By Salihu Moh. Lukman
As far back as 1918, the German Sociologist, Max Weber, while delivering the speech, ‘Science as a Vocation’ at Munich University, observed that the “fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life …nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissmo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.” More than hundred years after, logical (rational) and knowledgeable (scholarly) assessments of situations have receded. Disappointment (disenchantment) taken over almost everybody, such that the direction societies are following deviate from known or predictable experiences. Inspirational (sublime) values have disappeared or are fast disappearing, and as a result, conditions that expedite processes of development and human progress are being eroded.
Instead of nations becoming stronger and people united, citizens are more and more divided, experiencing so much conflicts, violence and wars, consuming human lives and properties in a scale that is very alarming. In the midst of all these, everyone, or most people, both leaders and the led, as argued in the book edited by the American Psychologist, Robert J. Sternberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, become ‘trapped in rigid mindsets, …actively drawing novel distinctions rather than relying on distinctions drawn in the past. This makes us sensitive to context and perspective. When we are mindless, our behavior is rule- and routine-governed. In contrast, when mindful, our behavior may be guided rather than governed by rules and routines.’
This is no doubt the Nigerian reality of today – ‘rigid mindsets’ with ‘novel distinctions’ of our diverse sensitive ‘context and perspective’. Behaviour, rather than being ‘guided by rules and routines’ (mindful), is instead directed almost mindlessly. So-called smart people are behaving more stupidly. Therefore, more problems are being created than solutions found. How do we get out of this mess? With all the intractable problems of insecurity – insurgency, banditry, kidnappings, abductions, etc., what will be required to get citizens (leaders and the led) to become mindful and guided and not governed by rules and routines?
Given the excessive politicisation in the country, especially as 2023 come closer, the temptation to reduce answers to partisan choices are quite high. Valid as partisan choices could be, it is important to recognise that even within partisan choices, citizens will require strong engagements with leaders at all levels and the courage to articulate recommendations as well as win the buy-in of leaders to consider implementation. Part of what must be also recognised is that, important as partisan choices are, beyond the personalities of leaders, the substantive details of initiatives, in terms of strategic plans and the programmes required to recover Nigeria and put the country on the path to resolve all its intractable challenges and accelerate processes of nation building can at best be work in progress.
Perhaps, it is necessary to make important clarification from the beginning. No choice is perfect or absolute, partisan choices inclusive. Citizens’ commitments to develop partisan platforms is a determining factor to ensure that choices produce desired outcomes. When choices of partisan platforms are therefore limited to celebration of ‘rigid mindsets’, it may only be active in ‘drawing novel distinctions’ and not capable of ‘relying on distinctions drawn in the past.’ The difference is that ‘drawing novel distinctions’ will be largely about rationalising choices. While ‘relying on distinctions drawn in the past’ is about being able to recognise and acknowledge reality and accordingly envisioned new realities or at least give new insights to old realities.
Therefore, in terms of political choices and their applications to contemporary Nigerian reality, the challenge is whether the choices Nigerians make are creating new realities or at least giving new insights to old realities. If political choices are expressed in terms of, for instance, expression of support or resentment to All Progressives Congress (APC) or any party for that matter, including the PDP, to what extent does that produce new realities that can respond to our numerous challenges as a nation? Or in what way is the choice at least giving new insights in terms of how problems can be solved?
There can hardly be agreement in terms of how to produce new realities and it will be fruitless to try to establish any agreement as it will be almost impossible. The important issue is about getting Nigerians to take reasonability and initiate actions to produce the envisioned new reality. This was the point very well-articulated by one of the leading ideologues of the PDP, my good friend and longtime associate, Dr. Sam Amadi, when he reported some reflections, he recently had, on his Facebook timeline, about a ‘friend from Rwanda who’ argued that ‘in Rwanda culture, leaders don’t complain or wail about problems. Leaders proffer solutions.’ This was explained to be because the Rwanda culture ‘was a result of the experience of genocide, when the youths of Rwanda discovered that the world did not offer them support. They took it to mean they alone should solve their problems. So, if you are a leader and you are wailing instead of solving problems, you are shifted from the leadership cadre to the followers cadre. Leaders solve problems.
With such reflections, Dr. Amadi admit that the ‘cultural mindset’ of the Rwandans ‘is the opposite of the culture of leadership in Nigeria.’ In Nigeria, ‘Leaders wail and complain and blame others. It is not their fault. It is the system. It is the federal government. It is the state government. It is Boko Haram. It is Yoruba agitators. It is Sunday Igboho. It is IPOB. It is even the people who refuse to change. It is the former government. It is the dead- Zik and Awo- who didn’t take us out of Nigeria. It is everyone and everything but the leader,’ if one can add, and followers too. Dr. Amadi further highlighted that even ‘in our personal life we fail the leadership test. Our misfortune has to be the work of witches and wizards, or relatives who didn’t help us or government that is corrupt. We are never responsible for our misfortune.’
Dr. Amadi’s reflection excellently highlight part of Nigeria’s challenges. As Dr. Amadi stressed, until Nigerians ‘focus on finding solutions and less on wailing or blaming’, and ensure that focusing ‘on problem should be to find solution and not for the smug feeling of sanctimony’, our challenges as a nation will not disappear. Instead, our challenges are more likely to get worse. The caution however is that this should not be used in any way to rationalise political choices or block criticisms. In fact, what this means is that in the context of taking responsibility, within our different political choices, including partisan choices, Nigerians should constantly be able to recognise challenges and accordingly initiate or propose appropriate responses to them. Inability to do that will only push citizens, including leaders to be mindless, and not mindful, of Nigeria’s development challenges.
Inadvertently, this requires that part of the overarching political goal is to develop Nigerian politics such that both leaders and followers take responsibility. This is not simply about declarations or simply choices of leaders. It is about developing corresponding political initiatives to reorient Nigerians to take responsibility, which entails a clear political vision. Within the context of individual political choices, Nigerians should have the courage to develop recommendations and work to win the support of, first, political leaders to undertake to implement the recommendations, and secondly, win support of Nigerians in general. It should be expected that the requirement for competition will necessitate that each of the partisan choices available to Nigerians, APC, PDP or any other party for that matter, will have to be both responsive and representative.
Ideally, being responsive and representative should compel political parties and leaders to be more guided by rules and routine and to that extent ‘sensitive to context and perspective.’ Without going into analysis of Nigeria’s political history, especially under the Fourth Republic, it is hardly disputable that PDP mismanaged and squandered opportunities for sixteen years between 1999 and 2015. No need to go into details as that is not the focus. What is more important at this point is the recognition that it was easy for Nigerians to register their support for APC, and on that account voted PDP out of power in 2015.
Of course, there were contextual factors, which made the APC to win the support of Nigerians. These factors include the successful merger of defunct opposition parties – Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressives Change (CPC) and Owelle Rochas Okorocha’s faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) – combined with relatively transparent processes of candidate selection for the 2015 elections, especially the Presidential Candidate, together with all the inspiring campaign promises and the personality of President Muhammadu Buhari as the Presidential Candidate of the APC. With all these, the APC was able to win the 2015 elections and Nigerians had very high expectations. The question is, to what extent did the APC and its governments meet or are meeting the expectations of Nigerians? What are the challenges and how is the APC and its governments responding to these challenges? Compared to PDP, how different is the APC?
No need for the familiar debates of PDP vs APC here. The fundamental issue is the question of the extent to which APC leaders and members are responding to challenges. Are we taking responsibility? The good thing is that, in APC, leaders are not in denial of the challenges. This was not the case with PDP before 2015 and up this moment. However, being members of the APC, we should be able to acknowledge too that although, the slogan of the APC is CHANGE, which underlines the commitment of the party and its leadership to bring about change in the country, the programmatic details as articulated in the party’s manifesto require a mobilisation programme in order to win the support of Nigerians.
One of the big gaps confronting the APC, which unfortunately makes it easy for opposition politicians to dent the party and its governments’ is the absence of mobilisation programme to engage Nigerians to take responsibility in their different fields of endevours in responding to challenges facing the country. Getting Nigerians to take responsibility in their different fields of endevours in responding to challenges facing the country is a critical success factor in terms of producing the change envisioned by the APC and its leadership as articulated in the manifesto of the party. Inability of Nigerians to take responsibility through initiating appropriate actions raises questions about sustainability of initiatives of government. Beyond questions of sustainability, there is the issue of public awareness and the associated challenges of public support and endorsements. It is not enough for government to initiate programmes and projects as responses to challenges facing the country. Public support and endorsements will be required to make them sustainable, which is not automatic.
Part of what should be recognised and acknowledged is that the challenges facing us as a nation are deep rooted. It will require a robust programme of reorientation in the country to sustain the envisioned change APC and its leadership are working to achieve. Once the focus and scope of initiatives is limited to operations of government institutions, and non-governmental institutions continue with business-as-usual practices, most of the challenges facing the country will linger. For instance, take the case of insecurity, which is the most important threat to the survival of the country. As much as combative military operations against insurgency in all its manifestations – banditry, kidnappings, abductions, etc. – is fundamental to restoring order and protection of lives and property in the country, equally important is also how Nigerians across all strata of social life are being mobilised to take responsibility in restoring order and guaranteeing security of life and property in every part of the country. How is government working to raise awareness of Nigerians in terms of what to look out for as danger signals in our different communities? What kind of conducts by citizens, including community leaders constitute risk factors and therefore indicative of security challenges? What should be done, where and who to report to? What other initiatives should citizens take?
Most of these issues are at best taken for granted. There is hardly any planned campaign taking place at national level to mobilise Nigerians with specific sets of detailed responses. Because issues of public awareness around these issues are taken for granted, everybody, both leaders and followers are just ‘complaining and wailing’ as Dr. Amadi rightly observed. Some have gone beyond ‘complaining and wailing’ to propagate false narratives, which can at best be distractive, if not subversive to any campaign or initiative to end insecurity in the country. Unfortunately, most of these false narratives are allowed in the public space without strong efforts to correct them. Take some of the claims by religious and community leaders that insecurity in the country is directed against particular ethnic and religion groups. These are very treacherous narratives, which should be combatted not through military operations but civic engagements with religious and community leaders.
Absence of engagements with religious and ethnic groups is more and more creating factors in the country, which are disorientating and undermining the authority of conventional structures and representatives of Nigerian society, including non-governmental institutions. In their place, unaccountable and self-appointed leaders are emerging and culture of public blackmails against conventional structures and representatives is becoming rampant in the country. It was Benjamin Arditi, the Mexican political scientist, in the book, Politics on the Edge of Liberalism, who cautioned that ‘situations of disorientation can facilitate the appeal of charismatic leaders who present themselves as self-styled saviours, or lead people to seek the sense of belonging offered by aggressive forms of nationalism, uncompromising religious sects, or violent urban tribes.’
One of the major challenges facing Nigeria today is that ‘self-styled saviours’ projecting themselves as leaders campaigning to win ‘a sense of belonging’ based on aggressive ‘nationalism, uncompromising religious sects, or violent urban tribes’ are springing up in every part of the country. This is partly the issue around the Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho phenomena in the South-East and South-West. Unfortunately, because such phenomena are allowed without any counter mobilisational strategy, they are increasingly becoming threats to political leaders. To some extent, they are also becoming models of responses to Nigeria’s challenges by ethnic and religious groups, which is dangerous.
Therefore, beyond the question of insecurity, the broader issue of mobilising Nigerians to develop new orientation require a programmatic national coverage. Given some of the challenges, especially in relation to, for instance, engaging youth in the country, how can it be handled? This will require partnership with youth organisations. Who are these youth organisations and what will be required for government to be able to develop the kind of partnership that can produce the desired outcomes of changing Nigeria? What are the potentials of using the nation’s educational system to facilitate or strengthen engagements with youth groups in the country? Given the challenge of frequent closures of our educational institutions due to strikes by teachers and university lecturers, how will it affect government’s mobilisation of youths in the country? Above all, how can engagement with youths address the challenge of creating employment opportunities in the country?
Generally, ‘situations of disorientation’ in the country has created problems whereby the character of Nigerian civil society, including the labour movement has radically change. Most of the organisations that used to be knowledge-driven, based on which they have strong connections with academic institutions, are bereft of knowledgeable viewpoints. At least up to the late 1990s, most of these organisations were very active in policy engagements through campaigning for alternative policy frameworks. When they criticise government policy, they do not only explain reasons for such criticisms, but also propose alternatives. This is hardly the case today. The main approaches of the work of civil society are mainly to abuse and condemn whatever government is doing with hardly any recommendation for alternatives. If anyone is looking for evidence of how ‘sublime values’ have retreated form Nigerian public life, just look at the character of today’s Nigerian civil society and labour movement today and compare them with what used to obtain in the past.
Beyond civil society organisations and labour movement, the sad reality is also that quality of scholarship in our academic institutions is, to say the least, below standards. We have professors, researchers and lecturers who cannot engage in any useful enquiry about the challenges facing the country. Many so-called Professors, researchers and lecturers, rather than working to provide new insights about challenges facing country and to that extent propose alternative responses, they join the ‘complaining and wailing’ community. They speak in languages that are offensive to government and political leaders with unsubstantiated allegations.
Part of what has been lost is the fact that categories of leaders of non-governmental organisation who used to have strong values that envisioned a prosperous country have disappeared. Instead, we have many leaders of non-governmental organisation who see nothing good in Nigeria and its political leadership. The promote campaign for hatred against the country and its leadership. The culture of political intimidation using protests and strikes have become rampant. Most demands by non-governmental organisations come with threats of strikes and protests in the first instance. In the context of mobilisation to produce change in Nigeria therefore, what will be required to change the orientation of leaders of non-governmental organisations in the country for instance? Being members of APC, how can we engage our leaders differently without joining the ‘complaining and wailing’ group of Nigerians? If, like other Nigerians, APC members join the ‘complaining and wailing’ community, which is largely the case, how can we take responsibility to ensure that the commitment of our party and our leaders to change Nigeria is achieved?
To be different, APC members should be able to appeal to the party’s leaders to urgently develop a a strong mobilisation campaign that can connect citizens with all the initiatives of government. As part of such mobilisation campaign, raising public awareness about the initiatives’ government is taking should be a priority. The second thing is also to be able to provide feedback to government about the effectiveness of initiatives taken by APC governments’ so far. To what extent are government initiatives responding to challenges? How are government initiatives’ being able to envision new realities or at least give new insights to old realities? What are the expected roles of citizens in their different fields of endevours to achieve envisioned realities? In particular, how is government mobilisation programme succeeding in securing the buy-in of especially non-governmental leaders to initiate supportive actions to resolve challenges?
As members of APC, we need to take responsibility and acknowledge that challenges facing the country require a strong mobilisation campaign as a fundamental requirement for bringing about change in the country. This is, at the moment, almost taken for granted. In fact, most of the distortions going on today in Nigerian public spaces, which attempts to dismiss the APC and its governments as a failure is largely because of weak or absence of strong mobilisation programme. Being able to acknowledge this reality should be supported with good recommendation on how best to develop strong mobilisation programme to rally the support of Nigerians to address challenges facing the country.
Noting the existence of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), with the statutory functions of mobilising public support for government policies, programmes and activities, among others, how can it be transformed to get it to develop and drive the kind of strong mobilisation programme, which can begin to re-orient the mindsets of Nigerians and get everyone to take responsibility? The question of why the NOA was unable to develop a strong mobilisation programme since 2015 should be engaged mainly in the context of ensuring that the campaign support Nigerians to embrace positive behaviours and to that extent therefore envisioned a prosperous future for the country.
How can this be achieved? Perhaps one of the things that need to be done is to completely re-organise the NOA. As part of the re-organisation, it may be necessary to be moved out of the Ministry of Information and make it a specialise agency of the Federal Government directly under the Presidency. Making it a specilise agency under the Presidency will strengthen its powers to be able to engage all agencies of government at all levels. Its current status as an agency under the Ministry of Information limits its powers and to that extent its capacity.
The second issue is that there has to be a review of its activities, personnel and general orientation. Elementary logic would suggest a complete overhaul, otherwise, it will simply continue with business-as-usual approaches. Once its approaches are business-as-usual, it will not be able to drive any campaign for change in Nigeria. Largely because it is conducting itself based on business-as-usual approaches, it is hardly present in most of the critical public debates about challenges facing the country. Beyond being absent in most public debates, it is hardly under any consideration in terms of organisations regarded with any visible roles in addressing challenges facing the country. For instance, in the case of insecurity, does the NOA outline for itself a kind of checklist of what to do when incidences of insecurity emerge in any part of the country?
All these need to be put in place. It is not to lament about any failing or rationalising why we have what exist today. As members of APC, it should be about responding to the reality facing us and ensure that we appropriately take responsibility. We must engage the issues with all the confidence that our political leaders, especially President Buhari will favourably consider these proposals and strengthen the capacity of the party and its governments to mobilise Nigerians. The important appeal that should be made is that failure to develop a strong mobilisation programme will continue to create gaps that will make the voices of political opposition louder in the country, even as they don’t have any clear proposed alternatives. They will simply continue to promote divisive politics based on mis-information and falsehood. It is painful that with all the initiatives of APC governments, especially Federal Government under President Buhari, the claim of any failure can be made. Unlike all past governments since 1999, APC Federal Government is successfully implementing more initiatives and projects. How can the APC government be successful in implementing almost all the projects past governments have failed to execute be a failure?
If APC and its governments are being alleged to be a failure, what is the specific alternative being presented by the opposition to APC? The narrative of failure of APC and its governments must be corrected based on a strong mobilisation programme. Nigerians just need to ‘focus on finding solutions and less on wailing or blaming’. Nigerians must be protected from ‘self-styled saviours’ – both politicians and other desperate categories, whose mission can only be self-serving. A stich in time saves nine!
*Salihu Moh. Lukman, Progressive Governors Forum, Abuja. This position does not represent the view of any APC Governor or the Progressive Governors Forum