprimand to show for it.
It is perhaps against this depressing backdrop that Pentecostal pastor and General Overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly, Tunde Bakare, recently postulated a “Rawlings shock treatment” for the political class as a sanitising imperative. Angry Bakare at a recent press conference said: “We need the Ghana treatment to send shock waves down the spines of everybody so that people would tiptoe when giving into public office.” For those who may be too young to know, Jerry Rawlings, Ghana’s former head of state, carried out a far-reaching purge among the political class of that country in the early 1980’s, encompassing the summary execution of top echelons of political actors, including some former Heads of State.
Interestingly, Bakare’s radical views received endorsement from elder statesman and former governor of Kaduna State, Balarabe Musa, earlier this week. Musa argues that “normal democratic solution would not work because those who are directly responsible for the negative state of the nation are too powerful and too callous that they would not allow a democratic solution.” Is it not profoundly disturbing that senior citizens who were in the trenches for the enthronement of democratic rule are now advocating an extraordinary, and violent jettisoning of democratic rule? It is clear, therefore, that scepticism about the prospects for reforming Nigeria and of smoking out entrenched corrupt interests has turned into cynicism and cynicism has in turn bred despair. Reforming the unreformable, as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala puts it, has suffered a comprehensive mission creep and a definitive setback.
If we interrogate the Rawlings option closely, however, we find two outstanding factors which make it immensely difficult for it to work in Nigeria. First, Ghana’s unitary constitution and relatively more homogenous subnational composition is a far-cry from Nigeria’s violently disparate ethnic mix featuring the strife of tongues. Corruption has assumed in Nigeria a federal character though cynical elite transactions manifested in a politics of disbursement and so-called bridge building underwritten by the oil bonanza.
Even a Rawlings, if one were to emerge in Nigeria, will be tasked by the wild play of divisive and centrifugal forces as well as the ability of conservative elites to manipulate these forces for reform blocking objectives. To put it less abstractly, consider the varying ramifications of a Rawlings of Ijaw, Yoruba, Fulani or Nupe extraction, and how these will affect a violent reform agenda. In other words, a Rawlings option may well be the commencement of what renowned essayist Adebayo Williams once evocatively described as “the road to Kigali”; referring thereby to ethnic bloodletting on a gargantuan scale.
The other reason for doubting the efficacy of a Rawlings solution is the changed international climate in which democracy, human rights and the rule of law have become defining mantras. Even Rawlings had to transit to an elected head of state, in the 1990’s and functions today in a leadership role in one of Ghana’s major parties. For all its attractive veneer, a Rawlings option, therefore, is a throwback to the jaded dark ages of Africa’s despots. It is also a search for poetic justice or a fabled dramatic resolution and to that extent an avoidance of collective participation in instituting a lasting reform. It is a kind of anaesthesia and feel-good balm that says: Never mind, Rawlings is coming to deal with all those hardened crooks and rogues parading as leaders.
If a Rawlings’ scenario is not feasible, are we then giving the current administration a blank cheque for official squandermania, drift and inertia? Far from it. There are in my view hopeful tendencies on the horizon which should occupy our attention, namely the implosion of the Peoples Democratic Party as well as the resurgence of a coalition of opposition parties determined to give the ruling party a good run for its financial war chest in 2015. If reformists in the PDP team up with reformists in the opposition parties, then we may be getting nearer to the prospects of reforming Nigeria without a traumatising upheaval on the scale of a Rawlings purge.
For this to happen however, the opposition must broaden its agenda beyond ousting the PDP from power to the articulation of a comprehensive reform programme which must take on board a wide range of dysfunctions in the current situation as well as generate a template for reinvention and redemption. That is another way of saying that the opposition must go beyond the current politics of allocation to advance the politics of reform not just of policies but of values and leadership ethos; in short, take on the fundamental drivers of corruption and institutional decay. Beyond that, any serious attempt to reengineer Nigerian politics must include the need for a transformational leader who has the will, courage and stamina to set goals, map out priorities, build coalitions for change and breathe new life into governance through a transformative tempo, not in words but in actions.
The desperate calls for a Rawlings-styled shock treatment by eminent citizens may be somewhat overzealous; they nonetheless signal that time is running out for a reprobate and morally adrift political system to mend its ways or be confronted with seminal challenges. It should be noted too that no lasting reform can be instituted without the active involvement of the civil society both domestic and international. Perhaps, the only way to avert a Rawlings scenario pregnant with ominous uncertainties is through the mass mobilisation of the citizenry to decisively repudiate the ongoing looting of the public treasury, insist on minimum standards of decency in governance and provide the impetus for the emergence of a reformist wing of the ruling class through the ballot box.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
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