Our country is a victim of serial rape by hordes of bad leaders. And bad leaders are harvested from all parts of Nigeria. This is not an exclusive preserve of one section of the country are some people want us to believe it. Again, bad leaders have no ethnic or religious identity marks as the media and some opinion leaders would want to shove it down our throats. From the mid 1970s to date, Nigeria has been producing leaders that are incompetent, ignorant, inexperienced or downright self-serving going by the way they have run the affairs of the Nigerian state. Our ordeal began way back in history with the military misadventure in politics through the litany of coup d’état and counter coups by one section of the military elite or the other. With hindsight, the most annoying thing about all those coups is that they always come under the guise of safeguarding the corporate existence of Nigeria. From Yakubu Gowon to Murtala Ramat Mohammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, Mohammed Sani Abacha, Abdusalami Abubakar, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and the recent returnees to power through the democratic processes. Except of course for some flashes of hope under some of those names, the approach to governance by majority of those leaders was poor and uninspiring to say the least.
We shall assess their bad style of governance in order to ascertain what exactly landed us where we are today. Lets start with Yakubu Gowon. The cluelessness of leadership that we are bandying around all over the place has actually started with him. During his rule, he demonstrated incredible incompetence as the first postwar military leader. He started his rule at critical moment of transition, a point when Nigeria should have taken a proper stock of itself. But that was not to be. Before anything, the regional structures of governance were unquestioningly dismantled, because those structures were thought to be responsible for the disunity and unsavory circumstances that led to the total breakdown of law and order, the Nigerian civil war, its aftermath and even the necessary safeguards to avoid its recurrence. That was also not to be. And since then the country has not really sat down to critically evaluate its failures, and to thoroughly assess what exactly happened to warrant such wanton destruction of millions of lives and property within just a span of three years. As usual, everything was glossed over as if the problems would just disappear. The military had assumed that by merely imposing a unitary structure on the nation all our political problems would be automatically resolved. Never! Once again, the country is witnessing the repeat of similar circumstances that led to Nigerian civil war in the 1960s.
For most of the time that the military were at the helm of our affairs, it has been one tale of woes or the other. It is today very difficult to recollect how any one of those leaders move Nigeria to a desirable state of social growth and development. Instead, the country is dangerously spiraling downhill from their self-serving system of administration. Conscientious Nigerians have for decades been complaining of the repercussions of poor handling of our affairs by incompetent and corrupt leaders at all levels of governance but nobody listened to them. Unfortunately for us all the fears of those critics have now been coming to haunt us. Nigeria is now turned into an illegitimate child of terrible circumstances with no role models or shared values to fall back to when the need arises. As we are groping in the darkness of uncertainties, and as the country slides into a morass of ethno-religious violence, nobody seems to bother about constructive solutions that are clearly bereft of sentiments. From media projections of views and opinions, every one of us would want to force their myopic understanding of issues down the throats of fellow Nigerians.
The perpetuation of military in power has only aggravated the divisions that led to the civil war in the first place. The inability of the military to bring the country together was something that was inherited from colonial administrators right from the days of the system of Indirect Rule that persisted after the amalgamation of Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914. Post-independence era has only accentuated the socio-political, economic and cultural divisions and differences in the country even more. The military naively thought the answer was imposing a unitary system to bring Nigerians together. Again, that was not to be. The long spate of the jackboot approach to power by the military has only subdued the problems that have been filing over the years unattended. If the country should make any meaningful headway something worthwhile has to be done. It was in this situation that Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha surfaced and polluted the political atmosphere in the country some more. The transition to democracy under Babangida in particular, going by the manner in which he destroyed the democratic process after a free and fair election that saw to the emergence of Mashood Abiola, has really set the hand of the clock back for Nigeria. Since then, other sections of Nigeria began to think that the Muslim North was only interested in dominating a power structure that has not been of any benefit to anybody, to even its people, but few elite and their cronies. It was Abacha that singularly reinforced that perception through his dictatorial mien.
Now that we have return to the democratic rule, all those repressed fears are also returning with vengeance. Surprisingly however, we are still pretending that the problems that led to so much acrimony between groups and sections of Nigeria should not be attended to by either the different set of elected officials between 1999 to date or their supporters who would always think it was their turn to do as they wish with Nigeria. Never again should the enemies of the previous occupants of political offices smell power. Even the two instances in which the previous civilian regimes attempted to address our existential problems as a nation through the idea of constitutional conferences were done halfheartedly. The worst of course was the climate of suspicion under which President Goodluck Jonathan organized what he called national conference. That process was not transparent at all. Jonathan’s national confab has merely succeeded in generating mutual suspicion from the stages of conception of the conference right through its logistics, representations, deliberations and recommendations. The only people happy with it were the unalloyed supporters of President Jonathan who thought that his rule presented them with an opportunity to deal with their perceived enemies. Therefore, the outcome of the national confab only left Nigerians more divided than ever.
The coming of President Muhammadu Buhari has also complicated issues some more with the style of his leadership. A lot of Nigerians thought his ascension to presidency under a democratic rule would have ushered in the transformation that all are hankering for but to no avail. The civilian rule of Buhari is proving to be more of the same. Expectations were dashed. Disillusionment has taken over. The change that people expected with his stewardship appears to be not forthcoming. Actually, under Buhari the expectations of those that elected him into power were not met for a number of reasons. Like Jonathan, Buhari has no proper grasp of the complexities of today’s Nigeria. In that sense, Obasanjo was better than his successors even if for wrong reasons. Considering the level of rot in the country, Buhari’s supporters also expected him to hit the ground running. Instead, they are getting wrong signals from him. So far, despite his long years of showing interest to contest elections for the presidential slot to rescue Nigeria from the clutches of marauders, he was apparently not prepared for it. This is perhaps due to his old age and illness. To argue it further, looking at Buhari’s appointments of his cabinet and advisers has convinced me that the man is not prepared to bring about the change he has been clamoring for before he clinches power. It does not also appear that Buhari cares about the performance of those he appointed in cabinet positions. Similarly, those he assembled as his advisers do not also seem to understand their role as advisers. Some of them still think they can handle Nigeria the way they previously handled their local constituencies. The culmination of this dysfunctional administration is the unfolding image of a President who is unprepared for the enormous task ahead of him.
On the whole, Nigeria does not deserve what it is getting from its rulers. Things are so bad that people are no longer sure that the current crops of leaders have the capacity to address pressing challenges in the country. Nigeria is so fragmented to the extent that the prism of ethnicity and religion appear to be the only analytical categories that people are deploying in even trying to understand what is happening. Meanwhile, the political class is continuing to have a field day messing up the country. Is there a way out?
