I
was invited to Abuja last week to an elaborate policy summit organised
by the All Progressives Congress. A respected friend, Dr. Otive Igbuzor,
informed me about the meeting and Dr. Kayode Fayemi, a former governor
of Ekiti State, graciously invited me to the event. It was a collection
of experts of some sorts. However, as I pointed out to one of the
participants, exactly 16 years ago as the civilian regime of President
Olusegun Obasanjo was preparing to take over from the military
government of Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar, a similar conference was held. I
looked around and saw exactly (probably a majority) of the people who
attended the conference in Abuja. They also offered the same nice
proposals and suggestions that I heard last week. Now, the only
difference is that some people who were participants 16 years ago, now
have become presenters and vice versa. So, I came to the conclusion that
we are not a country that lacks ideas or in short supply of experts.
There must be something probably much more fundamental.
Is
it the lack of doers? Is it the lack of political will? Is it the lack
of sincerity? Or is it that we just enjoy to say these things seasonally
even when we do not mean them or have an idea that they were not going
to happen?
Nevertheless, there is something about having so many
experts taking on policy issues. Experts hardly come to a consensus. As
I moved from one parallel session to another, I encountered experts who
had suggestions about how to practically turn around every sector of
our economy including how to eradicate corruption. How ambitious! I
momentarily felt that they were just pontificating and mistook me to be
an APC stalwart who could potentially offer a job. I wish I was one!
But
seriously, I think there is a need to develop some consensus about what
constitutes the biggest problem to our national developmental
aspiration and attainment and get a priority list of how to tackle them.
I consider this the most urgent task before the incoming government. No
doubt the problems are multifarious and complicated but it could be
dangerous or even counterproductive to expect to solve all of them at
the same time. I also think that it is wrong that the APC did not manage
to pull off a less rancorous exercise with the Peoples Democratic
Party. As a party that had not been in power at the national level
before, the APC needs all the help it can get. There could be some
landmines buried somewhere within the bureaucracy and robust
interactions could help expose those.
I overheard the problem of
corruption being mentioned conspicuously in all the sessions. As I said
earlier, many suggestions about how to solve the problem were proposed,
however, one thing was clear from the presentations: Even the problems
do not appear to be well understood. While there is a general feeling
that corruption is one of the biggest problems of our polity, there is
not yet a shared understanding of what constitutes corruption. With both
politicians, bureaucrats (the people we call civil servants),
academics, journalists, private sector players, all gathered in the
room, it will be difficult to develop a shared view of which act that is
corrupt and which is not! Yet, that shared view is critical if we
expect to tackle the problem collectively. Out of all the lot, the most
important group of people are the politicians. We must avoid a situation
where a right hand is seen to be fighting corruption while the left
hand is promoting it. The APC can continue to express how far it is
willing to go to fight the corruption virus but its members must look
inwards and ensure that when they talk about corruption, they mean the
same thing!
If after 16 years, we still gather to hear the same
beautiful things from almost the same set of people, then it means we
need to do more. The APC needs to do more and differently to bring the
change it promised. It should not expect any luck. The outgoing
administration relied on so much luck and it did not produce much. Was
it a coincidence with the name of the outgoing President, Goodluck
Jonathan? We have spent a lot of time criticising his style and how he
took the country backwards and did not appear prepared for the
leadership that was suddenly thrust on his shoulders. But it is evident
that he did not quite get himself together until Nigerians gave him a
notice to quit from the villa. However, I think we have spent so much
time talking about the weaknesses of the outgoing administration and
very little time scrutinising the activities of the incoming
administration. That is unhelpful. We must pause to take a comprehensive
review of what happened and see what we can learn from them. We must be
vigilant not to allow a repeat because some of the enablers of what we
blame the outgoing administration for could find their way into the
incoming one.
We must begin to look at how to operationalise the
promises made to Nigerians by the APC and begin to sieve out what is
possible from what is not. We should be getting a feeling of timelines
by now. We should also watch very carefully the calibre of people the
incoming administration will choose as key public officials especially
ministers. That is an important acid test to whether it means business
and whether it understands the level of expectations of Nigerians. Given
that the President-elect contested the position several times before he
got it, one would expect that he prepared for it and have a clear
picture of what he is coming to do. In a few days, he will have an
opportunity to prove us right or wrong. For the Abraham Lincoln of
Nigeria, no one is ready to accept excuses. No doubt, the problems are
complicated but there must be a few low hanging fruits that he can
harvest to set a tone of his style and send a signal to Nigerians. The
initial steps do matter a lot.
To
Nigerians and to the world, all I can say is that the era of good luck
is gone for good. This era is either hard work or nothing.
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