Engagements By Chidi Amuta.
In the relationship between government and people in Nigeria’s curious
democracy, there is an assurance of reciprocal bad blood. The broad
masses of Nigerians hold the government and those who drive it in
irredeemable disdain. Government in our midst is like the village witch.
The easiest way to hang a witch is to accuse him of responsibility for
multiple calamities. So, in our polity, government is responsible for
every negativity ranging from flood disasters to harmattan haze and
rising instances of testicular cancer in middle-aged men. Or
miscarriages among destitute women!
The other side is no better. Our governments, at nearly all levels, are
at best embarrassingly indifferent and condescending to the people. In
the parlance recently made popular by President Goodluck Jonathan
himself, government people ‘don’t give a damn’ about the people. In
their view, the people complain too much. You cannot satisfy them. They
want government to do everything for them ranging from giving them
subsidy for multiple wives to scholarships for limitless offspring.
Among the people, government people think, there are too many pocket
book critics and professional grumblers. The bulk of those who speak out
on radio phone-in programmes and ask silly questions that border on
accountability and good governance are just plain troublemakers.
But in their quiet moments, politicians in power admit that they may
not be meeting the expectations of the masses. Once that admission is
made, it is time to find a scapegoat. State governors blame the federals
for holding back too much oil money, which they waste on fuel subsidy
to their friends and private jets for their girlfriends. The federals
blame the global economic meltdown or the states for being too ambitious
in their projects. Everybody blames everybody and in the process our
collective commonwealth dwindles as public accountability is replaced by
creative accounting. While the blames crisscross, the turnover in the
corruption industry has left the millions to billions and is hovering at
the trillion mark.
As matters stand, I think that the fractured relationship between
government and people as the keystone of democracy may lie at the root
of our troubles as a nation. In a democracy, the reciprocal obligation
between government and people defines a social contract. We vote for you
and cede our rights. In return, we expect that you will protect us one
from the other. We expect that you will replace our collective urge for
self-destruction with an overriding force for collective protection and
good. That is politics 101.
But in contemporary Nigeria, something terrible has happened. The
social contract has been replaced by a transactional ethos. Pay us and
we vote for you. When you get there, recoup your ‘investment’ and behave
badly if you like. When you come back to renew your mandate in four
years’ time, we will increase the price tag for the mandate, adjusting
it for inflation, exchange rate fluctuation. As it were, it is, in crass
banal parlance, ‘pay as you enter’ and ‘carry go’. Period.
Under this transactional regime, a new market place language has
replaced our patrimonial relationship to the fatherland. You hear it at
these all too frequent fancy seminars and read it in the papers. There
is now something constantly called the ‘Nigerian project’, not the
Nigerian nation. Those empowered by elective democracy to run the
affairs of the nation are now its ‘drivers’. Its main subscribers, the
rest of us, are called ‘stake holders’. The contributions of those who
are paid to work for the public good are now ‘value addition’. Through
this linguistic vandalism and utter mayhem, the elite has perhaps
unwittingly advanced the progressive death of the nation and lent
credence to those who have predicted that in a few years’ time, ‘this
house will not be standing.’
It is time to loudly and vehemently protest this invasion of public
discourse by the language of the market place. A nation is not a project
for God’s sake. When a project, like a joint stock company, fails, its
drivers and subscribers disperse to lick their wounds or count their
losses. Not so a nation. A nation is a perpetual patrimony, something we
find at birth and are obligated to improve upon before handing it over
to our children in infinity. In today’s interconnected world, no nation
fails alone. Each nation that fails or falls takes a few others, even
in unexpected places, along with it. Gadhafi’s Libya fell and unleashed
those huge guns. The repercussion nearly took down Mali and threatened
Nigeria and Algeria with apocalyptic violence. Not even the West was
spared. That is why French soldiers are killing terrorists in the
African desert.
The people of a nation are not stakeholders whose interest is defined
and limited by the extent of their stake. They are citizens. Citizens
have inalienable rights as well as obligations. The perennial existence
of the nation is their most abiding interest and stake. If a nation
fails, citizens have no place to hide or call home. If it works, we all
thrive even if differentially according to class and circumstance. The
collapse of national discourse, which has come with the invasion of this
bad language, has its origins in the tragic iterations of our Alibaba
politics.
The pathological rascality of Nigerian politicians lies at the root of
it all. The elections that emplace our leaders have little to do with
the will of the people. Leaders just emerge. This tragic irony somehow
marks out Nigeria's strange democracy from most other democratic
traditions. The essential difference is this: in the best traditions,
the people vote for politicians. In Nigeria, most politicians literally
‘vote’ for themselves and arrange the outcome they desire or have paid
for. In a familiar tragic and ironic twist, the successful election
rigger turns around to thank the people for their massive support and
mandate! Our system therefore literally awards positions to political
animals irrespective of their origins.
The informal assurance that cliques of rascals and gangsters can just
come to power irrespective of what the people feel has created a
governance culture of impunity and reckless insensitivity on the part of
a great majority of elected political leaders. The result is a curious
notion of the relationship between government and people as inhabiting
two separate realms.
Even the colonial overlords cared about the feelings of the colonised
because their taxes, produce and tributes sustained the colonial
enterprise. The difference is that the colonialists did not claim to be
mandated by anybody other than their home governments. So, colonial
subjects were neither 'people' nor citizens in the way electoral
democracy defines us. There was, so to say, no social contract between
subject and overlord. But there was an appropriate transactional
relationship: I pay your taxes, you protect me from yourself.
Right now, computations about 2015 are the rave. It is perhaps a
healthy indicator about the future of democracy in this place that most
people eat and breathe politics. But politicians hardly care about the
people except as statistics for vote winning and rigging.
In all the computations that I have seen yet, the dynamics of our
demographics do not count: the predominantly young population and their
needs for jobs, opportunity, prospects, promise and hope do not matter.
The percentage of our people that are seniors does not matter. The
pension liability to our retirees does not matter. The health care costs
of a youthful population that will one day get old does not interest
our politicians. No one is doing the projections on internal migrations.
Where are people going to, never to return? Which cities are growing in
population and why? Which areas are being deserted and why? Why are
people fleeing certain places and flocking to others? These are the
kinds of informed questions that ought to define the politicians’
engagement with the people.
Soon after the elections have taken place, everyone runs off in the
direction of the winner. No one waits to analyse the results against the
background of real factors. The outcomes of our elections end up as
embarrassing travesties of electoral democracy. In some cases, states
have been known to record more votes than their total population. In
some places, total votes cast have exceeded the populations of those
dead, alive and unborn. In other places, Mike Tyson, Idi Amin, Emperor
Bokassa, Bill Clinton and other impossible 'Nigerians' have shown up in
voter registers and have actually 'voted' for the candidate that saw to
it that they showed up in the register in the first place. No one is
prosecuted for electoral fraud. The fruit of victory and the bile of
defeat consume actors, spectators and referees alike.
There is therefore a fictional essence to the Nigerian politician's
concept of the people. 'We the people' do not exist the way real people
exist. The constitution begins with 'We, the people' alright. But most
of us do not know we are involved in the whole alien festival called
government. But we do exist perhaps the way phantoms do, objects in the
imagination, which people quietly acknowledge and disbelieve to their
peril. Ghosts and ancestors 'exist' but you can go against their wishes
without the prospect of immediate sanctions. So do the people in
Nigeria. But in other real democracies, the people do exist as an
objective reality. Do their wish and watch your poll ratings soar. Go
against their wishes and kiss the state house and free rides good bye.
That ought to be the fundamental relationship between the rulers and the
ruled in a proper democracy.
But something is changing without our willing it. So much atrocity is
committed daily in the name of the people. It is the sheer weight of
these atrocities that has helped in creating a fast changing people
helped along by the force of new technologies. The masses are gradually
finding a voice. But it is a rough voice. Only recently, President
Jonathan's nattering mob of court defenders had cause to revolt against
the roughness of the people's voice in the social media. Here was a
president that was hyped and hailed as the first product of a new
generation that communicates their patriotism via Facebook and the
Internet. Now, less than 10% of reactions in the social media to our
governance see anything good in the man and his running of Nigeria. The
rest is an unprintable cocktail of abuses, curses and plain insult.
Our politicians may not like the new voice of the people. As a
solution, maybe we should try abolishing the people for a change!
No comments:
Post a Comment