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Of change, focus and distractions

By Debo Adesina
04 July 2016   |   4:21 am
The fog over Nigeria’s political and economic landscape today requires a certain luminance of the mind and sight to comprehend. It is a thicket through which only leaders with the sharp-edged sword of integrity and super-clear vision can cut.

democracy

The fog over Nigeria’s political and economic landscape today requires a certain luminance of the mind and sight to comprehend. It is a thicket through which only leaders with the sharp-edged sword of integrity and super-clear vision can cut.

There are so many issues, hardly helpful to the nation’s purpose but deep in intensity, which can blur the vision. There are persons, hardly useful to the course of our country but ferocious in determination, out to blunt the sword. Nigeria can do without those distractions.

Ours is a country in trouble. The people are in real pains as they get little or no value for their given wealth. The level of poverty has never been higher and the army of the unemployed is swelling by the day. The cost of living has hit the skies while the average income has dwindled.

The tragic irony, to the shame of Nigerians, is that very few countries have anything near the warehouse of human and material resources available to Nigeria. But no nation has exhausted the store of harvested capital as mindlessly as Nigeria has done. No nation has put its blessings to so much waste or plundered its resources so mercilessly, leaving it scraping the floor presently for anything resembling crumbs.

While this country is not alone in the battle for economic survival, however, our case is compounded by a leadership that seems to have shifted or has been compelled to shift focus from its core emergency mission to matters of ego or cheap vanity of personal glory.

When politicking should have ended and real governance taken to a higher level, many are still stuck in the rut of quest for offices. This has led to a situation in which the challenges before the nation appear ignored or intractable, while the ruling elite dissipates greater energy on self-advancement.

As the struggle continues on how to save Nigeria’s economy and make it engender the greatest good for the greatest number of the people, let me reiterate my position that the notion of aridity of the ideas landscape needing a special massive irrigation is one big lie. It is a lie that insults the collective memory as well as wisdom of all Nigerians, who have been witnesses to the publicly debated diverse ways of making Nigeria great. This notion, if anything, merely exposes a certain lack of capacity for bold actions on the part of the nation’s leadership. To those in command of the chariot of change, the ideas available for changing Nigeria’s story are so many and so readily available that the richness of the terrain borders on the soggy.

As far as rescuing Nigeria is concerned, the current leadership dwells on very fertile ground of ideas and has no other tether than confusion and distraction.

Contrary to its pretensions to the high road or its affectation of a different mind-set, the Muhammadu Buhari government remains mired sometimes in the petty or the primordial and has not been helped by divisions along those lines, with painfully distracting battles over offices, power and positions fast becoming a signature.

And at no other time is this confusion as well as distraction more evident than now. On one hand, the President appears to pander to the whims of some people, members of his kitchen cabinet or some acolytes. On the other, he wants to assert himself as everyone’s man who is no one’s man. Then, his own loyalty judgment pitches ambition against ambition, friends against friends, godfathers against god-children, plots against sub-plots, merit against primordial sentiments and, of course, the future of Nigeria against its present.

So, instead of harmony and iron-cast unity of purpose, unremitting sniping has been the constant in the administration, with everyone looking over his or her shoulder for who might be carrying a poisoned jagged-edged knife.

Hence the definitive profile of the current class is not one of a band of leaders who are doing so much in the legislative arm, for example, or initiating so much in the executive branch, both arms of government under the control of the same party as they are! Rather, to paraphrase Bill Clinton at his first inaugural as President of the United States of America, who is up or who is down, who is in and who is out, has become the pre-occupation of the All Progressives Congress’ entire ruling class. The leading elements seem to have forgotten the people of Nigeria whose votes sent them into power and at whose behest they hold their various stations or wield their influence.

Their APC-led government is distracted by too many things, not the least being serious internal contradictions as exemplified by the open war between some of its leaders, culminating in trials, tribulations and accusations of persecution.

The result is that the leaders’ eyes are often off the ball of giving Nigerians the change they voted for and which they desperately need. And the kind of clarity of vision or purpose expected of a government like Buhari’s gets blurred by the persistently thick dust of intra-party battles for power.

This situation, no doubt, is a direct result of the fact that at the helm of the government is the typically Nigerian assemblage of extremely strange bedfellows.

A typical Nigerian political party in recent experiences at democracy is never known to be anything more than an association of men and women of different hues whose only binding principle is the absence of one. Which is why not many may be surprised that the APC is fast advertising itself as no better than the ousted Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, as it currently carries the self-inflicted image of just another convenient vehicle for grabbing power for no other purpose than wielding it for selfish ends.

This, of course, would not have mattered if Nigerians had not made such a huge investment of hope, trust and goodwill in that party, especially in its torch-bearer, President Muhammadu Buhari, the disciplined man of integrity, who, they believed, would rise above the mundane and mould Nigeria into the giant it has the capacity to be.

While no one was fooled, given its origins, into believing the ruling party would be different from the hodgepodge which it was and still is, Nigerians swallowed the APC pill in the hope that it would cure some of the ills afflicting them, not cause them another massive bout of sickness and regret as it currently threatens to do!

Nigerians must by now be tired of the sniping in the administration and ruling party. They want results. Even the catch-all-the-thieves policy, such a hit with the people, is getting a bit worn, with complaints of bias, vindictiveness, shoddiness of investigation and far from diligent prosecution.

Buhari has enormous powers and even much more enormous influence, which he can use for the good of the people of Nigeria. He is in a vantage position to strengthen Nigeria’s governance by ignoring petty sentiments and by institutionalising respect for the country’s different institutions. More importantly, he has enormous goodwill, enough moral capital, to turn deaf ears to the distracting noise of politics and put a laser-like focus on service to the people as well as a genuine fight against corruption.

Extra-ordinary times call for extra-ordinary measures. Unity of purpose, clarity of vision and bold ideas are what these times demand. With oil prices, though showing signs of improvement, still very low, the nation’s revenue intake has been so puny and the treasury can hardly support the kind of human and infrastructural development Nigeria needs today. It is a destination at which we have arrived on the vehicle of corruption.

Nigeria must therefore be rid of that menace if the country would ever get started on the journey to peace and prosperity. We must catch the thieves, by all means, bring them to justice and retrieve all they have looted. But that should be done within the context of institutional due process and fairness, with no consideration for anyone or his ox being gored. To do less, however, convenient, would be the greatest ammunition in the hands of the enemies of Nigeria, whose population in high places is best measured by the exceptions countable on the fingertips.

Also, Buhari, not the APC, has this point to prove: that he did not run for the Presidency so many times before finally winning the price only for the sake of being addressed as President; that he is out to create a record in history beyond being another military commander-in-chief who also succeeded in becoming an elected one; that he is not another politician up for manipulation or out to manipulate the system.

To prove this point, he should be reminded of the faith of Nigerians in his person in addition to their belief in his political party and shun all kinds of self-induced distractions currently assailing him and his government.
.Excerpts from earlier submissions on this page.

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    This opinion writer is totally off the point, and no doubt he is she is an apposition apologist and among the wailers. He did not see the Niger Delta Avengers (Militants), and the Economic sabotage against the current government as the bane of affecting the focus and distractions of the change agenda. He saw nothing in the external forces fighting the kick start of the economy, fighting against the agenda of the well cut out 2016 Budget, the progressively laid down blue prints and plans to develop the economy as the government moves through the four (4) years tenure of the administration. I have not seen any infighting within the FEC Cabinet, or even the kitchen cabinet of the President as being professed by this opinion writer. It was his or her own imagination and wishes. I think our major problems affecting the new planned developmental process is external – Niger Delta Militants, those opposing the EFCC fight against corruptions, the Judiciary and the National Assembly. Take it or leave it, we are moving forward. When the militants are tired, when there are no more oil pipes to blow up, when the oil wells are dried up. We will have alternative means of energy, and agriculture will come to our rescue, When the chips are down, Nigeria will laugh. Surely we will get to the promise land, and this government is like Moses that will lead the true way. Believe it or not. We will survive.