Our political power problem

The presidential election, which ushered in our current democratic dispensation held on February 27, 1999. That’s exactly 23 years ago today or about one-third of our national life as an independent country. Some Nigerians, who were born on that very day, are probably parents by now and most would likely be during this decade. But […]

The presidential election, which ushered in our current democratic dispensation held on February 27, 1999. That’s exactly 23 years ago today or about one-third of our national life as an independent country. Some Nigerians, who were born on that very day, are probably parents by now and most would likely be during this decade. But what have we done with all of that time? What have we achieved for ourselves collectively as a country? What social, political or economic problems have we solved during all of this time? In short, what have we done with our democracy so far?

These are not just abstract questions because 23 years are long enough to change the course of a nation in a favoured direction irreversibly. In any event, a society not given to abstract thinking will be prone to crude actions. In those 23 years, we have had four presidents, three or more governors for each of the 36 states, thousands of senators, federal representatives, state houses of assembly members, federal ministers and state commissioners and of course, local council chairs and councilors, all of them elected or appointed by two or more political parties. So, the difference of political party or individual leadership skills cannot explain the appalling under-achievement we have known so far. 

• Kannywood: I’m not married to Abacha’s son – Actress Hafsat Barauniya    
• Niger govt. restrategises to tackle insecurity

Now, Nigeria’s population has almost doubled from about 119 million in 1999 to just over 200 million today in 2022. We have also made quite a bit of money, tons of it in fact, from many different sources during the same period. Nigeria’s earnings from crude oil sales are the opaquest in the world, but we can herald a guess about how much we have made from that source alone since 1999. Our daily crude oil production has risen and fallen often drastically since 1999, but let us settle for the very conservative figure of an average of one million barrels per day. That means some 8, 395, 000,000 or approximately 8.4 billion barrels of crude oil have been pumped out of Nigerian soil and waters since February 1999.

Now, the average annual price per barrel of oil has varied considerably during the same period, rising from around $20pb in 1999 to a high of around $100pb consistently through 2011-2014. The average so far this year is over $85pb. But let us also settle for a conservative annual average price of $50pb. This means that Nigeria has made, in gross, $419,750,000,000 or approximately $420 billion from crude oil sales alone in 23 years. That’s nearly 100 per cent of Nigeria’s current gross domestic product (GDP), which, according to World Bank data, stood at $432 billion in 2020. But what have we done with it all?  

We have, then, so far raised the question of what we have achieved with a democratic political leadership (as opposed to military government), with our large and young population, with tons of money (minimum $420 billion) during a specific period of our national life (1999-2022). All four issues are about political power and how we use it as a society. Consider a small list of the lingering problems we could have used all these resources (democracy, time, population and money) to solve, after all, the whole point of political power is to solve society’s problems. The list might include population explosion; physical infrastructure particularly housing, energy and transport; social infrastructure particularly education and health; and the twin problems of unemployment and poverty.  

All these problems were with us in 1999 and none of them has been fully resolved today, if at all. There are many more, of course, but these four strike me as the most significant. And in a word, they are all problems of development. Now, problems of development, although mostly in the economic realm, are uniquely solved in the realm of politics and political power. Therefore, if we have proved unable to solve anyone of these four, the reasons might lie in the nature and function of political power in our society. And here, I can think of three core problems with how we wield political power as a society, regardless of party or individual leaders’ differences.

First, political power has absolutely no serious purpose in Nigerian society whatsoever. The Nigerian Constitution explicitly states that state power must be used to advance the security and prosperity of the country and the welfare of its people. But this constitutional requirement is lost to almost all who seek political power, since most have no serious reasons for doing so other than personal gratification. Why do I want to be a president, governor, senator or chair of a local council?

Well, it is because I am honest, or it’s my lifetime ambition, or because I had no shoe growing up, or because I am a Muslim or Christian, or because I worked 30 years in government before and have all the experience, or because it is the turn of my section of the country or state to produce one. Of course, behind all these pretensions is the hard reality that most office seekers at any level in Nigeria are in it because it is almost the only way they can survive economically as they do. So, when they get elected, actual leadership in terms of solving society’s problems becomes more like a disturbance or distraction to them.

Secondly, the imaginative capacity of political leadership in this country, collectively and individually, is only slightly above zero. Hardly any political leader at any level in Nigeria has ever come up with any serious plan for solving any of the country’s problems. How can we create 30 million new jobs over the next decade? How can we solve the problem of fuel subsidy? How about the 25 million houses needed for a growing population? Indeed, how do we even get about slowing the pace of population growth itself? How can we reduce poverty levels by half in 20 years? How can we build 20,000 kilometers of roads or 20,000MW of electricity in 10 years?

None of these is a mere hypothetical question. Every one of them is achievable where the power of the state is purposefully and imaginatively deployed to the most productive use, given Nigeria’s starting-level potentials and opportunities, and regardless of pandemics or global economic downturns. Yet, almost none of these issues come up during elections or in the media and from the universities in between elections. This leads us to our third problem with political power.

Those institutions, which stand outside of the state but are crucial to the positive exercise of political power—the media, the civil society organisations, think-tanks, the universities and an active citizenry—are, in Nigeria, just as defective as the state, if not more so. We have a peculiarly ignorant political journalism and we reap the benefits of that—political merry-go-round—every day. Our civil society organisations feel more accountable to their external dollars than to Nigeria or its citizens. Our companies, universities and think-thanks—the foremost spaces for generating the ideas, inventions and innovations that the political leadership uses to solve problems everywhere—are simply comatose, if not dead altogether. And the citizens? Well, they are praying to God about it all.   

In such a political context, it is difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel, regardless of who wins next year’s elections at whatever level. Still, we must hope.