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Professor Okey Ndibe (Photo: Africainwords.com)
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By Okey Ndibe
In many nations, whenever it is felt that hard times
have befallen a people, elections represent a real opportunity for
contemplating a variety of options. Voters become relatively more attuned, more
sophisticated, more attentive to policy debates between candidates. Many voters
jettison primitive partisanship. Instead, they leave themselves open to
consider new directions, receptive to new ideas. In fact, many voters become impatient
with politicians who stick to the usual, easy game of mudslinging. Eschewing
the politics of personal attacks, these voters insist that political candidates
wrestle with issues. Often, they listen to, and reward, candidates who are most
adept at spelling out what they understand the problems to be—and most gifted
at proposing ways to fix things.
Let’s take one recent example, from the United States.
A man of African descent like Barack Obama was able to get to the White House
in large part because too many Americans had become fatigued by the escalating
cost—in lives and dollars—of George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Candidate Obama’s promise to de-emphasize war and to zero in on revitalizing
economic growth resonated with voters who despaired of a recession that sucked
jobs, weakened the real estate market, and gutted real incomes.
Faced with the prospect of a deepening economic
crisis, US voters demanded answers from seekers of elective office, whether it
was state legislatures, Congress, gubernatorial posts or the presidency.
I’d suggest that Nigeria has hardly been in a more
dire time, but you would not know it from the tone and tenor of the current
phase of politicking. Nigeria is not about to slip into a crisis; it is fully
mired in one. Even so, with elections approximately a month away, it is—for the
politicians and voters alike—very much a season of business as usual.
How bad are things in Nigeria? Grim, from the evidence
of my eyes and ears during two recent visits—in November and December. I was
there as tumbling crude oil prices forced the Federal Government to devalue the
naira. I had drinks at a restaurant with a contractor who bemoaned the woes of
putting in bids in naira. I met another businessman in Abuja who told me, in a
weary, forlorn tone, “It is impossible to get paid for any jobs now. They
[political parties] have mopped up all the money for the elections.” In Enugu,
a state commissioner spoke in a similarly bleak accent: “The way things are
going, most states will not be able to pay salaries in a few months.” Several
state governments were already behind in the payment of salaries. And the
Federal Government was not about to be left out. As I left Nigeria on December
22, thousands of Federal Government workers were yet to receive their November
pay!
Any government that is unable to meet its recurrent
obligations might as well be declared moribund. Yet, in Nigeria, this is about
to become the new normal.
In the face of such a crisis, you’d expect the
political space to be abuzz with solutions. I was in Nigeria as various
political parties carried out their primaries. The space was abuzz all right,
but it was the buzz of vultures hovering overhead, bent on pecking away at the
carcass of a near-bankrupt Nigeria.
If the candidates and delegates at the various
primaries knew a thing about the desperate state of Nigeria, they did a
terrific job of concealing it. Yes, there were speeches, lots of them, but
there was nothing clarifying, no attempt to offer a reasoned critique of opponents’
policies and to articulate alternative, differentiating policies. There was no
light at the political events, only the dust of insults hurled at opponents and
hollow self-bragging. If anything, most of the speeches were feckless
regurgitations of standard clichés: “moving the nation forward,” “delivering
the dividends of democracy,” “total transformation” of this and that.
Above all, the primaries were a cash fest, occasions
for candidates to splash obscene sums of looted cash on so-called delegates. Delegates
were bought and sold, and they in turn traded their votes in exchange for the
highest bid they could get. It was a particularly ugly example of political
prostitution, of political mercantilism.
It is as if the broad confraternity of politicians had
set out to offer comfort to those who argue that Nigeria is not tailored for
democracy, that what we need is a benevolent dictator—or God. Nigeria is
virtually bankrupt, but few politicians are insisting that we have a
conversation about it at all—much less that we ponder how to get ourselves out
of the jam. The price of oil has dropped sharply, but there’s nothing in the
Nigerian public space about how to sustain ourselves in a post-petro-dollar
time. Nigeria has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars of its oil
bequest, with little or no infrastructure to show for it, but nobody is talking
about effective ways of plugging the loot, holding looters accountable, or
prudently husbanding what little resource we have left.
No, the country’s disappearing wealth has bred a new
fever pitch among the rats racing to gnaw at what’s left. No political party,
as far as I know, is seriously pushing any ideas for reducing the untenable
cost of running this monstrosity we have misnamed a democracy. No party has backed
the idea that legislatures, at the state and national levels, should be on
part-time basis, with legislators earning sitting allowances only when they
meet. Few have raised objections to the abuses of the security vote, or
demanded a drastic review of Nigeria’s immunity clause, arguably the most
expansive such stipulation in the world.
At a time like this, with the US shunning our oil,
with our foreign reserves evaporated, with Boko Haram abducting, maiming and
slaughtering victims as they please, with armed robbery as rampant as ever,
with roads, universities, healthcare and electric power supply terribly
wrinkled, with hundreds of thousands of graduates without jobs, one would
expect this year’s elections to have an illuminating effect, a winnowing moment.
You’d expect politicians to speak seriously about these crises, to proffer
considered solutions, and to map roadways to a different, more hopeful future.
Instead, the politicians are strutting the length and
breadth of Nigeria in festive mode, their agbada more suited to inebriated
excess than to work, their speech alternating between pompous self-inflation
and infantile denunciation of their opponents. On social media, oblivious to
the depth of crises that have gripped their country, confused choruses of
partisan commentators are having a gleeful time as their country burns. They
are content to make sport of people of other ethnicities, other religious
faiths, and to heap scorn on those who profess a different political loyalty.
It is as if our politicians and many of us—the victims—believe that the answer
to our bankrupt, bankrupted lives lies in mastering the art of proclaiming the
virtuousness of our partisan cliquishness and spewing invectives and stigmas at
the occupants of other tents.
Please follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe
Originally published in PREMIUM TIMES
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