Running for the history books
For a man who enters his second and constitutionally final term in office as President of Nigeria, many people think he is through with running. To the extent that a former president in Nigeria is not expected by haughty local culture to seek election into any lesser office, then he has finished running in elections. […]
For a man who enters his second and constitutionally final term in office as President of Nigeria, many people think he is through with running. To the extent that a former president in Nigeria is not expected by haughty local culture to seek election into any lesser office, then he has finished running in elections. However, in his second term he is running for something even more difficult and more uncertain than winning an election. He is running for the history books.
To find honourable mention in the history books years after one leaves office and decades after departing from this life is the trickiest of all aspirations. Unlike an election, it cannot be rigged. Loyal party chiefs, zealous supporters, thugs, posters, billboards, flyers and money all cannot help in the struggle to enter the history books. Even the number of votes scored in the election, the number of states and regions won and the gap between the winner and the runner up do not guarantee success in the history books. Only visionary performance in office and a stroke of good luck will do.
Good luck is important because unforeseen events sometimes crop up, throw the ruler off balance and impose on him a new situation that he neither envisaged nor planned for. To cite a recent example, President George W. Bush was still groping around in 2001 to find meaning to his presidency when 911 landed on his lap. It was both an opportunity and a pitfall. Mr. Bush grabbed both in equal measure, temporarily scored high in opinion polls, then wrecked everything when he invaded Iraq and also got involved in the interminable war in Afghanistan.
Probably the best a leader can do about unforeseen events is to pray, but competent staff work can also anticipate and make provisional plans for all sorts of eventualities. These range from a rebel invasion of Nigerian territory to a meteorite hit, a devastating computer virus, collapse of international oil prices, a sudden technological shift away from oil, early cessation of rains, a major pest invasion of crops or livestock, a major plane crash, a Langalanga-scale train accident or an Nyos-like gas eruption.
For the most part however, the re-elected President must look at the problems at hand and determine which ones can be solved in order to earn an honourable place in the history books. This task is made trickier because some problems that are existential today may not necessarily look so in ten years’ time. For now, the most immediate problems facing the President are to end the kidnapping pandemic, end banditry in Zamfara State, end the Boko Haram war, ensure the return of IDPs to their homes, and secure the release of Leah Sharibu and the remaining Chibok girls, among others. The danger is that all of these problems could be but footnotes in the history books.
Before he begins to grapple with the substantive issues, there are other issues that earned President Muhammadu Buhari bad press during his first term. He ought to correct them in his second term before they torpedo his way to earning a good place in the history books. One of them is to move faster with decision making and appointments. Another one is to increase the regional and cultural diversity of his appointees, especially the heads of security agencies. A third one is to increase local communication and to end the tradition of granting interviews only to foreign media houses and of making major statements only when he is addressing Nigerian communities abroad. A fifth one, if possible, is to avoid scandals.
The kind of issues that will earn honourable mention in History, many years from now, are the perennial ones such as ending the Almajirai problem, settling the farmers/herders contest for land, greatly improving this country’s embarrassing power supply, finding a solution to Niger Delta environmental and political problems, reorganizing the public service to reduce the quantum of resources it consumes and improve its ability to deliver service, finding technological solutions to different types of corrupt practices, end this country’s massive medical tourism to foreign hospitals, reduce the propensity to send children to foreign schools, improve Nigeria’s political culture to make the people’s voice to count, improve the election system to end or at least reduce rigging, and launch the country to a path of rapid economic growth.
These problems are not easy to solve. But then, none of them is impossible to solve either. Even if we start on the right footing, it might take a decade or more to solve some of these problems, but it will be worthwhile to start. Take the Almajirai problem, which has kept an estimated 12 million children out of school. It is a Northern problem, and President Buhari is best placed to tackle it. Since it has religious and deep Hausa cultural connotations, it should not be left to the next president, who is likely to be a Southerner. Although the Almajirai problem is multi-faceted, it has one weak link: the Malams who collect children from their parents in the rural areas and bring them to the cities, without food or proper accommodation, allegedly for religious study. Buhari is strong enough to stop these Malams in their tracks.
Four years ago when farmers/herders’ clashes raged in Benue State, Agriculture Minister Chief Audu Ogbeh proffered many solutions, including cattle ranches and colonies. None of them was ever implemented. There is currently a lull in the clashes but the problem will not go away on its own. This is the time to work out a well-considered solution and to begin to implement it. If cattle colonies were to dot the landscape and end pastoralism in Nigeria, they could come to be known as “Buhari colonies” and will receive more mention in national life than Shagari Housing Estates, for instance.
President Buhari spent the last four years fighting corruption, mostly through arresting former top officials and recovering funds from them. The limits of that strategy are all too visible because corruption has hardly abated in Nigerian public life. New cases are sprouting even when old ones are being punished. I think Buhari will accomplish much more in this regard in the next four years if he turns his full attention to technological solutions. For example, BVN alone has made a dent on ghost worker syndrome. EFCC’s Eagle Claw software has made a dent on money laundering.
Three years ago, when the then Chairman of General Electric Jack Immelt visited the State House, I thought we were going to hand over the entire electricity industry to him. Instead, he was marginalized in the photo-op and he was made to stand at the far end, grinning sheepishly, instead of rubbing shoulders with the President. Please, we should not do that again when the Chairman of China Shenhua Energy comes calling.
Reforming the public service could be one of the most lasting legacies that Buhari could impart on Nigeria. The way things stand, however visionary the economic blueprint that the government adopts, it cannot be delivered by the current public service. It is too slow, too corrupt, too self-serving and too much given to rivalry and turf wars. A recent example is the battle between Ministry of Trade, Industry and Investment and Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority [NEPZA] which threatens to cripple one of the government’s best projects, the creation of Special Economic Zones.
And then there are projects. At the state level, governors have discovered since 1999 that the projects that earn a man the most accolades long after he left office are an airport and a state university. At the federal level, I think the equivalents are Lagos-Ibadan expressway, Second Niger Bridge, Mambilla hydroelectric dam, standard gauge railway, East-West railway, dualization of highways, improving power supply and building a few world class hospitals. From these policies and projects, let us choose the ones that could earn President Buhari a good chapter in the next great history textbook.