The young ones are asking through the Obi-Datti ticket for a regime change to a proper civilian politics under the rule of law. I think the youth of this country have a good case and they have presented it with dignity and decorum. THAT IS WHY WE NEED TO VOTE OBI-DATTI INTO POWER THIS YEAR.
By Elder Dr. Uma Eleazu
In today’s Nigeria, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, thanks to the Buhari regime. The economy is not growing, in fact the growth rate of the GDP has slowed considerably due to poor economic management, the Naira has lost its value, and interest rate is so high that it does not encourage either savings or investment, and without these, the economy cannot grow.
Foreign investment cannot flow in because of unpredictable exchange rate, and without foreign capital inflow, we cannot get the technology that could have come with them. Indigenous scientific research has for long been stultified because those in power do not value education. The physical infrastructure that support growth of businesses – energy, roads, ports, etc., have dilapidated. The general business climate is harsh and uninviting; those foreign businesses already here are taking their flight out of the country. And then the big elephant in the China shop, security. There can be no civilization in a country living in the “state of nature”.
On the other hand, the population is growing faster than we can feed, house or educate the young. As a result we have over 20 million children who have never been enrolled in school, and many more who dropped out without completing the primary school education join the growing number of youth unemployment.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says 45.6% of youths (aged 18 – 35) are unemployed. Those of them who managed to go through primary and secondary level of education have no employable skills. Some of them who managed to finish their tertiary education eke out their living on the periphery of the formal economy, thanks to the internet and IT revolution. They are starting families and soon have other mouths to feed! The result is poverty of body and mind. Any wonder the World Bank says Nigeria is now the poverty capital of the world with over 130 million suffering from multidimensional poverty.
The reason people set up government is to protect life and property from external or internal marauders; to protect their freedom to go about their lawful businesses unmolested. The US Constitution summarized in the famous phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Copying from the 1979 Nigerian constitution, the makers of the 1999 Constitution, stated categorically that the constitution is adopted “… for the purpose of promoting the good government and welfare of all peoples in our country on the principles of Freedom, Equity and Justice, and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people…” (See preamble to the 1999 Constitution)
In Nigeria today, that is not happening. Nobody can sleep with two eyes closed. There is banditry and kidnapping for ransom, murder of innocents by known and unknown gunmen, highway robbery, rape, murder and arson especially on Government facilities built with colossal amounts of public funds. There is blatant looting of public funds by the people who were elected or appointed to use it for the welfare of the people.
Our elected leaders appear to be “fiddling while Rome burns.” Debates in the National Assembly, and even state assemblies sound so flat, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They do not show that our leaders understand the people’s problems except when it touches their pockets. At the end of the day they take their loot and retire to their homes abroad only to be replaced by another batch of treasury looters under immunity from prosecution, because they were once governors of states they have looted dry. Do they understand their role as elected representatives of the people? I doubt it.
When the Buhari regime was waiting on the wings (2014/15), it promised CHANGE to Nigerians. Naira would exchange 1 to 1 with the dollar; Boko Haram will be defeated, corruption will be wiped out, etc. Eight years down the line, Naira now exchanges at 740+ to one US Dollar. Boko Haram has gone from being ‘technically defeated’ to controlling nearly the whole of North East and parts of the North Central zones of the country. Corruption has reached high heavens as do make the angels weep.
Add to this the impunity with which public officials deal with the down trodden, the wretched of the earth of Nigeria; there is much extrajudicial killing of innocent citizens, the youths are hounded into prisons for having an earphone; young people are arrested and detained without trial for having a computer. A panel beater was sentenced to death for stealing N57,000 while an Accountant General was fined N750,000 for stealing N109 billion. If that is not a travesty of justice, then I don’t know what justice is.
Security officials act with such impunity that many youths are afraid to ply their legitimate IT trade. Even as I am writing, a young female lawyer has been gunned down by an Assistant Superintendent of Police – a very senior officer who should know the rules and boundaries of policing and law enforcement! We have not heard that he has been at least taken into custody for questioning, let alone trial. What a country? And yet our future lies in the education and encouragement of this growing resilient, adaptable, tech-savvy generation of youths, our greatest resource for development.
It has not always been this bad
How did Nigeria descend to such a level? Our children are now asking questions. How do we get out of the mess the country is in and join the rest of the world? That is the challenge the OBI-DATTI Movement (I call it a tsunami) poses for us of an earlier generation.
It is either we allow this quiet revolution to take place now, or risk a violent change.
After all, it was an earlier generation of youths that challenged the British colonial regime and successfully fought for our independence. (Nnamdi Azikiwe was 37 when he returned from America to found his chain of newspapers that was the voice of the masses. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was only 38 when he published his Path to Nigerian Freedom (1944) in London. He later returned to lead the Action Group party, the Sardauna was in his early 40s when he became the Premier of the whole of Northern Region. Chief Anthony Enahoro was only 27 when he moved the motion for Independence of Nigeria in the House of Representative in 1953. These were young men who wanted change from the throes of colonialism. They used the language of the spirit of the post WW2 world – freedom, independence, human rights — and they succeeded.
Contrast this with the ObiDient generation. Most of them were born after the Nigerian civil war, which means that the oldest ones are in their early fifties. And yet they have known nothing but military and pseudo military rule. Their parents will tell them stories, that once upon a time, there were Nigerian Airways, Nigerian Railways, Nigerian National Shipping line, Nigerian Post and Telegraphs, Public Works Department, Mission schools etc. and they wonder what happened to the men and women who manned these institutions. They were Nigerians trained by the colonial power.
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Nigerian Engineers could design and build roads and bridges then. Now we rely on Chinese coolies. All such infrastructures have decayed and those who worked in them are all dead or languishing somewhere in the country side waiting for pensions that will never come. All that the younger generation has seen, as far as governance is concerned are military rulers, “men in uniform”. They hear about the wealth from petro-dollars, billions and trillions of naira budgeted, and yet the country is now ranked among the poorest of the poor, they see poverty in the midst of plenty. What is the relationship of this groveling poverty to the insecurity, terrorism, insurgency, banditry and lawlessness ravaging the country? Short answer: poverty of leadership and poverty of the mind.
A cursory look at the recent history of Nigeria will show how this downward spiral started.
Since inception, Nigeria has had four regimes, each with its own characteristics and impact on the peoples of Nigeria.
- The Colonial Regime 1900 – 1960
TRADE AND COMMERCE brought the British to our shores. In the spirit of the age, they colonized the area now known as Nigeria, enclosing many ethnic nationalities, and imposed their will and ways of doing things on them. They enslaved our fore-fathers on their own land and imposed an autocratic form of governance on everybody. They introduced a divide-and-rule strategy of administering and managing the colonial estate in order to keep the various ethnic nationalities from coming together. The system they set up was intended to help them achieve the maximum profit for the mother country, not to create a united country out of the many ethnic nationalities in the colonial plantation.
As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. So, as time went on, a younger generation of Nigerians (incidentally, in their 30’s and 40’s) arose and demanded independence and self-government for Nigeria from the British. They all agitated for the overthrow of British imperialism and to regain the independence and right to rule themselves in the interest of the peoples of Nigeria.
After series of negotiations between the British on the one hand and leaders of the various ethnic nationalities on the other, the British agreed to withdraw their imperial rule in 1960. What bothered the local elite at the time was not how accommodate the multiplicity of ethnic nationalities but first to get the British out and then worry about how to live together in peace once the British law and order was withdrawn.
However, three principles of politics and government were canvassed and adopted as the basis for living together as a people, namely: i) DEMOCRACY embodying the principles of Freedom, Equity, and Justice for all. Ii) Operationally, they also adopted a FEDERAL Structure to accommodate the diversity of peoples and cultures, and iii) a PARLIAMENTARY (REPRESENTATIVE) form of Government to cater for inclusiveness; All these were embodied in a CONSTITUTION implying Rule of Law as the guiding principle, to provide the parameters or boundaries for social/political action. On our Coat of Arms was emblazoned with the words “UNITY in Diversity”
- Nationalist Regime: 1960 – 1966
Between 1954 and 1960, the British supervised the establishment of democratic governance structures based on the above principles. The ethnic nationalities were regrouped into three regions based on geographical contiguity. Thus we had Western Group of Provinces, Eastern Group of Province and the Northern group of provinces, now designated as Western, Eastern and Northern Regions respectively. Each of these regions formed the federating units of the federal structure. However, each of these regions still had its own diversity of ethnicity, diverse tongues, cultures and religion.
The nationalist leaders accepted to live with that, if only to hasten the Independence Day. In their hurry to attain “independence” the leaders did not agree as to what Unity in diversity meant. There is the oft quoted conversation between Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) and Sir Ahmadu Bello (the Sarduna of Sokoto) in which Zik told the Sardauna,”let us forget our differences and work together as brother Africans” to which the Sardauna replied, “No, instead let us understand our differences first, to see if we can work together.”
Twelve days after Independence Day, the Sardauna in an interview with the BBC, said that Nigeria was an estate bequeathed to them (Northerners), by their grandfather, and that the British only interrupted their match to the ocean and it was only a matter of time before they can dip the Koran in the Atlantic. That was quite an ominous statement, and indeed, it was only a matter of time when that idea began to play out as the ideology of a section of the Northerners on the Nigerian political scene.
Political formations during the colonial regime was not really what political scientists would call political parties. They were either ethnically based associations or an agglomeration of interest groups ranging from labour unions to tribal/community based associations. Each of the leaders of the three regions was supported by a major party; Action Group (AG) led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo was the dominant party in the Western Region with the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe a close second.
The NCNC was the dominant party in the Eastern Region. The Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) led by the Sardauna of Sokoto was the dominant part in the north with minor parties like the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) under the leadership of Alhaji Aminu Kano a close second. There was also in the North a splinter of the NEPU and AG in the middle- belt area of Nigeria, the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) under the leadership of Joseph Tarka. In fact, on the run up to Independence, the leaders of these groups could not agree on anything except the date of independence. As a matter of fact, the NPC did not even want independence unless on their own terms, which delayed our freedom until October 1960. That was problem no. 1
To work a federal structure of government requires statesmanship on the part of the leadership of the federating units. It requires leadership with unity of purpose, who can bargain in a spirit of give-and-take while keeping the overall purpose in mind. It required leadership who at least had the same values, like simple keeping of a gentleman’s agreement. We did not have that in 1960. Add to this the disagreement over issues of the structure of the federation which some groups still did not accept. The smaller ethnic nationalities that found themselves grouped into one or the other of the three regions expressed their fears of domination by the larger ethnic nationalities.
Most of the smaller ethnic groups living in contiguous areas organized themselves into political interest groups to demand regions of their own before the departure of the British. (For example, three provinces – Calabar, Ogoja, and Rivers provinces formed what they called C O R State Movement and wanted to be carved out of the Eastern Region. Similarly the Igbo Speaking Provinces In the Western Region wanted to be carved out of the predominantly Yoruba/Edo speaking peoples of the Western Region and be made a region of their own, the Northern Region had even more of such movements: the United Middle Belt Congress, the Kanuri Progressive Association to name a few.
These fears were expressed so vociferously that the British administration set up a “Commission of Inquiry into the fears of Minorities, and means of allaying them under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Willink. The Willink Commission did not buy their arguments and so did not recommend the creation of any more regions or states. Instead it was argued that with the coming of democracy and responsible governance, good governance and good policies these problems would just go away. So in October 1960, power was handed over to the leaders of fractious regions.
- Elder Uma O. Eleazu, OON is the Chairman, BoT of Anya-Ndi-Igbo, a non-partisan, socio-political and economic development-oriented organisation, committed to equity, peace, unity, justice and progress of Nigeria
- To be continued tomorrow, Tuesday, February 21, 2023