Rebuilding Nigeria requires shift from consumption to production as espoused by Peter Obi.
By Nchee Nwabunnia
The Nigeria state started evolving from the colonial era when the British Colonial Government cobbled the hitherto independent nations together for administrative and business convenience. The Amalgamation of the Southern and Northern Protectorates in to what turned out to be Nigeria by Lord Frederick Lugard in 1914, institutionalized the agenda.
Early nationalists like Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik), Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello etc, took the country to another stage of its political evolution by fighting for independence. Their struggle, alongside many other compatriots yielded fruit when on October 1, 1960, the British Government granted Nigeria her independence.
With the emergence of Zik as the President and Tafawa Belewa as Prime Minister, the journey to nation building commenced in earnest.
However, in less than 6 years after independence, in 1966, the military struck and held the country hostage and redundant ever after. Up until 1979, they held sway without any vision or mission outside ethnic jingoism and dominance.
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An interlude of a democratic rule was ushered in in 1979 with Shehu Shagari as the president. The regime was short lived as the military kicked it out in 1983. The country continued to drift in the hands of generals that were hardly equipped for civil politics. The outcome is that the country has been on the path of underdevelopment, more than 60 years after political independence.
From 1983 to 1998 Nigeria remained under military rule and in handing over to democratic rule, the soldiers, who conducted the transition programme, deliberately scuttled the people’s mandate freely given to business mogul and newspaper publisher, MKO Abiola.
Faced with unceasing agitations by Nigerians for the military to quit the center stage of politics, the departing General Abdulsalami Abubakar regime presented Nigerians with one of their own, Retired General Olusegun Obasanjo, as civilian president. With this, it appeared as if the military had continued in disguise up till 2007 when a President without military background, Umaru Yar’Adua emerged with Goodluck Jonathan as his deputy in 2007. At Yar’Adua’s death in 2010, Jonathan completed their term and stood for election in 2011 in which he won and remained in office till 2015.
Jonathan was replaced by a retired military leader, Muhammadu Buhari, who took over in 2015 and has within the seven years of his presidency, virtually left the country in ruins. The major attribute of his administration is obvert provincialism and reinforcement of ethnic jingoism.
This implies that since after the first military coup, Nigeria has not really been on the move, strictly speaking. The only thing the military class understood and got fixated on was ethnic dominance. As a result, the country has lost every opportunity at developing its economy and infrastructure.
The reversal of this sordid trend, is the driving force behind the aspiration of the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi. Many defining factors underline his candidacy. In him, for the first time in the history of Nigeria, we are seeing a presidential contestant emerging without backing of the political elite of his geo-political zone. He is not riding on religious, ethnic card but by an unusual youth and mass support base. We are seeing a contestant whose vision and speeches are purely economy-based and a conscious agenda to shift the focus of the country from consumption to production.
Nigerians need to give attention to the message by the LP standard-bearer. We cannot afford to continue to live in the past. That will amount to self-denial. Religion and ethnic induced politics has failed all including people of the dominant ethnic groups. Insecurity, mass murder, banditry, kidnapping, etc do not select region or religion. Poor leadership cannot be improved by the leader’s region of birth. In President Buhari, we have seen Nigeria’s economy and security architecture collapse. The hardest hit being the North West/North East, incidentally, his immediate constituency.
Our evolution needs be recalibrated. Our economy needs to be rejigged. Our security needs to be effective again. Peter Obi is the only one who seems to have the solution. Let’s dwell on reality again and eschew sentiments. Nigeria can be good again.
.Nchee Nwabunnia, Political Scientist, wrote from Lagos
