Nigeria! A Rebranding Or A Repackaging Project?

By Chinedu Opara I will say Nigeria has really come to stay. Necessity condemns us to co-existence. The truth is that the geographical entity called Nigeria, never mind that we are yet to attain nationhood, at this rate, has coalesced into one solid structure around and within which several very diverse tribes and world outlooks have tried to carve a niche and compete with each other for the resources available mainly in one geopolitical zone of the country. There has come to be some, well, if not understanding, then mere acknowledgment that we will all carry one international passport and use one currency. Achieving this has not been easy. In Nigeria's unimaginable odyssey, a brutal civil war was fought before I was born and the geographical entity known as Nigeria remained intact. However, nationhood, which ought to be the hallmark of any serious people, has continually eluded Nigeria. Without mincing words, this is attributable to poor, unimaginative leadership. In the aftermath of the civil war came the oil boom. Nigeria emerged as a regional economic power thanks to vast reserves of crude oil found in the swamps of the area where the Niger River flows into the Atlantic through numerous tributaries, an area now known as the Niger Delta region, hotbed of militancy in Nigeria. Then came the latest experiment in civilian rule (not democracy, mind). From 1999 till date, Nigeria has had the singular misfortune of having inflicted on it, the most visionless, corrupt and inept rulership in written history. This is a most impartial judgment given the size of resources available to it and the peculiarity of both the country's constitution and the political society which gives and allows the president of the country wield enormous almost unheard-of powers, powers the likes of Suharto and Lee Gwan possessed in Indonesia and Singapore that set their countries on the path of Industrialization. Corruption and sheer political brigandry have been the bane of governance in Nigeria. Given the enormity of human and material resources in Nigeria, it is simply criminal for the ship of the Nigeria state to flounder so dangerously especially in issues any serious country ought to have resolved long ago. In Nigeria, we still discuss issues like power supply and credible elections and no end seems in sight for the resolution of these foundation stones of any modern democratic society. I wonder how some present and past public office holders manage to look their foreign counterparts in the eye whenever they meet. A decent person would die of shame! Well am not travelling for now, so I wouldn’t know. But certainly not our politicians. That human attitude of feeling ashamed of wilful failure is totally alien to them. That's why one will see the few convicted politicians in our midst still wielding influence especially in political parties. The people of Nigeria have often been touted as the happiest people on earth. And why not! Nigeria is warm and hospitable; never mind the deviants. The image of a country is not set by drug barons, prostitutes or advance fee fraud scammers for every country has its own deviants and social misfits. Rather, the international image of a country is set by the response of governments to whichever socio-political challenges it faces. It is noteworthy that countries like South Africa, United States of America and a few South American countries have the highest crime rates in the world with violent crimes topping the crime charts. But it is equally noteworthy that these countries still remain business and tourist destinations. Well, since man is unpredictable and deviants exist in every society, the burden of good governance (hence, image brand) lies not in the total prevention of social and economic ills, but in the provision of credible, pragmatic and proactive solutions in nation building. Can President Buhari set the record straight? President Buhari has promised to shed the garb of greed and narrow personal aggrandizement and honestly engage in true nation building, this can only be evidenced by a conscious and apparent radical reform of ALL sectors of national life, I only hope that he will later not move to repackaging out of frustration, as any effort at rebranding Nigeria will fail abysmally. Because if nothing is done to rehabilitate the already failed Nigerian state, any repackaging will only be cosmetic, ephemeral and a journey in self deceit. Until President Buhari sets the machinery in motion, Until President Buhari begins to send corrupt politicians to jail (not the present EFCC arrest-detention- and-bail- for-life round robin), there will be no rebranding and Change of Nigeria! This process will throw up genuine leaders whose hands and faces will be clean enough to show to the world as Nigeria's new image.

President Buhari Belongs To Everyone, How True?

In the 2015 Presidential election, the number of registered voters was 70,383,427. This means that having won with 15 million votes, less than 20% of the registered voters actually wanted Buhari to be President and over 12 million wanted Jonathan to return, while over 140 million Nigerians never voted at all, probably for lack of interest, age limit, and other forms of technical disenfranchisements, including INEC’s refusal to make permanent voters card available. So, only clusters of 15 million Nigerians will now decide the thrust of national development, which the President has inadvertently admitted in US that it would be based on patronage, despite the fact that less than 3 million Nigerian voters separated him from the former President in a country believed to be over 170 million. How should We draw the Conclusion? Should we say that the actions and utterances of Mr. President are all pointing to the fact that the sections of the country that did not vote for the All Progressives Congress (APC) are in for a barren 4 years and possibly beyond. The speculations were rife on it for quite long before the President proved the pundits right by stating that much in faraway USA. When President Buhari was asked by a white journalist how he intended to deal with issues in the Niger Delta, particularly Amnesty, bunkering and inclusive development; he said: “Going by election results, constituencies that gave me 97% cannot in all honesty be treated, on some issues, with constituencies that gave me 5%. I think these are political realities. While, certainly there will be justice for everybody but the people who voted, and made their votes count, they must feel the government has appreciated the effort they put in putting the government in place. I think this is really fair.” If there is anything that should have been left unsaid about governance in a pluralistic environment, even if it were the policy, it is this one. Some say the President was stating the obvious or shunning people angling to reap where they did not so, while others condemn the President’s statement. In Presidential and constitutional democracy as Nigeria is said to be practicing, the whole country is the President’s Constituency; and once he or she emerges, the President leads the entire country and leads for the good on the entire country. Some of the people conveniently gloss over this reality to make the matter worse. Starting with the appointment of service chiefs, which should be the most apolitical, the South East may have been deliberately sidestepped also, ok we understand given the situation presently, Nigeria needs the best hands, but again South east is about the only Zone that is not represented in the National Council of State. President Muhammadu Buhari appointed new service chiefs: Major-General Abayomi Gabriel Olonishakin as Chief of Defence Staff; Major-General T.Y. Buratai as Chief of Army Staff; Rear Admiral Ibok-Ete Ekwe Ibas as Chief of Naval Staff. Others include Air Vice Marshal Sadique Abubakar as Chief of Air Staff; Air Vice Marshal Monday Riku Morgan as Chief of Defence Intelligence. The president also appointed Major-General Babagana Monguno (rtd.) as the new National Security Adviser taking over from Sambo Dasuki who was out of office a week before. The APC did not even put the South East in the remotest equation in the distribution of principal officers in the House of Representatives where there are two APC Members from Imo State. Protest by the two Reps did not even move the APC to at least concede Deputy Whip to the South East in the House of Reps fell on deaf ears. Therefore, while the APC have only allocated Boko Haram to the South East, the only position that has come to the South East so far, actually came courtesy of the PDP Senators and some patriotic APC Senators who considered and elected Senator Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President. Even at that, they have deployed all forms of intimidation and mudslinging in a futile attempt to run him out of office. They claim the position belongs to the APC, but the same APC was frank enough to defend Section 50 of the Constitution when Tambuwal defected to its fold with PDP’s speakership mandate. The position of the Constitution is that any lawmaker can emerge Speaker or Senate President or their Deputy. Ironically, APC are Speakers in Plateau and Benue where PDP are majority in the Houses of Assembly. The question will always remain, why is it right to APC in Tambuwal’s case and in Benue and Plateau, while it is now termed as “greed”, “coup”, and “abomination” in the case of Ekweremadu? The answer is simple: he comes from one of the zones that gave the President the proverbial “5% votes”. This is certainly not how to belong to nobody and belong to everybody So also, unlike what mostly obtained under Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, where development of nation Nigeria was based on equity and justice, APC Federal Government is going strictly on political patronage or selective justice as is the emerging trend in present dispensation. APC and Buhari should be driven by patriotic mindset carefully aimed at enthroning social justice and even development. In a democratic dispensation too, efforts are made by winners to woo those who may not have supported them, in view of the next election. The continued marginalization of the South East Government is only confirming the fear of many people from the Zone that there is nothing for them in the All Progressives Congress (APC) Government. The South East has been told in unmistakable terms that it has no share in the APC government. This policy, if sustained, can only reinforce a sense of alienation and belief that their political future is only guaranteed in other parties.