Today, most of us Nigerians live in poverty. About 70% of us are estimated to be living in “absolute poverty” – meaning that we are barely keeping alive with just about one U.S. dollar a day. The days are gone when parents who sacrifice to give their children education can hopefully wait for those children to graduate and come back to help. It is sad to watch bright young graduates roam the streets jobless endlessly and, in desperation, turn to crime or terrorism.
But it has not always been like this in our country. When I was a boy in the 1950s, we youths lived in great hope. Commonly, as we were graduating, we had letters of employment in our pockets. Weeks later, we were usually able to borrow money to buy our first cars. We were then able to help our parents – and our younger brothers and sisters with their education. Life was orderly, predictable and filled with hope – and with determination to succeed in life, and to help others to succeed.
All this life of certainty and hope was rooted in the circumstances created for us by our leaders and rulers. My Western Region, under Chief Awolowo’s leadership, was doing best in the country, but the Eastern and Northern Regions too (under Dr. Azikiwe and Sir Ahmadu Bello respectively) were doing well. Schools were springing up everywhere, and so were modern roads, water supply, and electricity supply. We did not have petroleum and its enormous revenues in those days, but region by region, local government area by local government area, our people were vibrantly engaged in a common push for progress and prosperity – and the results were showing everywhere.
Unhappily, since 1962, and until now, we have gradually and foolishly thrown away all this hope-filled scenario. It all started when the politicians who controlled our federal government at independence decided that the regions were too independent and needed to be subdued under federal government’s control. Targeting the strongest of the regions, the Western Region, they embarked on their ill-advised crusade against the regions in 1962. They disrupted, subdued and broke up the Western Region. But the crisis they thus initiated spiraled out of hand, generating military coups, genocidal pogroms, an outright civil war, and federal administrations (military and civilian) hell-bent on federally micro-managing all the affairs and resources of our country. Petroleum began to pour out its revenue bonanza in these years, and that created, for the controllers of the federal government, an added incentive to seize control of all our country’s resources. To make the total federal control sustainable, the controllers of the federal government decided to begin to use part of the oil revenues to bribe, buy, subvert and emasculate the elite from all over Nigeria, to make the total federal control acceptable to them. Public corruption became an avowed tool of governance in our land.
At three different times during this growth of insanity, sanity and hope tried to rear their heads. First, in 1975, a young military officer named Murtala Mohammed seized power and, surprisingly, launched into a spirited war to kill public corruption and the widespread indiscipline that accompanied it among our leaders and rulers. Some of his initial methods were hard and painful, but his sincerity was never in doubt – and the promised goal of return to orderliness, progress and prosperity was intoxicating, especially among Nigerian youths. But the influential enemies of his kind of goal got him killed within months, and got him replaced with other kinds of military men whom they could trust.
Then, secondly, in the years from 1976 to 1979, when these military rulers promised a return to elective civilian rule, the former leader and guide of the era of progress and prosperity in the former Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, pulled together a broadly national group of patriotic Nigerians which then designed very ambitious programmes for the renewal of Nigeria’s progress and prosperity. Their goal was to transform Nigeria into a country of educated and skilled working youths, bubbling enterprise, modern farms, crowded industries, a magnet for investments from all over the world, and the source of massive exportation of goods to the rest of Africa and the wider world. As background to all this, they proposed to restructure Nigeria into a rational federation, in order to diversify the bases of enterprise and progress again, and to enable the peoples and federating units of Nigeria to share in the new transformation in their own ways and thereby make their own contributions to the growth of Nigeria’s prosperity. These programmes immediately became considerably popular countrywide, and the group seemed very likely to produce the next civilian Federal Government of Nigeria as well as the governments of many states. Hope began to revive among Nigerians. But the military rulers became instantly incensed against this group, preferring the group that was organizing to elevate corruption as Nigeria’s system of governance – the group that was determined to give the Nigerian elite the best of chances to acquire huge personal bounties, through corruption, from Nigeria’s oil revenues. The rest of this story is well known – especially the final story of how the military rulers manipulated the 1979 presidential election for the group that they preferred. There then followed four years (1979-83) of blisteringly corrupt governance.
Then, thirdly, sanity and hope suddenly intruded onto the scene again. A military officer named Muhammadu Buhari, assisted by a no-nonsense younger officer named Tunde Idiagbon, pushed the corrupt group out of the government and embarked on investigating and punishing the corrupt politicians. By then, however, the forces of corruption had become far too powerful. Buhari and Idiagbon were soon pushed out – and then replaced by the military officer who now holds the record as the master architect of corruption in Nigeria’s life. All that has followed since has kept along the path that he charted for our country. This is how we have become what we now are – namely, a country where public officials steal trillions of Naira, where some politicians pocket billions of Naira or even dollars in loot, where powerful citizens buy million-dollar houses for their concubines abroad, where governors and their cronies buy jet aircraft for personal use, where federal legislators earn more than the president of America, where more than 70% of citizens live in “absolute poverty”, where the lack of infrastructures massively discourages enterprise, where more than 70% of youths are unemployed, where crime has virtually destroyed all sense of security, etc.
But, yet again, the same old Buhari is back – this time as an elected civilian president. He has launched a war against public corruption again. And, again, most Nigerians welcome it.
Yes, it looks and sounds good, but what are Buhari’s chances of succeeding? Those like me who have seen this kind of welcome effort two times before cannot help being skeptical. As I watch Buhari, I am painfully convinced that he does not know what he needs to do to win this war. And people around him say that he does not know how to listen to other people and use their wisdom. He seems to think that finding and punishing corrupt big men is all that is needed – but he is flatly wrong. Corruption is much more deep-seated than all that. As he is proceeding now, he is likely to keep chasing corrupt big men without real success, until his four-year term comes to an end – if they will leave him to keep chasing them around for that long.
Buhari needs to return to the drawing table and, with his men, reconsider the approach to this mammoth problem.
If he does that, I believe that he and his men will almost certainly find that the approach needs to be more comprehensive. One cannot leave in place, and revel in, the system that upholds corruption, and then hope to eliminate corruption. It will not work – and the effort will only frustrate and burn Buhari. If Buhari sincerely desires to set this country on the right path, then he must seriously embark on convincing Nigerians to come with him to restructure and reorder the country. He will need particularly to persuade the elite of his own Hausa-Fulani nation who have generally believed that they have a special stake in the system as it has been concocted. He will need to persuade all of us that we have all been losing egregiously and need to turn around. He can succeed if he sincerely tries. Otherwise, he is likely to fail – and, for Nigeria, that could be a terminal disaster.
NATION
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