To begin on a light note, is it not good news worth celebrating that President Muhammadu Buhari would this time round not need his Kaduna-based bank manager to purchase his nomination form for the presidential contest? Recall that in 2014, Buhari criticised the practice of pricing nomination forms, far above what the ordinary politician can afford. To drive home his point, he revealed that the N22.5 million that he raised to pay for his form was through the auspices of his bank manager, who provided him a loan. Even at that time, Buhari was speaking as a privileged citizen, considering that not too many Nigerians could secure a bank loan reaching that amount. Now, however, after three years in the saddle, Buhari does not need to take a loan or come up with the stipulated amount of N45m, because the Nigerian Consolidation Ambassadors Network, one of the Buhari Support Groups, has paid the entire cost of the form to indicate their commitment to Buhari’s victory. It would have been edifying if following Buhari’s travail in 2014, he had struggled as leader of the All Progressives Congress to do away with a system in which presidential nomination forms are denominated in hard-to-reach millions of naira, in a country widely regarded as the new poverty capital of the world.
But following a pattern replicated in so many aspects of our national life, we have no such luck; politics remains more than ever before an upscale affair, featuring the high and mighty, who have or have had access to the public kitty. Time will come to set forth what reformist change would have meant in the past three or so years, juxtaposed with the astonishing short falls which have been the daily experience of Nigerians, now however, let us consider the impending electoral competition where there is a surfeit of aspirants and parties in the midst of a frightening dearth of policy ideas.
To start with, the bombast of the competition begins with the fact of having 91 parties, many of whose names one does not know or even remember. Although some have hailed this mushrooming effect as a bold expression of democratic liberty, it broaches a kind of parody when so many parties, so-called, are crowding around a theatre that is barren of party identity and policy discussion. That is not the only thing that is extravagant and queer about the evolving political field. The Peoples Democratic Party has had the luck or ill-luck of an unusual crowd of presidential aspirants, 14 as of yesterday, and still counting. In 2003, it was felt that presidential aspirants were a shade too many for the party, but in this season, we have almost double that, and the number does not take into account the presidential aspirants of the other 90 political parties. To an extent, the glut of presidential hopefuls is a result of the fact that there is no vacancy in the APC, once Buhari indicated his intention to run. Abdicating the terrain to a sole contender may be common sense in our political culture, but it expresses as well as reinforces the shallowness, top heavy character and vertical topography of a system dominated by executive omnipotence. Be that as it may, it must give cause for surprise that in a country so tormented, we have so many politicians with no other distinction than that they have held political offices before, clamouring to be president. Ordinarily, diffidence should have been the norm, rather than assertiveness. But here, we are stuck with the Nigerian brand of politics, replete with hustle but devoid of significance or lasting values. We do not know what many of these aspirants stand for, what track record worth talking about they bring to the table, or what they plan to do, beyond clichés and borrowed slogans to repair the open veins of a country.
At this point however, the writer digresses, characteristically, to accommodate a short take.
The short take, let us not forget, is a technique for breaking and for lightening the boredom of reading grey matter, which tends to put off the wider reading public. In other words, it introduces lightness and variety into the monotony of lamentations, rendered in severe cadence. Come with me to Ado Ekiti, where at a symposium held at the Afe Babalola University earlier this week, two elder statesmen, Chief Afe Babalola, the Proprietor of the university, and Prof. Michael Faborode, the Executive Secretary of the Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, took turns to lament that the shortage of proper teaching methodologies has deepened the crisis in the educational sector. Babalola went so far as to say that the quality of education has dropped radically because of the neglect of teaching methods and teaching qualification, as a requirement for working in the educational sector. Place this comment side by side with the grievous revelation made in the course of this week by the Academic Staff Union of Universities that only four out of 10 teachers required in our ever multiplying universities are obtainable to teach the students. If this is not a manpower crisis, with predictable reverberations on the entire educational sector, then I don’t know what a crisis means. So, the system is afflicted by a double whammy, in which a dire shortage of academics is compounded by the lack of attention to good and effective teaching. None of these critical deficiencies is new; the issue is whether anyone with the power to make changes will do anything about them before they graduate into systemic and structural crises, giving birth to so many deformed babies. The time to act is now.
To return to the initial discourse, it goes without saying that there must be a linkage between the repetitive maladies the nation experiences, and the nature of our politics, which is almost totally bereft of policy debate. Apart from former Vice President Abubakar Atiku’s emphasis on restructuring, our presidential aspirants and their parties are not talking to us about pressing and urgent issues. As far as I know, there is no equivalent in our polity of the United Kingdom’s annual autumn conferences, mounted by all the political parties in turn, devoted to a discussion of policy issues and state of the parties. As known, the fora allow civil society groups, businessmen and advocates to make input and lobby for a hearing on their particular needs. I don’t recall that any of our parties in the Fourth Republic has held conferences outside of sharing positions or money. It is this barrenness that the aspirants are reflecting, and giving everyone the jitters about whether 2019 will be any different from the other national elections that had been held.
Is it not desirable that this increasing horde of aspirants, some of whom admittedly are merely positioning for relevance, excites us with possible solutions and scenarios on how to end the recurrent wanton killings in the Middle Belt, on how to escape renewed debt slavery, soaring unemployment, as well as reviving a comatose educational system and reinstituting genuine federalism. Doing this will flicker the hope that they understand our problems and are minded to solve or reduce them.
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