BETWEEN JOY AND DESPAIR - Pat Utomi As the killing fields broaden and the very abnormal seemingly turn to norm, as Nigeria falters and tithers, the world issues score cards. The Economist magazine newspaper recently referred to Nigeria’s uncanny ability to mess up opportunities, in Nigeria speak, to draw defeat out of the jaws of victory. I too have been troubled and reflected much on that trend. The depths of despair are captured by the front page editorial in the Punch of March 6 titled ‘Jonathan’s Banal Handling of Boko Haram Terror. As I read it I was trapped in traffic created by amazing queues for petrol and talking to a friend who had not been to work in two days because he had no fuel and his driver had taken ill from two days of being on long lines at petrol stations. On the radio channel people were complaining that Bolaji Abdullahi who they thought had done a good job as Sports Minister had just been sacrificed at the altar of petty politics. Was it in our stars to fall into such ways on the verge of MINT status and becoming a more respectable economic destination? Several past conversations streamed through my consciousness. I remembered Mike Wallace of the US CBS network when I challenged his description of Nigeria in an interview of Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam early in 1996. He told me he thought his hyperbole was justified given how the Nigeria of promise had disappointed so badly, referring to an opposite description of Nigeria he gave after interviewing General Gowon just after the Civil War in 1970. Contending with that in my reflections was a long telephone conversation I had with General Gowon just two weeks before the Punch Editorial, I had raised the subject of the higher civil service and policy making about which I had interviewed him for my Ph.D. thesis 33 years ago while he was living in the UK. He pointed to the Third National Development Plan and growth prospects it harboured until those who overthrew him threw the plan overboard. Then came the first post military government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari that I was associated with in its last months. Of that era, Onyeka Onwenu anchored the documentary ‘A Squandering of Riches’. Of the season since 1999 is a greater squandering of riches, as impunity replaced prudence, and the worship of self and money made Narcissus the new god and an ‘objective principle of state policy’ if the obvious goal displacement of public officials get taken into account. What is in the character of the Nigeria elite that makes us unable to cease the historic moment, as good fortune has brought our way many times and fashion immortality for those willing and able for something sustainable that is bigger than self and the material garnishing of now? I think every time I arrive Abuja of the bullet proof SUVs and Limos that pull up for the big men, business leaders and politicians who before their positions in public life had very modest means and ways of conduct. Then I think of Sam Walton who built Walmart into a multibillion dollar global giant but continued to drive around in beat-up old trucks, or of the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, Warren Buffet, who as the richest man in the world used a several years old cell phone, not to talk of the US Governor who drives himself with the wife in a regular Buick for Dinner at a local restaurant. What went wrong with us, because things were not this bad and politicians so disconnected in the 1960s? But before that, is anything right about now? Quite a few actually. In the same edition of the Punch there was a report of APC and PDP representatives almost coming to blows probing how monies were disbursed and abused to cater for the Presidential Advisory Council and the budget of NNPC on real and imagined petrol subsidy. That report brought me close to tears because it was a signal that my life’s struggle had not been in vain. It may seem untidy, the quarrelling. We may query the motives as bare faced partisanship but because we have two strong political parties it is moving us close to the true purpose of oversight and to institution building, with the norms that set boundaries to acceptable conduct. After the APC summit I felt really truly that nearly 40 years of my writing, organizing civil society and social enterprise and lately of partisan political involvement had not been a waste as I have sometimes feared and lamented when I gauge the mood of despair. To the person who does not have my academic history as a student of institutions, economic performance and nation well-being, it may seem like premature triumphalism, but for someone who has had people not fully understanding motives and the passion for institutions, over strong men in a culture of the strong man as history, how far we have come is absolutely phenomenal. In ways I felt like George Eastman reflecting on his life’s work as he retired from Kodak he founded. The main difference is that as a person of faith I am unlikely to take his exit path. He simply took a piece of paper and wrote “My life’s work is done” wondering what point there was to further hanging around, he shot himself! As I told this story of my feelings to a journalist in Abuja, she started exclaiming ‘please do no such thing: we still need you around’. I was planning no self-determined final exit, but as unusual as it may seem, the achievement of two strong parties and effort by one, the APC, to craft a thrust of ideology that is people centered, set a tone for the evolution of political parties strong enough to check impunity, allow the people to change from one to the other and create an order of accountable governance. My view is that the deep and detailed work of a manifesto and party plank done at APC, which I was a part of, and know well, will cause PDP to begin same. In the end the Nigerian people will be the big winners. When Karl Meier wrote in This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria, at the onset of this Republic he was expressing the frustrations of the world with Nigeria as a land of missed opportunities as did the last Economist report on Nigeria, Mike Wallace, and General Gowon’s lamentation. Part of the reason the state seems rudderless in a gale is that vision is unclear, planning to that vision is absent and people of character, competence, commitment, charity and capacity have typically been scared off the arena of public life as people of desperation with little to loose, tend to be the most quick to run into the arena. They have deformed the public square and made it materially lucrative thus further pushing back good governance. What I see, in the rough pattern of path of the evolution of institutions is that this moment they said would not come and could not come of opposition politicians burying their egos to come together is not history’s great moment. No one who has educated themselves to these things can say Bola Tinubu is not a hero. Part of what went wrong with us is that citizens stopped being citizens, politics became too lucrative, those who should be in politics began to look down at it and culture collapsed. As one of my favourite Nigerian ballads goes “who will save us now”? But it has to be beyond singing ‘Aji bo le ole’. We must take from the joy of emerging institutions to chase out the despair of frustration at so much wrong. PU
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:52:40 +0000
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