Change agent reformer-leader Nigeria needs in 2023

In May 2015, when he was sworn in as the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari, made a strong show of patriotic commitment when he announced clearly, “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” That came as an additional signifier to the immense goodwill and personal capital of integrity that President Buhari brought on board an administration that was invested with lots of expectations from Nigerians.

While the administration had done all it could, Nigeria does not seem to have achieved a development profile that would allow the incoming administration any respite from the legitimate demands of Nigerians. Insecurity and unbridled corruption at both the political and bureaucratic levels have complicated Nigeria’s development impasse.

The catchphrase of “belong to everybody and to nobody”, though not clearly lived out in the lifetime of the present administration, is a fundamental one that speaks to a leader’s determination to govern no matter the impediments. That statement must necessarily be regarded as the first condition in an overall leadership temperament that solidifies a governance philosophy.

The first condition of a leadership that will succeed, especially in a country like Nigeria, going forward, is the determination to make a difference at all cost. That means so many things, the first of which is the refusal to give in to greed and the lure of primitive accumulation. Such a refusal could only come from the depth of a deeply patriotic conviction to give one’s best to a country one believes in.

The second imperative is the need for a vision. This visionary frame must have the capacity, one, to roam over the national past to achieve a diagnosis of national errors and misdirection that had led to leadership and governance failures. Or, did Georg Santayana, the American philosopher, not say, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? The past is where the rain began to first beat us, to quote Chinua Achebe. And it is from there we must begin to make sense of where we got it wrong. And then, two, the visionary frame must also take a critical note of Nigeria’s present political and economic configurations, especially within the ambit of regional and global political economy to make sense of Nigeria’s strength and weakness.

This visionary frame must be the precursor to the emergence of a governance philosophy of ideology that incorporates national goals with national consciousness in generating a “we-feeling” that constitutes the greatest underlying challenge of the national project in Nigeria. The national project requires the creation of a civic nationalism that derives from a developmental vision of the Nigerian government taking care of Nigerians. This is how Nigeria’s “commanding height” statist philosophy became the underlying ideological dynamic for pushing a development vision.

However, such a vision must be squared with several ideological possibilities in contemporary governance, especially with the urgent need to critique the dominance of the Washington Consensus and the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and its stranglehold on Africa’s economies.

At the core of civic nationalism is a sense of an active citizenship that is motivated by a politically obliged government to undermine all forms of religious, ethnic, personal and parochial biases and interests in the service of an overall commitment to the Nigerian nation. Citizenship is not achieved in a vacuum; it is the function of good government, and a democratic governance that puts the citizens first in terms of infrastructural development that makes life qualitatively different.

The nation and its civic imperatives therefore take over the functions that the primordial ethnic enclaves of the people used to fulfill. Without this civic sense of belonging, the incoming administration will essentially fail to govern meaningfully.

In a sense therefore, the leadership that will emerge in 2023 must be perceived as a unifier. The incoming administration will be inheriting a deeply fractured country where the six geopolitical zones represent ethnic prejudices that seems to determine more a sense of ethnic entitlement than unity.

It would seem that the fracturing issues that led the country to a tragic civil war are still very much with us. Nigeria is still as deeply divided as it was 57 years ago when we took up arms over what Nigeria means for ethnic configurations. No leadership can ever hope to succeed with that level of divisiveness, unless it is determined to do something about it. Unless, that is, such a leadership is willing to be for everybody (a genuine Nigerian president) and for nobody (an ethnic figurehead). The task of national development and national reconstruction must therefore be simultaneous. One cannot wait for the completion of the other. In fact, one requires the other in temporal proximity.

To be continued tomorrow
Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary and Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, (NIPSS), Kuru, Plateau State.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com