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No More Business as Usual: Nigeria’s New “Change” and Lessons from Our Recent Past
No More Business as Usual: Nigeria’s New “Change” and Lessons from Our Recent Past
NEWS
Niyi Osundare
5/20/20205 min read
By Niyi Osundare
May 20, 2015
Like the two women we met earlier in this lecture, let us declare: Never Again! Let us hold up our voter cards and tell the incoming government—and every government that follows—that with these cards we removed a perverse administration that held us down for years. If you do not want the same fate, kill corruption before it kills this country. Help us build a just and egalitarian society in which leaders lead by following conscientiously, and citizens lead by insisting on their rights and performing their duties.
Too Big to Fail
No national election in Nigeria’s troubled history attracted the intense international scrutiny that surrounded the March 28, 2015 presidential polls. On the African continent, only South Africa’s 1994 election—the first democratic vote that ended apartheid—generated comparable anxiety. The fears were real: the consequences of failure were too terrible to contemplate.
In the weeks before the election, Abuja became a hub of crisis-prevention diplomacy. Kofi Annan and Emeka Anyaoku brokered a peace deal between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari. Former African presidents Thabo Mbeki and John Kufuor, Nigeria’s own Abdulsalami Abubakar, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, British Prime Minister David Cameron, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and even President Barack Obama all intervened. Kerry’s warning was especially sharp: any Nigerian politician who disrupted the process risked losing access to the United States—and to the foreign bank accounts that hold much of Nigeria’s looted wealth.
The world treated Nigeria as “too big to fail.” Just as the collapse of major American banks in 2008 threatened the global economy, Nigeria’s unraveling would destabilize Africa and add another flashpoint to an already troubled world. Global altruism mixed with enlightened self-interest. As the Yoruba proverb warns, if your neighbor swallows a poisonous insect and you ignore it, his coughing will keep you awake at night. Nigeria’s politics is every African’s business.
Why the extreme anxiety? Nigeria is a country of roughly 180 million people speaking more than 300 languages, where political power is the surest path to personal wealth, exercised with impunity and without accountability. Elections have long been do-or-die affairs. Until March 28, 2015, no incumbent government had ever been defeated at the polls. Peaceful transfer of power had never occurred since independence.
On one side stood a dysfunctional ruling party determined to cling to power by any means. On the other stood a newly coalesced opposition ready for battle. The PDP controlled the security agencies and the national treasury, confident that, like its predecessors, it could simply declare itself the winner regardless of the vote. The world braced for the worst.
Yet when the election came, a clear winner emerged. In an unprecedented act, the incumbent conceded defeat. The world exhaled. Congratulatory messages poured in. Nigeria had, for the moment, dodged the bullet.
Never Again
During the long queues on election day, two ordinary women held up their Permanent Voter Cards and told a camera crew: “You see this card? This is what we will use to sweep out this government of thieves. If the next one is no better, we will use it to sweep them out too.”
These were not sophisticated political theorists. They were graduates of the hard school of Nigerian life. Their words carried a clear sequence: once upon a time… and never again.
Once upon a time we had a government that blurred the line between right and wrong, that treated corruption as a qualification for high office, and that turned Aso Rock into a refuge for the dubious and the lawless. A minister who spent $1.6 million on two bullet-proof cars found protection rather than punishment and later became a senator. In Ekiti and Osun, the ruling party backed deeply tainted candidates. One of them, once elected, led thugs who assaulted judges and desecrated the courts. The president, the attorney-general, and the party saw nothing wrong.
Then came Ekitigate. Thanks to Sahara Reporters, the world heard a defence minister blackmail a general, a gubernatorial candidate bully military officers, and plans discussed to rig an election with official complicity. The president dismissed the scandal as fabrication and rewarded the key player with a ministerial nomination. The army, police, and INEC largely looked away. Corruption sat comfortably at the cabinet table.
At the root of these failures lay impunity—the belief that those close to power could commit any crime and escape consequence. When impunity mates with immunity, the result is “imuniti”: unarrestability.
The abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in April 2014 exposed the same emptiness. While the girls were being driven more than 80 miles into Sambisa Forest, no one in authority appeared to notice for days. It took global outrage and a looming election to produce even a belated response. The world laughed and wept at Nigeria’s expense. The rulers carried on as if it were business as usual.
Never again, too, to the obscenely high pay and allowances of public officials, the secret security votes, and the wasteful spending—one billion naira for State House meals, nearly 900 million for generators. These excesses destroy both the economy and the nation’s moral capital.
The Demand for Real Change
The outgoing government offered transformation without change, motion without movement. Real change must mean functional education, quality healthcare, roads that do not kill, decent housing, and meaningful jobs that keep young people from drowning in the Mediterranean or working in foreign brothels. It must mean ending the power outage jinx and the illusion that Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy when it is largely a dumping ground for other countries’ products.
General Buhari: make your government friendly to ideas and to people who think. Address the National Question. The 2014 National Conference, whatever its timing, produced recommendations that deserve serious attention. A country that remains a mere geographical expression will continue to creak at every ethnic joint.
Nigeria has enough resources to give most citizens a decent life—if rulers steal less and think more about the future. No country can be happy when it is a land of ten millionaires and a hundred million paupers.
The People’s Responsibility
For too long we have blamed only our rulers. We the people have also been complicit—ignorant of our rights, apathetic, buyable, and willing to trade our votes for ethnic or religious inducements. Real change will come only when we hold those who govern us accountable and refuse to be ruled the way we do not wish to be ruled.
Like those two women, let us say Never Again. Hold up the voter cards and remind every government: we removed one failed administration with these cards. We can do it again. Kill corruption before it kills the country. Build with us a society in which leaders and citizens both do their duty.
Nigeria may be too big to fail. Let us make sure it is not too dysfunctional to succeed.
—
New Orleans
Niyi Osundare
May 10, 2015
(Christ’s School Distinguished Alumni Lecture, May 17, 2015, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Victoria Island, Lagos)