Democracy, Governance And The Nigerian Condition (3) -By Usman Sarki

“The due arrangement of men in the active part of the state, far from being foreign to the purposes of a wise Government, ought to be amongst its very first and dearest objects”- Edmund Burke, 1729-1797

Nowadays, when discussions around governance in Nigeria take place, many of the ideas issued forth are couched in obfuscation, vague terminologies like “sovereign national conference” and “restructuring” that leave the masses of our people more confused and bewildered, and observers of the country’s political scene even more perplexed and dismayed. While no genuine and honest attempts are made to offer any viable suggestions, the proponents of these slogans and concepts are only able to point to alleged or perceived “shortcomings” and “contradictions” in the country.

The issues that they usually highlight include matters like resource allocation, control of the Police, reducing the powers of the Federal Government vis-a-vis those of the states and local government councils, checking the powers of the President, and a variety of other matters that should ideally be addressed in a legislative setting rather than at the sitting of tribal and ethnic councils, or social sub-groups representing microcosms of the country, usually restricted to a few vocal elites from some sections of the country.

The visionary recommendations of the Political Bureau were penned 37 years ago and they are still relevant today to mending the system of governance in the country. Its recommendations are still the issues and challenges that we are grappling with, while no genuine attempts are made to address them constructively as the Cookey report had done. Many of the discussions are more opportunistic than constructive, and tend towards fragmenting the country rather than integrating the nation as the Political Bureau report clearly recommended.

It is my firm conviction that if we are diligent enough, we can find the panacea to our problems, including the solution to the seemingly intractable problem of governance in the past rather than the present. I maintain this view simply because of the barrenness of the current discourse and the lame excuses or justifications that are being offered the public almost on daily basis, by commentators who should know better. Many other valuable but often neglected measures were introduced by the succeeding administrations in Nigeria, whose retention and faithful implementation would have carried us step by step to greater heights of national regeneration, re-orientation and greatness.

However, due to expedience and more as a result of inchoate approach to the formulation of public policies, we have tended to jettison everything inherited from past administrations, thereby throwing both the baby and the birth water, the good and the bad, out of the window. Various measures such as electoral reforms, constitutional amendments, people’s empowerment programmes, education and food security policies, etc, have been introduced by succeeding governments but due to lack of policy coherence and forward-looking philosophy of government, every one of these has either been neglected or entirely thrown out while the substitutes have not proven to be better than what they tended to replace.

I have mentioned the Obasanjo administration as another episode in the search for direction and compass for our national development. Several important initiatives were taken during his two terms of eight years in office. Mention should be made of the many attempts that were made by his government to promote and protect the integrity of the Nigerian state and the unity of the country, as well as her sovereignty and independence.

His foreign policy regime took Nigeria to greater heights in both esteem and relevance not only in Africa but the world over. Nigeria was courted by everyone in terms of aggregation of ideas and constructive roles in redesigning the international political landscape and creating momentum around initiatives of value and worth globally. The reform of the Organisation of African Unity, OAU, and its transformation into the Africa Union, AU, was a brainchild of the Obasanjo administration and others around Africa.

His championing of mechanisms like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, NEPAD, and the creation of the African Peer Review Mechanism, APRM, contributed to the shaping of the African multilateral institutions. Obasanjo was made the Chairman of the African Union more than once and of the ECOWAS Commission as well, whereby he shaped and guided their deliberations along constructive and result-orientated trajectories.

Internally, one of the important legacies of the Obasanjo administration was the fight against corruption and organised crime in the country as evidenced by the creation of mechanisms such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC; the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Offenses Commission, ICPC, and many other statutory bodies aimed at fostering good governance and rule of law in the country.

The Bureau for Public Procurement, BPP; the Bureau of Public Enterprises, BPE; the Debt Management Office, DMO; the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC; the National Council on Privatization, NCP, and a number of other institutions all portended towards better management of the economy and more streamlined approach to governance in the spirit of constitutional democracy and accountability by government.

Those measures entrenched for the first time in our polity the system of fighting corruption and tendering responsibility in the handling of public resources, including in the area of the national debt. At the social and economic empowerment levels, the Obasanjo administration took far-reaching decisions to ensure that not only the grassroots populations were touched by the government’s policies, but also the people were mobilised to support their own empowerment liberally and actively through direct participation in the governance process.