The Electoral Realignment

The first concrete reality coming out of the presidential poll of April 16 is the emergence of a new electoral realignment that may have conclusively dislodged the  previous status quo political network for good. For what many have long considered a natural coalition, the south-south, the south-east, the south-west and the Middle Belt cast votes to produce a formidable progressive frontier to elect the person of Goodluck Jonathan, rather than the PDP as a party.

Several lessons must be drawn from this new event. The first is to debunk, once and for all, the wrong-headed myth that the Hausa-Fulani political oligarchy is destined to rule Nigeria at the highest level of government.  A second lesson is closely linked to the first, which is the acceptable gamble that any Nigerian can run and win the office of the president, including the Hausa-Fulani, if such a candidate is academically trained with all the discipline associated with such training, is intellectually savvy both at the conceptual and analytic levels, possesses global leadership qualities and is far removed from the emotional limitations of religious and sectional influences. While Jonathan may not have demonstrated these qualities to the complete satisfaction of many observers, voters were mostly drawn to the totality of his persona that exudes humility, modest upbringing, emotional intelligence, the total absence of any claim to religiosity and his academic credentials.

Thus, if there are any more lessons to learn from this grandiose electoral tsunami, it is that the south-south, the south-east, the south-west, and the Middle Belt voters will find it no longer appealing in future presidential elections to elect a core northern Muslim candidate as president if such candidate fails to meet the above enumerated standards. In other words, the April 16 mandate has submerged and demolished the issue of zoning for its own sake, especially the sinister plot of hoisting or recycling poorly educated and “born-to-rule” regional and religious bigots upon Nigerians. In establishing the winning coalition that just elected Jonathan, millions of Nigerian voters temporarily downplayed PDP’s innocuous and criminal governing style by hoping, betting and crossing their hearts that Jonathan will acknowledge their choice and do what will be morally required of him to transform the PDP and the nation from a “republic of thieves.” We will now wait and see if Jonathan will cling to his party’s salacious reputation or do the will of the people who voted him president without regard to party.

Towards a Republican Constitution

The Jonathan victory represents the first progressive government in Nigeria’s modern political history and its ascension should bode well for a new republican constitution that has long been advocated by Nigerian progressives. The new mandate must be non-negotiable nor should it be subject to any form of consensus politics that the fallen Nigerian conservative movement slyly applied and heavily favored for more than thirty years. The business of politics should now be based on majority decision-making and this new electoral map provides that solid majority to commence transforming the Nigerian nation on a progressive agenda. This democratic majority must no longer be determined by any mathematical formula of region, place of birth, religion or status but by the palpable requirement of public policy formulation and implementation that will be driven by progressive domestic and international priorities.

We would assume that the president and his inner circle have heard enough of the clamor to dump the military-inspired 1999 constitution that is short on details and long on frivolities. The recent post-election mayhem that was perpetrated by defeated opposition elements in some northern states should validate the long simmering call for a republican constitution that would define who we are as a people and establish constitutional lines of responsibility and accountability at every level of government.

We have advocated that delegates to this national conference be drawn equally from all of Nigeria’s local government districts and that the deliberation must define the appropriate powers that each level of government must have to defend the rule of law, raise taxes, develop resources, limit the powers of the federal government to sustainable levels, give the states clearly defined territorial resources to develop competitively and defend the tenets of citizenship and individual liberties.

In the current scheme of things, the federal government is saddled with finding every conceivable solution to every conceivable problem even when such problems are within state capabilities. By making the federal government all-powerful, states and local governments have virtually lost all legitimate skills to solve problems while their officials take home stupendous paychecks they do not deserve. A republican constitution will enshrine standards of accountability and set the legal boundaries for evaluating governing performance at each level of government, including sanctions of impeachment and recalls.

Doing The Peoples Will

In our public opinion poll taken in Nigeria between July-August, 2010, only 32 percent of respondents believe Jonathan has the capability to transform Nigeria beyond its current socio-economic stupor without also transforming his PDP ruling party apparatus. This is the crux of the matter and the very burden that will ultimately define Jonathan’s tenure. Jonathan just has to introduce a new paradigm of government and surround him self with proven and loyal technocrats whom he knows are qualified and who may not be party affiliated. We would even suggest that the president set up a “talent search engine” to track Nigeria’s best and brightest from all over the world, most of whom will be glad to assist, not for the money or fame for many, but for the opportunity to apply their scientific talents to solve Nigeria’s gravest problems. Within this progressive agenda, the president must resist the temptation of towing with the idea of a “unity government” through which his known enemies or opposition candidates are appointed to high positions of responsibility. Such appointees are not married to the president’s victory formula and are most likely to sabotage programs that the president may seek to accomplish.

It will be expected, from now on, to read about losing opposition candidates “decamping” and declaring their conversion to the president’s party or agenda with claims of bringing along their entire villages. These are the “guinea pigs” of the old order and they must not be allowed to contaminate this progressive mandate. The president will surely be flooded with recommended candidates from status quo godfathers, many of who may have no discernable qualifications or work ethic. These must be discarded for the public good. Progressives are hoping that Goodluck Jonathan may already be thinking along this line. 

Some listing of those backward behavior patterns that have consistently negated good governance in Nigeria is worth mentioning here. The first is the nauseating “courtesy calls” that are frequently made by idle party wigs or traditional rulers who waste away the president’s time and consume the energy he needs to peruse through volumes of reports that most certainly come to his desk daily. The president should eliminate these for Christ sake. As the CEO of a nation of 150 million people, governing such a vast array of peoples is serious business which requires quiet quality time in his office on a daily basis to read, evaluate, assess, direct and command domestic and international issues without the mountain of trash that courtesy calls entail.

This situation is much like a professor who sits down to grade his students’ examination papers. The professor will do a very poor job of concentration if he allows his children to rump and roll around him while grading those papers. Government, in its philosophical concept, should be devoted less to party intrigues about which tribe or region its chairman will come from or how much cash donation has been made to party operation or who gets a major contract.  Government must be subjected to continuous public policy brain trusts that are composed, not necessarily by party ideologues alone but more by experts and talents in the field. Government, by its nature, sets out policy priorities and unleashes mechanisms for their formulation and implementation. Courtesy callers should be handled by presidential assistants who are appointed to do so. In fact, callers to the president’s office should wait to be invited before driving up there unannounced.

Tasks Unfulfilled

If and when the president succeeds in clamping down on the intrusion of party hangers-on and numerous other national agberus, then voters’ demands will become more tractable. The least they would require of any president includes those basic necessities of life to which most Nigerians simply have no access. For president Jonathan, his tenure will be largely judged by how and when he keeps his promise to fix the nation’s electricity supply. On this issue, Nigerians will not be satisfied with a partial solution. For instance, getting six hours of electricity a day instead of two hours must not be considered a success story. Nigerians must be privileged to enjoy power and electricity 24/7. That is the least of their demands and that should be the soulful focus of the president as he takes up his leadership mantle. 

The task before the new president will be an enormous one. How he tackles it and remain in the good books of his fellow countrymen would require a wired mix of wisdom, skill, intellectual leadership and a nationalist tenacity. For a starter, it would be foolhardy to attempt throwing money at every problem and providing no monitoring mechanisms for evaluating performance. This has always been the standard Nigerian governing style and if Jonathan has already smelt any revolutionary fervor in his election, he must strive to engage in a more hands-on approach to development.

The winning standard in most development approaches is to focus on two or three major national projects that will impact the majority of citizens, then establish expert monitoring boards (not politicians or civil servants) to supervise these projects from scratch to finish and entrust competent presidential political appointees to validate the finished product. This winning standard holds the contractors charged with such projects accountable for every detail of construction and assures that the finished product is worth the price and the effort. We have the feeling that progressive minded politicos within the Jonathan camp already know how these things get done but doing them for the public good always turns out to be the challenge.

For all our experience with the Nigerian state, we sure would like to propose what we consider the three most immediate projects that the president should zero in from the outset. The first is electric power. Even a third grade primary student already knows the significance of electric power for sustaining life. It is the driving force for all industries – from the barber’s shop, the tailor and the motor mechanic to nuclear power, home comfort, and entertainment conveniences.

On the aggregate, politically savvy nations generate no less than 25 percent of all employments from electric-powered rural and urban cottage industries. Nigerians have great entrepreneurial spirit and their labor is most productive at independent small-scale levels. For this progressive agenda, these are the productive forces the nation urgently needs to expand the economy and prosper the nation at large. If these forces are denied the requisite tool to unleash their capacities, any government responsible for such a condition should have no legitimate claims to rule any one. Now, you can imagine how much human and material resources Nigeria has wasted and how much goods and services Nigeria has failed to produce in the last thirty years because of consistent power failure. Can Jonathan change this equation?

The second national emergency project that the Jonathan government must address immediately is transportation infrastructure. The movement of goods and services along well-built roads creates efficient markets, reduces the cost of commodities and saves money for transport owners. The notorious east-west highway that connects Lagos with Benin begs to be redesigned by proven road engineers. This heavily traveled highway by some of the nation’s most invested merchants has been under construction since God knows when. It now takes a sweltering sixteen hours to travel by bus from Lagos to Port Harcourt. Come on, Dr. Jonathan! let’s get serious for once. Ministers appointed with Works and Construction portfolios must reinvent their work ethic by putting on their boots and be at these construction sites weekly to monitor the performance of these  road builders.

These so-called “big men” ministers must take off their agbada and shokoto, throw on workman’s clothes, don on their hard hats, with boots to match, and head out to major construction sites on a weekly basis. We wish that could become the new standard. These ministers should be made to sweat for the big largesse they get from government. In the process, such hands-on approach may get them to lose those fatty tissues deforming their waistlines. A former Bendel State military governor, Colonel Samuel Ogbemudia, earned his national reputation for competence and accountability by frequenting construction sites and personally supervising work progress. For years, Bendel state remained the first among equals. The condition of the Lagos-Benin highway is no different from other road networks that connect strategic locations in the nation. While the nation also needs a modern rail system to reduce the hazards of road transport, the design and construction of modern rail system is always a long-term project.

The third national emergency project we suggest here is to re-train Nigeria’s very illiterate and poorly disciplined police force. In fact, we would recommend to President Goodluck Jonathan to use his first executive order as president to outlaw the use of police checkpoints across the country. A stipulated punishment for violation must also be attached. We are yet to find any overwhelming scientific evidence anywhere that police checkpoints are the best tools for deterring and apprehending criminals. If they did, then Nigeria would have become the most crime free nation on earth. The incidences of police arbitrariness and violation of individual liberties through lawless police checkpoints certainly constitutes the lowest point in the nation’s rule of law. We know of no police academies anywhere in the world where police checkpoints along a nation’s highways constitute the primary duties of police officers. Last summer, we recorded twenty-seven police checkpoints between Lagos and Benin City. The Nigerian police are so trapped in this misery that other pertinent police duties like crowd control or arresting arsonists and day light murders have become rocket science for them.

Cases abound in which towns, buildings, businesses and human beings are set on fire, clubbed to death and maimed for life in broad daylight with no mass police arrests. In all instances, the police usually arrived the crime scenes after its all happened. Their investigative and intelligence gathering skills are next to zero and when these crimes are ethnic and religion-related, the police quickly adopt a neutral ambivalence. This is simply absurd and unprofessional. It is immoral and an abomination, to say the least. Police checkpoints have been outlawed before but, some how, with collusion from their superiors, they return back to the roads, disobeying the nation’s laws with impunity.

The negative impact of police checkpoints is only too obvious to millions of Nigerians. At these checkpoints, the Nigerian police openly extort bribes in money and goods from traders and merchants who then recoup their losses by increasing prices of consumer goods. The Nigerian police have been known to shoot and kill innocent citizens who challenge the lawfulness of their actions at these checkpoints while many others have complained about how the police usually turn the other way in crises where they are most needed. Nigeria definitely deserves better.

Goodluck Jonathan has been elected by a new electoral realignment that was not necessarily party based but did represent a formidable voters mandate with a slew of manifest progressivism. If this is the opening salvo of an electoral revolution that progressives have embarked upon, Jonathan must not waste any of its capital. This mandate bears all the elements of hope and faith. It also demands a new paradigm of governance with the requirement that Jonathan cut his loses with PDP iniquities and embark on a bold new race to commence the transformation of not just the PDP but also the nation of Nigeria. We have not lectured any one about any thing here. What we do within our professional competence and expertise is point out comparable empirical approaches that have worked in similar situations around the world. The ball is now in Goodluck Jonathan’s court.

Cliff I. Edogun is professor of Government &

The North America Director, NIGERIA RALLY MOVEMENT

<www.nigeriarally.org>

<www.nigeriarally.org> cliffedo@nigeriarally.org

NIGERIAN YOUTH, ARISE, UNITE AND TAKE BACK YOUR COUNTRY!

Somehow, with the notable exception of sore losers like the unproductive and intellectually lazy Speaker of the Nigerian National Assembly, many skeptic Nigerians are now suddenly falling in line to accept that a democratic revolution is inevitable in Nigeria after all. From the Egyptian and Tunisian examples, many are now witnesses to the peaceful versions of revolutions that have taken the world by storm and hailed across the globe.

 It is ludicrously understandable that many Nigerians would prefer to preserve their current sub-prime life of deprivation, irrelevance and marginalization than strive to lose any pint of blood in order to be forever free. That is the choice older Nigerians may prefer to make or may have made. But for the Nigerian youth, whose dreams of freedom, equal opportunity and personal life achievements are dwindling by the clock, it will amount to sheepish suicide to even contemplate such a choice in this current historic moment. In the twinkle of an eye, consistent, relentless and principled peaceful protests and demonstrations, led by jobless and hopeless young people in these countries, are effectively bringing down murderous dictators along with their inept ruling political classes. Now, why should it not be Nigeria’s turn? Are the oppressed conditions of the Tunisian and Egyptian people any different from those in Nigeria? Haven’t Nigeria’s technological and industrial modernization been virtually halted and stymied in the past twelve years by the immoral profligacy of the federal, state and local government political oligarchy, most of which is poised again to return to power through an election that will be mysteriously rigged? Haven’t you suffered enough from induced regional, tribal and religious divisions that are perpetrated by political power mongers who make it virtually unattractive for you to move upward in your choice professions? Haven’t these intellectually crippled politicians told you point blank how your skills and educational background are sorely inferior to your international counterparts? Be you from the east, west, north or south, don’t you feel the perennial pain of having to struggle to find employment in your area of educational expertise? Are you not already exhausted and provoked enough that a country so naturally resourceful, especially in natural gas and abundant sun shine, cannot provide a mere round-the-clock power and electricity to drive the most basic cottage industries to employ and engage Nigeria’s productive forces? Haven’t you wept enough over how the political ruling class has deliberately decimated the nation’s educational system in order to set up their own expensive private institutions for their sons and daughters? Does it bother you to death that the highly acclaimed Nigerian universities of the past have now been converted into brothels and cult worship? Do you envisage your children living better lives than you did under the current scheme of things?  Don’t you have sleepless nights when you observe how law and order are first broken by a reckless and poorly trained police force who set up illegal police road blocks everywhere to harass, intimidate and infringe upon your liberties? With all the scholarly standards you have earned, is this your idea of a civilized society? Are you comfortable with the growing impunity of embezzlement that is flagrantly displayed by public officials who expend their stolen funds on prime real estate at home and abroad? How could you, for any imaginable human reason, tolerate the likes of Bode George, a former military officer, who sought to teach the young how to glorify sin against humanity? He is part of the political ruling class who was sent to prison for stealing public money and then turned his release from prison into a sinner’s carnival. Shouldn’t that be the last straw?

These were probably the same questions that the young in Egypt and Tunisia were asking themselves until hell broke lose. So far, from your candid observation of the on-going campaigns for president, have you recorded any quality and substance in their policy options? Do you sincerely believe that any of these presidential candidates has the vision, the character, the intellectual tenacity and the political will to bring about the fundamental change that is closest to your heart? Haven’t you noticed that the present contenders still recite those treacherous slogans of the past that are better reserved for slavish consumption?

The campaign crowds have remained essentially the same uncritical and happy-in-pain entertainment deludables, mostly stark illiterates who have no defensible stakes about whether Nigeria booms or busts. Supporting these emotional diehards are the gangster party hoodlums who rouse the crowd and act more like jungle mercenaries. Then, there are the party’s favorite lose cannons who adorn the high chairs that also include those who have already staked out their cabinet positions in the coming government. The party platforms contain the same intellectually lazy buzzwords that are generally devoid of detailed explanations about how the more than half a century economic, social and technical problems will be solved. Their turenchi reveals no discernable job creation strategies and no agenda for confronting the growing terror of killings, bombings, kidnappings, and police illiteracy.  In fact, these campaigns continue to offer the starkest indications yet about the inevitability of a popular insurrection against a severely incapacitated status quo.

This clarion call is primarily to alert and remind you that, regardless of who wins the presidency in the coming elections, nothing will change as long as politics is conducted under the current colonial induced political system. So, my dear young people, the crisis of politics in Nigeria is systemic, pure and simple. The Nigerian political system is like a vehicle that leaks oil. It can only go so far and no sane owner would dare embark on any long distance travel with such a vehicle. And unless that vehicle is overhauled, it can never travel far enough to see new places. So is the operating Nigerian political system. Sure, many will still quarrel with any such continued cause-effect inference to colonialism. That may sound plausible but facts and data still show that Nigeria’s power structure that the British divulged exclusively to the three major tribes of the north, east, and  west remains unbroken in spite of the token exercise of state and local government creation. None of what we claim today as democracy reflects any aspect of a Nigerian political culture either ideologically or philosophically. The British handed us a political framework of the master-servant variety by nurturing and empowering a political master class that, to this day, has failed to enter into a meaningful and productive social contract with the Nigerian people. The political perks and privileges that British colonialism handed down to selected representatives of the three major tribes of Hausa-Fulani, Ibo and Yoruba had so intoxicated this privileged few that the intellectual rigor required to fashion a republican constitution that would have defined who we are as a people was never summoned. Every generation of this privileged few received the succession baton from a previous generation and we are now witnessing the logistics of how the current retiring generation is handing over to their sons, daughters, nephews and wives. Thus, within the framework of this neo-colonial network, the Nigerian people are considered an alien force that will dismember this entrenched corporate greed and profits if allowed to gain entry into their filthy world of inhumanity. But the job now at hand for you young people is not to partake in their filth but to clean out the filth, dismantle their secretive world and establish a new order. Anything less than this agenda to dismantle and renew will only endanger your species further and render you incognito in a country that God has equally shared among you and these colonial-invented masters.

Before I close, please permit me to share some primary issues of renewal that could feature in your agenda for liberation from the current oppressive Nigerian ruling classes, regardless of party. It is encouraging to read about the many social networks blanketing the entire young world in Nigeria. However, it is not the number that matters, it is the unity of purpose, guidance, principles and leadership that will make the difference in any peaceful mass insurrection to bring down a corrupt and tone-deaf political system.      

The first item on the agenda must be to draw up a new republican constitution for which selected delegates from all of Nigeria’s local government districts should be equally represented. This equality of representation is to recognize Nigeria’s many nations that are not limited to Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Ibo nationalities alone. Bringing together all of Nigeria’s nationalities to write a new constitution will formalize who we are as a people. It will also promote a democratic rationale for negotiating and compromising on matters that will unite all, if that is the goal.

A constitution normally enumerates power relationships between the various levels of government and for a federal system which Nigeria represents, the appropriate power relations between the federal government and the states must be spelt out without any ambiguity. For instance, what specific powers should be reserved solely to the federal government? Which powers are reserved for the states? What are the limits to the president’s powers? What balances of powers must exist between the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government? What national and international policy issues must come under the powers of the executive and the legislative braches of government? What powers should be concurrent between these two branches of government?  How and what logistics must be in place for conducting all elections? Who qualifies to be elected president, governor, parliamentarian, council member, etc.? What national and international appointments can be made under the president’s powers?  What liberties and freedoms should all Nigerians enjoy as citizens? How must the state be separated from religion? What are the various judicial jurisdictions and how should appeals navigate such jurisdictions? Should the Supreme Court entertain political questions or should it be limited primarily to constitutional matters of rights, liberties and citizenship? Should tribunals be designated primarily to hear election cases? How would the various established federal or state courts approach criminal trials and judgments?  While these do not exhaust the entire spectrum of any constitutional deliberation, it however informs how gravely limited the 1999 Nigerian constitution has been. This constitution is similar to other previous constitutions that were hastily put together to satisfy the needs of the powers that be. A people’s constitution that is proposed here must have to be approved first by the deliberating delegates and then ratified through a national referendum to be arranged for that purpose. This will then be followed by organized general elections that will be governed by the new constitution. Thus, by the time the elections are held, the country would have been familiar with the formula for such elections.

In the final analysis, any peaceful insurrection to overthrow the current corrupt political class is meant to establish and advance democratic practices that must fit and meet the exigencies of the 21^st century and beyond. The status quo in Nigeria is an abominable contradiction to any such exigency. What is democratic in a country with more than 10,000 un-elected kings, monarchs, obas, emirs, obis, ezes, or chiefs who scramble and compete with elected representatives for power, influence and scarce resources while the rest of the Nigerian people remain doomed under the tutelage of a neo-feudal social order? In which other democratic political system in the civilized  world would you find such a coterie of improbable power centers with no institutional regulations or boundaries as in Nigeria? Every town, city or village has this individual or family hanging on to some unproven claims to inherited power, influence and authority that makes him the king, oba, monarch, emir, obi, eze or chief. They occupy huge manors across the land with multiple wives, children, servants and a multitude of hangers-on, all at the expense of public funds for some classified categories. They will tell you these free government-fed and state-paid rich nobles with no discernible job obligations are custodians of our culture and our fathers, plus the rest of the blah-blah! I am sure you know who your real father is and that you, as an individual, are the true embodiment of the culture that is in you. Thus, for years, these myriad centers of power have rendered the Nigerian political experiment with democracy an abysmal failure since the pitiable Nigerian citizen is often compelled to dutifully divide his/her loyalty between numerous self-centered masters. In so doing, his/her demands for a better life ring out in a clatter of voices that are incoherent and misdirected. This time around, your choice will determine if this is the form of democracy you wish to take with you into the competitive 21^st century world and beyond.

Finally, a word of caution: Nigerian youths have often fallen prey to the status quo for a few pieces of silver. Your conscience is sold for cheap but your condition remains the same or worse. That tactic should already be in full force now that you are organizing to empower your demographic that is more than 70 percent of the population. Now, that is quite some power base that has been left slumbering for too long. Many of you also may have pitched their tents with one of these presidential candidates for whatever reason. These candidates may be honorable men and women indeed and some may actually possess attractive imagery while others will certainly fill your ears with unattainable promises. Yet, every one of these candidates is a veritable product of the praxis of the discredited and incapacitated political system we have just described and none among them will be capable of betraying the very hands that feed them. None will summon the political will or the revolutionary zeal required now to overhaul the current long-running broken system. That challenge is now your calling.

 The gravity of the failed state in Nigeria was tearfully expressed by one Said Abdou Dirisu Minimu Aliu, a 26-year old Nigerian immigrant furniture builder, who was fleeing the Libyan revolutionary upheaval and got stranded at the Tunisian border. He complained bitterly about how he was treated like a slave while living in Libya even though he was a practicing Muslim. He remained in Libya only because he made a good living doing what he does best. Speaking to a United Nations aid worker at the Tunisian border, Dirisu Aliu put it this way: “There is something I want you to know; I’d have preferred to die in the war zone in Libya than to go back to Nigeria.”  For Allah’s sake, please remember that such young dreamers like the Alius and the Minimus all around the world come from within your ranks and the least you can do for them now is to demand, obtain and establish a new political order that would attract the likes of the Alius and the Minimus back into your fold.

Before I get to the reasons for this letter, I want to be clear that this conversation is directed only at the progressive nationalists in the military: those professionals whose loyalty, first and foremost, is to the Nigerian state and not to any sectional traditional rulers, political elites, region, tribe or religion. This conversation is for the trained and enlightened soldiers in flesh and blood who are related to, and know of, fellow citizens who have been rendered economically and socially bankrupt by the long-running corrupt Nigerian political regime; this conversation is for those military educated who share the current widening pain and torture of underdevelopment among their fellow citizens; it is for those who are daily witnesses to the debilitating policies of the current political ruling class who brought upon our country and its people injurious poverty, broken infrastructure, collapsed educational system, intractable youth unemployment, reckless and untrained police force, huge contract awards in the billions with nothing to show for it, mediocre appointments to responsible government positions and a brazen lawlessness that triggers unending murders, kidnappings and ransoms. And, in the midst of such socio-economic inferno, Nigerian parliamentarians and government officials take home paychecks that dwarf those earned by their American and British counterparts. These stupendous salaries are further complemented by mindless series of allowances that other Nigerians ordinarily labor intensely to acquire. To top these outlandish show of vice by the Nigerian political class is their perfection for rigging elections to perpetuate themselves in power. In April, we will all be expecting another field day for politicians now in power, whether it is the ruling PDP party or the opposition, to rig themselves back to power even when voters may have decided otherwise. Then comes the flourishing new frontier now taking hold, where old or discredited retired politicians continue to lurk in the shadows of power by sponsoring their wives, sons, nephews and daughters to carry on their heritage of greed and oppression in elective office. It is now clear that the hullabaloo accompanying the various military interventions in Nigeria during the 1960s and the 1970s were never directed at systemic change.  

The first of the reasons for inviting this conversation is to debunk the widespread notion, nationally and internationally, that military intervention in domestic politics in the current global democratic dispensation is a sure losing gamble. The threat of economic, trade, financial, and diplomatic isolation by the international community has tended to refrain the military in failed states from intervening in domestic politics. Even more serious is the threat to drag military generals who mastermind coups in these countries to the international court of justice for suspected war crimes. These and other global coalitions against military interventions have definitely encouraged woe-be-gotten politicians in countries like Nigeria to plunder and embezzle the nation’s wealth with impunity, murder opponents without facing any consequences in our seriously compromised justice system, sponsor sectarian wars to justify their enlarged egos and devise enabling strategies to rig all elections in their favor, all in the name of democracy. However, this global policy against military intervention in politics has taken on a new meaning since Obama became president of the United States. His government particularly loathes repressive African governments that have perfected election rigging to remain in power and that continually take their citizens for granted. His foreign policy has thus successfully mobilized all western industrial nations to modify the intent and purpose of military interventions in the politics of failed states. This policy began evolving in the ongoing popular uprisings in the Middle East.

In this evolving global policy towards military intervention, two major strands have emerged. The first is the old and outmoded intervention in which the military, for very flimsy and personal excuses, draws its weapons and rolls out its tanks to intervene, promising milk and honey to all and predisposing its prophetic arsenal to play God. It suspends the constitution in the process, closes the doors to parliaments and names its ranks as governors and administrators while relying on the civil service and appointed civilian stooges to do the brainwork. Meanwhile, they soon learn the ropes of corrupt governing, quickly building up fortunes for themselves, their mistresses and their wives. Not to be outdone by officers in power, bloody and bloodless countercoups by other jealous officers soon follow, with the same lure to replicate but refine the overthrown process with little or no fundamental changes. In the case of Nigeria, the various military coups, from Gowon in 1966 to Abubakar in 1998, were never nationalist in scope, form or precept but rather were fragmentary in management and style. Loyalty to the Nigerian state per se was minimal at best while loyalty to section, tribe, tradition, religion, and region was the preferred vision. Indeed, military interventions in Nigerian politics in this era openly favored the north for whatever reason as southerners invariably felt the weight of northern domination reinforced by such interventions. Any such interventions in Nigerian politics today or in the future will not survive a day with the current international scrutiny and rejection.

The military intervention that the world will glorify and applaud today is that which will support legitimate popular uprisings against morally bankrupt governments where politicians deliberately or routinely embezzle and mismanage the nation’s treasures without consequences and where the so-called people’s representatives care less about enacting laws to spur economic growth and development to employ the troves of unemployed young people. Their choice policy is to leave the critical decisions and strategies for economic development in the hands of foreign gamblers who willfully manipulate outcomes to include shadow front companies for siphoning out profits on behalf of their Nigerian official sponsors. These indicators have always reflected the Nigerian experience. In Nigeria, the trauma from an entrenched official corruption, a highly compromised judicial system, the failed and un-funded public infrastructure, non-existent health care for millions of Nigerian citizens, an untrained and reckless police force, a sorrowful educational decay, the constant threat to life and property and a severely flawed electoral process makes Nigeria a prime candidate for such intervention. In fact, it is long overdue.

The second reason for this conversation is to assure you that the contagion of democracy protests against corrupt and out-of-touch third world governments will definitely come to Nigeria where the young, the dispossessed, the economically oppressed and all sections of the nation’s demographic will troop out peacefully in their hundreds of thousands to demand the overthrow of the long-running evil political class. When this happens, the discredited ruling class will surely evoke the spurious and meaningless Nigerian Constitution in their defense and call upon you to violently stem this wild fire. It will resort to the usual targeted bribing of popular individuals and groups and deploy the violent prone mobile police to intimidate and brutalize many. It will even request you to shoot at sight. THAT MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. You must not fire on your own people who are only exercising their legitimate rights to demand for an honest and transparent government that they deserve. Their peaceful protests and demands must be seen and recognized as core parts and parcel of democratic practice. Therefore, the rules of engagement in this instance will require the best of the Nigerian military to align forcefully with the people’s vision and not with the morally bankrupt, corrupt state; not to any particular ruling class individual, section, region, tradition, or religion. Nor should the military express any bias in favor of the ruling party simply because it also shares in the political spoils. 

The greatest service you will do for all history and to your God-given country is to team up with Nigeria’s best and the brightest to establish a time-sensitive agenda for re-configuring the system best workable for a plural Nigeria. The focus must be systemic change and the starting point is to convene a national constitutional conference to re-draw a Constitution that recognizes the fundamental principles of pluralism (true federalism), citizenship, democracy, freedom and justice. Representation at this national constitutional conference must not be composed or dominated by the usual Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Ibo nationalities. These may be superior in numbers but they are not superior in wisdom, neither do they have a monopoly of vision. This national constitutional convention must comprise of the nearly 40 major ethnic groupings that make up the plural Nigeria: the Urhobos, the Igala, the Annang, the Kanuri, the Jukun, the Nupe, the Ekoi, the Ebira, the Berom, the Tiv, the Gwari, the Edo, etc, etc. The business of this conference is to define who we are as a people, what is required of us as citizens, what individual freedoms are protected and under which constitutional rights citizens must thrive and prosper as a people. It must define the proper powers granted to the federal and state governments so that the constituent parts do not encroach upon one another and get away with it. The powers of the presidency and the legislative branch must be enumerated to ensure that constitutionally derived checks and balances are preserved.  Federal powers cannot control all the resources as this has encouraged and promoted built-in corruption in high places over the years. The current practice in which the federal government plays Father Christmas is simply no longer sustainable. Such practice demonizes Nigeria’s pluralism and leaves the constituent parts with very low capacity to develop.

This new constitution will be voted upon in a national referendum and if accepted, the attention must then shift to devising a decentralized method for holding national elections. A national electoral commission that sits in Abuja and hopes to oversee elections thousands of miles away should not expect a free and fair contest. Over-centralization remains Nigeria’s worst enemy and the political class is still not capable or still unwilling to learn from the lessons of past failed experiments. How do we conduct national or state elections in Nigeria that are not subject to logistic rigging? That should be the overriding question that the military and its team of civilian technocrats will settle and I can assure you that we will be capable of settling it with distinction.

While I am not attempting to pre-empt any solutions to national issues that remain unresolved since 1960, my contention here is that a professional, nationalist and disciplined Nigerian military must seize the historical moment, at the appointed time, to intervene on behalf of a sure-to-come popular uprising against the failed state in Nigeria by setting a national agenda to re-define the landscape for national political renewal through a new federal constitution that enshrines the fundamental principles of pluralism, democracy, freedom and justice for all Nigerians. This historical moment calls for the replication of the Egyptian and Tunisian examples by the professional Nigerian military since it can no longer afford to remain a liability by continuing to protect a decadent, out-of-touch and injuriously corrupt Nigerian state. History now demands that you turn into an asset of the people, become their trustees and be recognized worldwide as the formidable frontier for democracy, transparent governance, justice, freedom and pluralism. Your patriotism will be judged favorably along with the current Middle Eastern examples and those that occurred in South Korea in the 1980s and Indonesia in the 1990s.

Cliff I. Edogun, PhD

Adjunct Professor of Government &

North America Director, NIGERIA RALLY MOVEMENT (www.nigeriarally.org)

clif3edo@aol.com

Believe me, you both are now the talk and the toast of town among curious western diplomats in Washington and New York City who long to see Nigeria’s vast human and natural resources rise from slumber and take its rightful place on the global roster. There is even the suggestion that if either of you could muster the required courage and political will to commence cleaning up the mess of the last thirty years, the violent social revolution that is hovering above the Nigerian skies might just not be necessary after all. In fact, if any Nigerian politician or feckless citizen is still second guessing the spread effect of the current wave of revolutionary fervor now saturating Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, then such politician or citizen must be brain dead. The uprising  in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen or Algeria are solidly rooted in the same issues Nigeria has grappled with for years: massive official corruption, political godfatherism, high joblessness among young school leavers, election rigging in favor of the ruling party, religious fanaticism and mediocre government appointments. What is probably certain about the ongoing Tunisian and Egyptian rebellion is that the vast majority of Nigerians may never get to see the images that are being conjured in the minds of observers since much of Nigeria will be in the dark for lack of power.   

For a nation that has suffered the shameful blights of religious, regional, ethnic and class bigotry, your nomination by your respective parties is viewed widely as a tempered relief for the younger generation of Nigerians whose entire lives has been saddled with little or no access to technology educational standards, no access to gainful employment years after university or secondary graduation, no access to basic visual communications systems that would open up the rest of the world to them, no quality of life benefits from simple electric power, pipe borne water supply, safety of life and property, medical attention or even a clean environment. For all they know, this younger generation continues to believe erroneously that the rest of the world is very much like Nigeria. For years, they have been compelled to trust in riches and rewards without laboring for them, they have accepted fraud and deception as pure convention, and they consider open-eye bribery and corruption as civilized conduct. Today, in the prevailing competitive world of the 21^st century, countries are competing to fill their primary and secondary school classrooms and libraries with computer soft-wares, so children can start the race to the top very early. Nigeria can surely afford the least of these but the greed and the pernicious aggrandizement that still color the worldview of the country’s ruling class would make such effort an impossible dream for the younger generation.

My dear honorable nominees, I have sought your very valued attention for this reason: Judging from all calculations in the gradual changing face of Nigeria’s struggling democracy, one of you will emerge president of Nigeria after the April poll. When this happens, please, please, for goodness sake, dedicate your historic presidency to Nigeria’s young people by striving with all the power and authority at your disposal to fulfill their dreams and aspirations. Establish works and training programs to absorb them into a good paying labor force; engage the unemployed and the underemployed university graduates in creative public-private projects to disengage their minds from unworthy pursuits. For a country with a critical shortage of judges and court houses where writs of habeas corpus are rarely evoked, the trove of Nigerian law graduates who roam the streets in vain to be trial lawyers could be lured into the administration of justice as prosecutors and criminal investigators, with good pay, just for an extra six months of professional training. Your immediate attention must now turn to investing the riches of Nigeria on these young people by enforcing laws to stamp out the root causes of their social degeneration. Wiping out these root causes will ultimately prove to the young and old alike that your presidency is either the peaceful revolution many have been wishing for or just another polar bear charging to push our young people this time towards the Tunisian example.

Before recasting some of the most notorious root causes of our nation’s degeneration and why wiping them out would set a new moral standard for our younger generation, I’d briefly introduce some findings from our public opinion survey research conducted in the Lagos metropolis this past summer between July 1 and August 7, 2010 and titled “The State Of The State In Nigeria: A Citizen’s Survey Of A Political System In Perpetual Decline.”  Some 872 sample representatives of Nigerian citizens were asked to indicate their presidential preference among Atiku, Babaginda, Buhari, Gusau, Jonathan, Kalu, Ribadu and Saraki. 40% chose Jonathan, 31% chose Ribadu while 15% chose Buhari. The rest of the pack received single digit pledges. The vote for Ribadu was quite surprising, considering he had yet to be nominated by CAN. This preference pattern in itself is clear testimony that Nigerians are painfully starving for new young blood. In this same survey, participants, by a margin of 89%, believed Jonathan’s ascension to the presidency brought a cooling effect to the Nigerian nation after the mysterious circumstances surrounding Yar’Adua’s death. However, only 32% of these same respondents believe Jonathan is capable of transforming Nigeria into a nation of peace and prosperity within the current PDP political arrangement. A whopping 89% of those surveyed view the PDP ruling party as “corrupt”, “heavy-handed”, “unaccountable”, “irresponsible”, “election riggers”, and “money-mongers”.

The opposition parties fared no better. 84% describe Nigerian opposition parties as “disloyal”, “lazy”, “disorganized”, “conspiratorial”, and “localized”. These respondents point to the devious mechanizations of major opposition party members who, in what is purely a contradiction, work assiduously to jump ship and be joined to the ruling party in pay-off arrangements. Thus, the weakness and the flirtatious character of Nigeria’s opposition parties tend to embolden the ruling party to act extra legal. {For a full account of this public opinion survey on such other national issues as Federalism, the Presidency, the National Assembly, National Security, Resource Control, Traditional Rulers, Political Leadership, Infrastructure, Elections, Social Revolution, etc., please visit nigeriarally.org, click on Rally News and scroll on to article #28}. 

The root causes of our most blatant degeneration are probably all too well known to you and you may have even condemned them yourselves in the past, but now that you are in the driver’s seat, our younger generation will definitely expect you to reverse their ditched train and head out for a more desired destination.

National security should keep you busy 24/7. How and when to bring the spate of widespread communal killings, kidnappings and hard-core white collar crimes to a minimum will eventually constitute the yardstick for measuring your effectiveness. The one agonizing and bedeviling experience that citizens and foreign visitors to Nigeria have encountered in recent years is the irrational official decision to mount illegal police checkpoints along the nation’s highways and city streets. The argument that they act to deter crime is so bizarre, so unprofessional and so intuitively primitive. For a nation not at war, mounting forty-five police checkpoints between Lagos and Benin for the purpose of deterring crime gives the Nigerian police a very bad name and defines the national purpose as lawless. For any president who will be intellectually attentive to the growth of the economy through trade and commerce, such unregulated and illegal police and customs checkpoints work to deflate the nation’s GDP. They severely limit inter-state commerce in goods and services since many of these traders have simply quit the trades because of high-handed police and customs extortions. Where they decide to recoup their police and customs induced losses, they end up setting high unit prices for consumer products, thus making these goods out of reach for the average citizen.

The impact of raw police indiscipline on our young people always tends to stifle their perception of legitimacy. The Nigerian police are known to have openly flouted several earlier directives to dismantle these backward methods of solving crimes. They would obey such directives for a week or two and then return to the same treasonable tactics. What is eccentric about their checkpoint argument is that every one knows the police engage in this practice primarily to extort bribes and gifts from drivers, motorists, traders and tourists. Even more insidious is their flagrant disregard for our freedom and rights. Is this the police agenda that a president elected by the people would accept for his country? It’s a shame! In more efficient, civilized and orderly societies, crimes are solved through undercover intelligence gathering, round-the-clock neighborhood foot and mobile patrols and expansive community outreach for information sharing.

Education modernization must be pursued with maximum vigor that this deserves. Since both of you have solid intellectual credentials, understanding the need to overhaul our education system from the primary to university levels would not require rocket science. The percentage share of federal government expenditure to education is still below 8% at 2007 level, a rate that falls far short of a UNESCO recommended benchmark of 26%. Cuba, which ranks first in the world, devotes 18.7 percent to education. Nigeria’s institutions of higher learning have fallen on such hard times that students have dutifully embraced the more engaging curriculum of cult worship while some professors find it more rewarding to charge for handouts. To continue such neglect is to willingly deprive our precocious young people from competing in the global economy of the 21^st century

While we request your valued attention to the falling education standards, we are not suggesting the usual quick fix of increasing government expenditure without accounting for such expenditure. For all we know about Nigeria of yesterday, the government is always capable of showing the world the mere high numbers of increased education expenditure without ever providing proof of how the money was spent. In fact, we would suggest this practice that is familiar with clean, transparent governments: Why not set up independent project monitoring boards for every project that the government makes an investment so that the public can be assured that such projects will be executed exactly as specified. Monitoring board members’ backgrounds must also be professionally related to their assigned projects to avoid the usual conniving practice of placing round pegs in square holes.

Finally, we wish to repeat on behalf of all grown-up Nigerians that the 1999 Constitution is whimsical at best, elementary in vision and purpose at worst and represents a body of language and philosophy that smack neatly with military intellectual simplicity. It is a Constitution that should not continue to be heralded by any civilian democracy. If you wear the mantle of a progressive, since you appear to have declared yourself as such or behaved like one, you must ignite the growing quest among our people for a national convention to re-write the 1999 Convention where every ethnic and religious demographic will be represented.

The 1999 Constitution, for anyone who found patience to read through its length, tended to have confused the goals of public policy with the role of a Constitution (the final law). A Constitution should have no business addressing such matters as the goals of economic and social development that a country may pursue. Neither is it the business of a Constitution to delineate the number of states or local governments and their boundaries or establish the modus operandi for federal character. These and other such economic and social issues should be best left to the people’s representatives at the legislative branches of government to decide. Constitutions deal with grants of power. For a federal system, the Constitution should concentrate on specifying the powers of the three branches of government and the jurisdictions over which such powers must be exercised. Constitutions must spell out the rights and liberties of citizens, establish the procedures and frequencies for electing the people’s representatives, governors, and the president, including the requisite majorities (simple or super) for deciding various social, economic, foreign and cultural issues. In addition, how do checks and balances between the three branches of government limit the concentration of power in any one branch as it currently does with the presidency and the federal government. Answers to such and other legitimate questions are surely best answered by a democratic national convention rather than by a kangaroo jury that was convened by a military-leaning government in 1999. 

Above all, we seek a democratic national constitutional convention to write a new republican constitution that would define who we are as a people and what guaranteed freedoms we enjoy from Port Harcourt to Sokoto to Jos to Benin City without regard to religion, skin color or political affiliation. For our younger generation, such a civilian democracy derived from a republican constitution should instill a sense of belonging in them and enshrine the spirit of equality in their quest for a decent future.

Cliff I. Edogun, PhD.

North America Coordinator

NIGERIA RALLY MOVEMENT

cliffedo@nigeriarally.org

By Dr. Cliff I. Edogun, PhD, NNP, Jan 3, 2011 -

This same experience will be required of Nigeria, whether we like it or not. To paraphrase the Holy Book that most Nigerian Christians often like to quote for convenience: Without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sin. I am sure some aspect of this scripture can also be found in the Koran.

If anyone is still drowsy about the possibility of a revolution in Nigeria, I think it has already started in earnest. Currently wrapped in religious garbs in Bornu and Plateau that many are still denying even when the perpetrators have identified themselves, and couched in series of bombings in Abuja, the Niger Delta and elsewhere, these caricatures will spread until the slumbering eyes of Nigerians will open and will be forced to pit their tents with the contending ideological mongers. This historical event is inevitable because the gods we call upon everyday in vain have thrown their towels into the combat ring. In fact, I never really quite understood how any sane Nigerian would believe for one moment that the overbearing Nigerian contradictions will somehow be glossed over without a violent duel

The template for a revolution in Nigeria has long been sown even before Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960. The British, in their quest to outdo the French in the scramble for Africa, cobbled together tribes, ethnicities and religious traditions from the south and the north of Nigeria without regards to their political and social fit. The British first experimented this imperial gerrymandering in British India when it foolishly amalgamated present-day Islamic Pakistan with India’s Hindus in its expansionist policy. The result, of course, was the inevitable India/Pakistan partition in 1947. The Nigerian experiment was a much more patronizing case as northern Nigeria, a haven of emirate oligarchies that suited British monarchical traditions, was willing to hang unto a Nigerian federation if the British would favor them as the majority group. Thus, to the emerging political forces in both the north and the south, independence had contrasting connotations and meant different things. For the south, led by Awolowo and Azikiwe, independence meant a golden opportunity to sever significant cultural and political ties with England and establish a nationalist state for creative engineering. With the north, having delayed independence once to catch up with the south, it sought to retain the British as diplomatic consultants and conniving bulwarks against the transformation-inclined southern Nigeria.

The 1952-1953 national census conducted by the British inevitably sealed their ulterior motive to declare the north the majority region and to apply this status as the cornerstone for the so-called parliamentary democratic rule after political independence. Top put it more mildly, this meant that any future elections based on one-man-one-vote will necessarily make the majority north the winner with the accompanying privilege of heading the national government. Thus, the first national government of 1960 witnessed a coalition of strange bedfellows between the Islamic north as senior partners and the Christian east as junior partners. Then, using the putative slogan of “One Nigeria”, Zik, an Igbo nationalist, broke ranks with the southern nationalist strategy in order to accommodate the collective interest of his expansionist and nomadic commercial-merchant Igbo clansmen who had set up vast trading posts across the entire northern landscape. Strangely enough, the north was not all united as Joseph Tarka, the ebullient Middle-Belt nationalist statesman, joined forces with the opposition radical Yoruba west.

The manifestation of this colonial arrangement gave birth to a system whereby unity was predicated upon the major tribes of Hausa/Fulani-Igbo-Yoruba sharing national political power proportionally while the minor tribes were content with crumbs from the table. Within this same setting, subsequent ruling political parties automatically put the core north (Hausa-Fulani Sunni Muslim oligarchy) at the head of the table while others scrambled for whatever they could get. It is thus no wonder that today, core northern political elites and political zonists are asserting their privileged right to the presidency even with the threat to make the country ungovernable for Jonathan if he contested the 2011 elections on the PDP platform.

Whether this threat is connected with the current series of bombings in Abuja and elsewhere is hard to say but the recent public pronouncements of the core northern consensus candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has struck a war-mongering tone to observers here in the United States. If the identities of perpetrators of recent bombings represent one side of the emerging revolutionary force, then it is not the vanguard force that the vast majority of restive Nigerians are clamoring for. Neither will they join this operating force as comrades when the revolution gets underway. For a quick study of the current violent force, it represents the old school, the discredited status quo, the privileged idle class which is quite comfortable with the way things are and could care less if Nigeria was stuck in an 18^th century world. It is strange that such a revolutionary force, if that is what it can be called, has no perceptible ideological identity except for its claims to a ruptured religious bigotry and an eccentric political nihilism.

The other side of the revolutionary force has not yet taken up arms and their bearings are largely progressive. They thrive on competition and creativity and are sore ashamed that Nigeria has lagged so far behind in the global roster. They are technologically inclined, experimentally minded and at the moment, are studying the tactics and modalities of the indiscriminate bombing fanatics of recent months. They are methodical and are overtly ready to match dollar-for-dollar with the financiers of the current violent religious and regional warlords. These progressives come from all across Nigeria’s vast space but are largely identified with the West, the East, the Mid-West and the Middle-Belt regions. These regions, if they wish to take advantage of it, now have the opportunity, as never before, to enter into a new political re-alignment and framework, including a solid majority to rule Nigeria for the next century without the insulting privilege of zoning. Thus, the battle is already joined and I am betting my last dollar on a sound progressive victory.

Then shall a national constitutional convention be finally convened to re-configure a working Nigerian federalism that gives more powers to the states to develop on their own and at their pace. Then shall the rule of law that enshrines equality before the law be established and a justice system that focuses on the facts of the law rather than on social status be mandated to deliver fair justice to all. Then shall a reasoned and intellectually designed Constitution stipulate a rational paycheck for the people’s representatives without those spurious allowances that make us look mental across the globe. Of course, the security forces will be modernized and contesting all elections will be open to all who qualify and made to strictly apply the one-man-one-vote democratic principle. For all intent and purposes, the 1999 Constitution was an intellectual aberration, a document prepared largely to assuage the semi-literate military government that appointed numerous academic stooges to the constitutional writing committees with guns over their heads. A victorious progressive revolution will change all that for good

_______________________________________________________________________

Dr. Edogun is the North American Coordinator, The NIGERIA RALLY MOVEMENT

cliffedo@nigeriarally.org