A serious characteristic of the apply of politics in Nigeria since 1999 has been its evident departure from the norms of its professed function and the issue or essential implications for scholarly criticism.
The veneration through which the pre-independence period politics was held within the days of the Herbert Macaulay clan has disappeared and the immediate guide for the continuation of its mores, practices and methods for the fast post-independence interval has been misplaced whilst its shadows vainly try to revive authority or challenge hope. It has been largely impeached and discarded.
Whereas the professed functions of politics embrace the requirement to advertise and put ahead leaders who’re humane, selfless, public-spirited, thoughtful or delicate to the wants of the folks; who’re passionate concerning the elementary targets and directive ideas of state coverage; and who’re themselves fashions of fairness, impartiality and integrity, the Nigerian image is lamentably odious.
It’s changing into more and more troublesome to attract a line between the view of politics as a purposive perception and its view because the realisation of the given. Does the modern practitioner of politics, prankishly known as politician, remind us of what we used to understand because the imaginative intercessor respecting our public affairs i.e. the one who seems deus ex machina to resolve our existential crises despite ourselves?
Our sense of reality because the province of systematic thinkers is disturbed as we observe our flesh pressers as crass propagandists or as Space Boys. In standard speech, propaganda is utilized to doctrines considered “as pernicious and unfold by males whom we mistrust”. All honest, accountable politicians are obligated to not be propagandists as each propaganda is programmed to hypnotise the general public and its presentation focused at seducing the harmless. The recipient of a bit of propaganda fairly than expertise a launch or aid from perverse emotion is as a substitute incited unto unreasoned response to the subject material.
Many divisive stratagem have been devised by the Tinubu administration buoyed by the nation’s tribal, ethnic, non secular, sectarian and regional faultlines. The federal government’s propaganda group, decidedly bloated in each content material and intent, has been deployed to fight the regime’s reputational capital deficit even because the individuals are reeling underneath the adverse financial penalties of a mis-conceived reform agenda, particularly the knee-jerk elimination of gas subsidies and the un-scientific devaluation of the nationwide forex.
The Tinubu media group has been struggling to substitute the vacuous Emilokan theology for a desired nationwide ethic. The presidency has been bungling from one mis-chance to a different mischievously ignoring the truth that its Emilokan creed charade is willy-nilly programmed to comply with the trail of earlier governance misadventures trod by its ungainly predecessors.
There may be in the present day the requirement to interrogate the prevailing institutional equipment that the nation’s grundnorm has imposed on the folks. The Structure of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) has been wrought to unleash on the residents a fait accompli involving the foisting on the polity of an irreversible association for State Seize by which buccaneers or political robbers insidiously purchase state energy whilst they arrogantly ignore the hallowed duties of governance.
The pursuit of sensuous particular person or personal pleasures underneath a system that reductions accountability to the folks is the avowed mandate or purpose of the captors of our commonwealth. Nigeria’s issues popularly recognized as corruption, poor management, and dwindling ethical values have peaked underneath the APC governments of Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu. The constitutional position of presidency for the safety of lives and property has taken a again seat as authorities seems helpless in tackling headlong the ravages of a nationwide insecurity evidenced within the devastation, destruction and of laying waste the institutional pillars of the polity.
Corruption stalks the complete gamut of governmental operations whilst governance has assumed the toga of personal enrichment and of care free stupendous life-style by officers of presidency. Poor management is exemplified within the enthronement or nomination of the worst amongst us for the pivotal workplaces of state.
The authorized equipment has been crafted for imposing on all of us the intellectually-inapt, the ideologically-befuddled or inept, and the socially-irrelevant or morally bankrupt amongst us to imagine the commanding heights of our political financial system. The end result that’s seen for all to see is the concomitant dysfunctional state of affairs.
The complicity of the educated elite on this miasma is baffling. It has additional compounded the gridlock. The hallmarks of Nigeria’s misgovernance famous as social insecurity, anarchy, infrastructural decay (ably epitomised in agriculture which tops the record of our infrastructural decay and which neglect has ensured starvation as a nationwide actuality), the recurrent gas shortage or irregular value hike conundrum which spotlight the company irrelevance of NNPC as constituted have mixed to query the change agent qualification of the elite notably of the general public mental.
Within the midst of the overall illness through which the nation is embroiled, the nation is on the mercy of “social vultures” which are capitalising on our dire scenario and have hijacked the nation’s processes for obnoxious private functions. The essence of presidency is misplaced when its purposive features to advertise the socio-economic wellbeing of the folks by reasoned financial and political transformation programmes are usually not carried out within the public curiosity or are carried out exterior of the mandated functions.
Authorities is established to do good as contained in its aide memoir or within the grundnorm. The legitimacy of presidency is questioned when it veers off the general public good. When a authorities doesn’t have the mandate of the folks for designing or crafting specific coverage modifications underpinned by a broad consensus for his or her execution, the failure of the reform is as certain as dusk.
The so-called radical reform programmes of the Tinubu presidency haven’t been knowledgeable by a acutely aware consensus constructing panoply as is being witnessed in what seems but as visceral opposition of the North to the Tax Reform payments now into consideration by the Nationwide Meeting. The absence of an underlying electoral mandate and the cavalier method of constructing real nationwide consensus on issues of nationwide significance to governance have aggregated to make the reform proposals unpopular.
At the same time as Chief Obafemi Awolowo recognized energy as flowing from a management that’s sustained by the need of the folks, freely articulated and given, the nationwide consensus constructing parameter is aptly paraphrased in his thesis. In Ideas on the Nigerian Structure, Awo made an incontrovertible suggestion:
“We’ve got mentioned, earlier on, that to make successful of their troublesome task, Nigerian leaders ought to possess comprehension, psychological magnitude, and non secular depth. By comprehension we imply the flexibility of a person to understand and grasp the salient particulars in addition to a lot of the sensible and temporal implications of a given downside or scenario.”
This recipe for efficient or environment friendly management is obviously missing in Nigeria in the present day and isn’t being consciously wanted. Management in Nigeria is assumed on circumstances which are at variance with established or time-honoured philosophy of election or choice for governance.
The Nigerian folks at all times trying askance appear to resemble what Mark Twain (1835-1910) mentioned of a folks: “Why do you sit there trying like an envelope with out an tackle on it?”
Rotimi-John, a Lawyer and Commentator on Public Affairs is the Deputy Secretary-Basic of Afenifere.He may be reached by way of: [email protected]
