To National Conference Delegates: Beware of nine mistakes that haunt Nigeria -
Atedo N A Peterside (CON)
Distinguished Fellow Delegates,
My contribution to the debate on the
President's Inaugural Address to this National Conference will be to seek to
further develop an important observation made by Mr President. On Page 25 of
his speech, Mr President said as follows (and I quote):-
“… We cannot continue to proffer yesterday's
solutions for today's problems”
This observation is bold, honest and forthright. I believe it is correct, but then it is also clearly an indictment of our leaders (including Mr President himself).
My humble submission is that our political
leaders have persevered with yesterday's solutions largely because our elite
have not properly diagnosed and corrected some of the most important mistakes
that the country made at various points in our history and many of which
continue to haunt us.
The nine (9) mistakes that I identified are
as follows:-
1) With the benefit of hindsight, the big
mistake of 1965 was the failure of political leaders to curb the excesses of
their supporters in the Western Region, even when the latter were getting
progressively more violent. Many Nigerian politicians still do not know the
correct time to curb the excesses of their supporters;
2) The January 1966 military coup, which was
plotted and executed by some young military officers, was violent in the
extreme. It was almost as if they thought they could douse violence by
confronting it with an even more violent outcome. That led us into a cycle of
escalating violence via a violent counter-coup in July 1966 and an even more
violent backlash against an ethnic group that was adjudged as having come out
unscathed from the first coup. Residents who were not indigenes were
slaughtered in some cases by their next door neighbours.
Sadly, many Nigerians still believe that the only response to violence
today must be greater violence. Also, minds have been poisoned in most states
of the federation (except possibly Sokoto State and one or two others) against
granting indigeneship rights to law abiding residents who have been tax payers
in a community for several decades. Their “crime” is that their fore-fathers
hailed from elsewhere.
3) Elders
and other ethnic jingoists sought to score advantages over their peers by
exploiting the naivete of the young and/or immature military leaders who
emerged in 1966. The familiar refrain today is that, if your “son” occupies a
high office then he must manipulate things to your advantage and give you more
than your fair share of what you desire, to the detriment of others;
4) We then also brought religion into
politics and are still trying to bring it into everything concerning the public
sector. The irony here is that, if we are truly religious, then why are our
public and private sector leaders more corrupt than their contemporaries in
countries where religion is almost viewed and/or treated with disdain? NO, by
their very actions, thieves and murderers of the innocent have confirmed that
they are neither moslems nor christians. They are simply criminals who should
be made to pay for their sins. Neither the Bible nor the Koran preach that we
should condone criminality;
5) When confronted with a stalemate or a
disagreement between any two substantial groups or groupings on a thorny issue,
we refused in the past to borrow tried and tested corporate governance
principles and other conflict resolution mechanisms including diplomacy. That
was how we slid all the way into a full-blown Civil War in 1967. I dare say
that if a National Conference, on the scale of what we have today and with a
composition that similarly went beyond political leaders, had been convened in
the first quarter of 1967, the Nigerian Civil War might have been averted;
6) In the mid-1970s, the military then
destroyed professionalism in the civil service through the combination of the
mass purges which they carried out and the consequent enthronement of tenure
insecurity which has since afflicted most public officers. Accordingly, our
civil service has never regained its ability to act as a restraining influence
on the excesses of political office holders;
7) Our leaders also behaved in a manner that
created the impression that our word has stopped being our bond and that is why
there is no sanctity of contracts;
8) Mistake nos 3), 4), 5), 6) and 7) above culminated in the
enthronement of injustice in many forms. Thus, you can infer the ethnic origin
of those who were in power at the time the last set of Local Government Areas
(LGA) were carved out
simply by establishing which states were
favoured the most. The oppression of minorities all over the land is now legendary.
Indeed, many of the advocates of “true
federalism”, “fiscal federalism” and/or “resource control”, simply hope to
replace carting away the resources of a community in their state to Abuja with
a new arrangement of carting away the same resources to a greedy and
insensitive Governor in the state capital so he can buy himself a N7 billion
aircraft. Royalties are a payment for the right to exploit minerals and a slice
of royalties on minerals (whether gemstones in Zamfara State, Limestone in Kogi
or Bauchi or Crude Oil and Gas in Bayelsa), should stay with the community for
the benefit of residents and landowners. Note that residents should ordinarily
include non-indigenes. This is what pertains in the U.K. with reference to
shale gas/oil exploration and the U.S.A., is even farther ahead where it is
recognised that the resources beneath your land belong to you and not to a
State Governor.
People who claim to be minorities at the
Federal or State level often visit the same oppression that they complain of on
smaller ethnic minorities as soon as they (who are a minority within the
State), become the majority in a Senatorial zone or LGA.
Having enthroned injustice everywhere, our
lawyers and judges then conspired to bequeath us with a dysfunctional legal system
which makes it virtually impossible for anyone to obtain justice speedily from
our courts. This is Mistake No. 8. For instance, it took my own father 17 years
to pursue a case all the way to Supreme Court on a matter that would have been
resolved by a disciplined, responsible
and
conscientious judiciary within a few months. Even in the corporate world, many
innocent small traders and suppliers have been bankrupted because they naively
supplied goods on credit to large corporations who simply refused to pay them
promptly on due date because they know that the little trade creditor cannot
seek and obtain justice from our courts.
Little wonder that this inability to seek and
obtain legal redress speedily has encouraged many among us to perpetrate
further injustices against the “weak”;
9) To crown it all, we then enthroned
perverse incentives which reward bad behaviour. Bankers refer to this as “moral
hazard”. Thus, we correctly honour General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who was the
military Head of State that restored the democracy that we all yearned for
within eleven months of taking office, but then we simultaneously “insult” him
by bestowing the same honour on one or two military leaders before him who
should correctly be tried for treason. If you reward an unruly horse with a
juicy carrot you set a dangerous precedent that may well come back to haunt
you.
Clearly the best and safest message that
should be sent to today's military leaders (in protection of our democracy) is
to have them understand that, even at age 80, they could find themselves being
tried for treason if they assault our democracy today at age 40 or 45. A few
countries have done this before and Pakistan is currently doing so.
Indeed, perverse incentives have also echoed
in this august assembly – that is why some of us voiced our complaint to the
Chairman when he appeared to be rewarding unruly delegates who refuse to sit
down by handing them the microphone ahead of obedient delegates who sat down
and simply raised their hands, as we were all supposed to do. The searchlight
is therefore also on us at this Confab.
We must show the nation that we can do things
differently. A national conference is essentially a contest of ideas. We should
seek to come up with and/or endorse the best ideas that come to us even from
non-delegates. If we can establish genuine consensus here around the best
ideas, we will propel this country forward with unbelievable force.
This is because it will be clear to all and
sundry that we are well on the way to building a grand coalition that will be a
“force for good”.
The National Conference Train is on the move
and Good Governance should be our watchword and goal and the ticket for getting
on board should be a genuine commitment to reject the nine mistakes enumerated
above along with others that are inconsistent with good governance. Saints and
sinners are welcome on board this train because we know that every saint has a
past and every sinner has a future. The oldest delegates (in the departure
lounge) and the youngest delegates (in the arrival hall) are equally welcome to
join this train. So too are the political parties. Our aim should be to get
them to compete to convince the Nigerian people that they have imbibed this
message.
If we are the elite, then we must shoulder
the burden for ensuring that the future of our nation becomes more than a
simple extension of our inglorious past.
My prayer Mr Chairman is that we will conduct
ourselves in a manner that historians will identify this 2014 National
Conference as Nigeria's “Now Moment”, the “Tipping Point”, a “Defining Moment”
when we chose to build a consensus by making it fashionable for all those who
have any good left in them to join what should become a grand coalition to
correct all wrongs and to stop repeating the worst mistakes of our past, some
of which have haunted us for close to five decades.
So help us
God.
(Being the full text of a speech that was
delivered in summary form on the floor of the on-going National Conference in
the week of 7th-11th April, 2014)
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