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Political Prospects And Challenges

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By Salihu Lukman

Divide and rule is by far the dominant strategy in Nigeria’s contemporary politics. It thrives on zoning and rotation of political offices with aspiring candidates for leadership at all levels of government and society cheaply brandishing their religious and ethnic credentials over any other qualification. Admittedly, in terms of educational qualifications, virtually all aspirants meet the minimum constitutional requirement. Although we have some cases whereby leaders are found to have presented wrong qualifications, often because of some manifestation of inferiority complex which made our aspirants and even so-called leaders to claim advanced educational qualifications. And given our current national pathetic proclivity for titles, some leaders have also commercially acquired educational titles such as Doctor and even B.Sc and M.Sc certificates from doubtful sources. On the whole, however, it can be argued that predominantly our political leaders are more driven by ethnic and religious sentiments and hardly governing our nation and society based on knowledge and commitment to ensure that Nigerian citizens overcome challenges of survival and the quest for improved livelihood.

Thus, the big issue is whether such knowledge acquired through formal educational, which so-called qualifications come with, suggest competence and capacity to perform leadership tasks as required by the offices being aspired. Aside competence, there is also the demand for leadership vision and capacity to prioritise and take the right decisions. Ahead of all these is the critical leadership responsibility of coordinating and managing human relations in its broad context, which requires not just friendly dispositions but being open and accessible to all irrespective of differences. These are requirements that endear leaders and societies to citizens even beyond their immediate domain and are often part of the attractions that invites other non-residents to explore opportunities in communities other than their own.

A quick assessment of developments in Nigeria, at all levels since the mid 1990s, will highlight remarkable departure and erosion of especially leadership values. At all levels of Nigerian society, standards have crashed and leadership requirements have been reduced to purely material (money) wellbeing. Anyone with money can buy his/her way to power at all levels, be it local government, state, federal government and even nongovernmental organisations. In the circumstance, people with poor knowledge, without any vision, lacking of any priority and often of doubtful integrity are vested with leadership responsibility. Citizens are coerced, blackmailed or hoodwinked to support so-called leaders based on primordial sentiments, with our leaders hardly challenged to win support of other Nigerians beyond their immediate narrow support base, often limited to their birth places, local governments, senatorial district, states, geo-political zone and hardly the nation as a whole.

Ethnic and religious factors have therefore emerged today as perhaps the most defining factors for contest for leadership positions in the country. As a result, there are incidences whereby leaders are produced with very narrow and parochial perception of their constituencies. In many cases, they even emerged just based on the endorsements of sections and few members. Even the practice of campaigns using posters, handbills and media hardly takes place, and if it does, it is reduced to mere symbolism. It is just simply a case of arrogance and contemptuous disrespect of the support of other sections and citizens other than so-called birth places, local governments, senatorial districts, states and geo-political zones.

This practice is widespread in many of our political institutions today. A visit to many seats of governments at all levels is enough to make any genuine Nigerian sick. Perhaps, it can be argued that this has been with us as a nation since independence. In some ways, it is an acceptable norm and little or nothing can be done about it. Yet, to the extent that it projects us as a fractured nation and promotes primordial hatred and anger, it constitutes a major national problem. How can we address this big national problem? Is there any possibility, however remote, that Nigeria can produce a leader who is not just a sectional leader? Or, is there anything that can be done to transform any of our leaders today from being narrowly perceived as a sectional leader to a national leader? By the way, what is the prospect that Nigeria’s problems can be solved by producing a national leader as opposed to sectional leaders? Anyway, what is wrong with sectional leaders? Have they not been serving their people? Do we even have leaders?

Our notion of leadership and assessment of their relevance to societal problems, in every respect, will influence our judgement with respect to these questions. To the extent that leadership is about having unregulated and unaccountable access to public resources, competition for leadership will continue to be driven by sentiments. Once leadership is blind to the issue of nurturing good human relations, our societies and nation will be highly vulnerable to reckless and crazy management of governmental and non-governmental affairs. So long as competition for leadership in our society and nation is reduced to our identity and the hegemonic drive for dominating others, knowledge and the challenge of environmental control will be a distant responsibility, if at all.

Without any doubt, if we want to survive as a nation, we must change our ways of producing leaders in every facet of our national life as Nigerians. We need a leader that is driven by knowledge, aspiration to unite our people across religion, ethnicity and all other differences, burning desire to reposition our society based on the capacity of citizens to discover their talents, respecting the values of the human person over and above any other thing and therefore recognising that the most fundamental asset of our nation is its citizens and to that extent not perceiving citizens as parasitic and the biggest liability.

How can this be done given a situation where the most important source of government revenue is the oil sector, which is a sector where government really don’t need the participation of citizens to be able to realise revenue? Why should government and our leaders respect citizens when in truth all they need is OPEC, US government, EU and other oil trading partners to be able to realise all the revenue needed to run government? With oil exploration and extraction being the direct responsibility of the Federal Government on account of which our states and local governments enjoyed huge revenue from the federation account for almost doing nothing in the process of revenue generation, why should the Federal Government not dictate to states and local governments? How can we be making any claims to federalism, when in fact our governance reality is anything but federal?

At the root of our leadership problems are so many issues that require urgent attention. It is beyond simply focusing on the individual. If the truth is to be told, government as oriented today is the source of our leadership problems. It is a situation that is known to virtually every Nigerian. Unfortunately, at best, almost every Nigerian only lament about it and conclude that nothing can be done to change it. This has given rise to a situation whereby all our governments are simply on auto pilot just facilitating importation and consumption with virtually the only production taking place being crude oil extraction.

This is a matter that calls for organised political initiatives based on selflessness and patriotic disposition. Unfortunately, most of our political actors are more driven by personal aspiration which weakened their capacity to develop the needed group approach. On account of personal aspirations, most of our political leaders are very defensive and susceptible to narrow and parochial approaches. With revenue given, all they need to worry about is not citizens’ contributions especially given zero correlation between government revenue and economic reality of citizens. All they need to worry about is perhaps their capacity to dominate citizens, which in the midst of high poverty levels money has become the main factor. The challenge therefore before anyone interested in addressing problems of leadership in Nigeria will be to initiate strategic approaches of organising Nigerian citizens around the values of re-inventing communal spirits of mobilisation and pulling resources together to drive initiative.

This is a critical rescue factor to pull Nigeria out of all the calamities facing the nation with all its varied manifestation. It is a factor that required everyone genuinely interested in moving Nigeria forward as a nation to submit and subordinate himself/herself to. This will be far more effective if driven by a superior political organisation such as a political party. The reason being that a superior political organisation would have the advantage of both legal and moral ambiance, which would engender not just commitment regarding leadership conduct by individuals but also prescribe orderly processes of nurturing citizens who subscribe to new conduct, including those of our leaders based on the need to create new outcomes that may perhaps place more premium on the welfare of citizens. Accordingly, issues of tax and how it translate into strong revenue sources for governments at all levels could then create a positive correlation between citizens welfare and governance at all levels.

Of course against the background of deep national frustration, there is often the temptation to reduce these issues to simple leadership change focusing on personalities. In today’s reality it is producing a strong clamour against the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. Being in power, especially at federal level since 1999, such clamour would not be without justification. In fact, with rising oil revenue and at the same time geometric rise in poverty levels, the clamour against PDP is very legitimate. However, Nigerians, especially opposition politicians, need to be very clear that simply changing individual leaders without clear governance programmes to address the fundamentals that make citizens inconsequential will not move our nation forward. In fact, from the experiences of some of our state governments between 1999 and today where new leaders emerged as state Governors after elections but end up doing worse than the PDP government they defeated, is an indication that the problem goes beyond individuals.

In a sense, a combination of programmes and good mobilisational strategies is what is needed. Endearing programmes and unifying strategy – a strategy that strongly unites Nigerians – is what is needed to defeat PDP and guarantee that such a defeat would produce new governance reality founded on respect for the contributions of citizens. This is largely because the PDP has designed power architecture for the country around divisive politics in the name of zoning and rotation and so far, programmes implemented by PDP are anchored with outright disregard to citizens. Once opposition politicians relate to Nigerian politics based on PDP power architecture, it will almost be impossible to defeat PDP. If that happens, it will purely amount to Pyrrhic victory and will hardly be capable of changing the welfare conditions of Nigerians.

This is where our opposition parties working to produce All Progressive Congress, APC, need to concentrate in producing new power architecture. Somehow, it would appear that either that the PDP public relations machinery is at its best and is succeeding to force the hands of our opposition political leaders to limit their objective to producing so-called individual leaders or that actually our opposition political leaders have not realised the full weight of responsibility facing them and to that extent, they are about to squander golden historic opportunity by limiting the problems of Nigeria to emergence of new leaders. Be that as it may, the issue before APC at this stage is to stimulate a national commitment to produce new power architecture for the country. Such new power architecture should be oriented to unite Nigerians, promote and proliferate competitive activities and in the process throw up leaders at different levels of party organisations and society through innovative applications of democratic principles.

As much as personal attributes are important, it must not be projected in such a way as to suggest primacy of the individual. In some ways, corresponding initiatives from citizens with good interface with our political structures, in this case, APC will be a strong catalyst to enable our opposition politicians meet this national expectation. Instead of folding our arms as citizens and waiting for our opposition politicians to rollout APC with all the risk factors of modelling it in the image of PDP, Nigerian patriots need to think more strategically and initiate corresponding political actions that would naturally compel a strong relationship and influence between APC and organised interests in the country. Absence of such initiative has the undesirable potential of pushing APC to adopt the same divisive governance architecture as PDP and in the process increased the probability of PDP remaining in power at all levels of government in Nigeria, way beyond 2015. Should that happen, both APC leaders and patriotic Nigerians should bear responsibility.

The choice is both for APC as well as for all Nigerians to make!

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Posted in Nigeria News. A DisNaija.Com network.

Source: PM News

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Kano Transfers Over 1,000 Almajiris To Different States Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic

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The Kano State Government on Saturday said it has transferred 1,098 ‘almajiris’ to different states of the country.

The commissioner for local government, Murtala Garo, disclosed this while presenting a report before the state’s task force on COVID-19 at the government house, Kano.

Almajiris are children who are supposed to be learning Islamic studies while living with their Islamic teachers. Majority of them, however, end up begging on the streets of Northern Nigeria. They constitute a large number of Nigeria’s over 10 million out-of-school children.

Mr Garo said the Kano government transported 419 almajiris to Katsina, 524 to Jigawa and 155 to Kaduna. He said all of them tested negative for coronavirus before leaving the Kano State.

Despite the coronavirus test done in Kano for the almajiris, the Jigawa government earlier said it would quarantine for two weeks all the almajiris that recently arrived from Kano.

Mr Garo said another 100 almajiris scheduled to be taken to Bauchi State also tested negative to COVID-19.

In a remark, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje said the COVID-19 situation in Kano was getting worse. He appealed for a collaborative effort to curtail the spread of the virus in the state.

Mr Ganduje, who commended residents for complying with the lockdown imposed in the state, said the decision was taken to halt the spread of the virus.

Kano State, as of Saturday night, has 77 coronavirus cases, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

The decision to transfer the Kano almajiris is part of the agreement reached between Northern governors that almajiris in each state be transferred to their states of origin.

However, even before the latest agreement by the governors, the Kano government had been transferring almajiris to other states and neighbouring countries after it banned street begging in the state, most populous in Northern Nigeria.

Despite the transfers, however, no concrete step has been taken to ensure such children do not return to Kano streets as there is freedom of movement across Nigeria although interstate travel was recently banned to check the spread of the coronavirus.

 

Sourced From: Premium Times Nigeria

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COVID-19: ‘Bakassi Boys’ Foil Attempt To Smuggle 24 Women Into Abia In Container

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By Ugochukwu Alaribe

Operatives of the Abia State Vigilante Service, AVS, popularly known as ‘Bakassi Boys’ have arrested 24 market women hidden in a container truck, at Ekwereazu Ngwa, the boundary community between Abia and Akwa Ibom states.

The market women, said to be  from Akwa Ibom State, were on their way to Aba, when they were arrested with the truck driver and two of his conductors for violating the lockdown order by the state government.

Driver of the truck, Moses Asuquo, claimed he was going to Aba to purchase stock fish, but decided to assist the market women, because they were stranded.

A vigilante source told Sunday Vanguard that the vehicle was impounded while the market women were sent back to Akwa Ibom State.

Commissioner for Home Land Security, Prince Dan Okoli, who confirmed the incident, said that  smuggling of people into the state poses great threat to the state government’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID- 19.

 

Sourced From: Vanguard News

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Nigeria News

Woman Kills Her Maid Over Salary Request

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Operatives of the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Yaba of the Lagos State police command have arrested one Mrs Nene Steve for allegedly killing her maid, Joy Adole

The maid was allegedly beaten to death by Nene for requesting for her salary at their residence located at 18, Ogundola Street, Bariga area in Lagos.

Narrating the incident, Philips Ejeh, an elder brother to the deceased said that he was sad when they informed him that his sister was beaten to death.

He explained that the deceased was an indigene of Benue State brought to Lagos through an agent and started working with her as a maid  in January 2020.

‘’She reported that her boss refused to pay her and anytime she asked for her salary she will start beating her.

She was making an attempt to leave the place but due to the total lockdown she remained there until Sunday when her boss said she caught her stealing noodles and this led to her serious beating and death,’’ Ejeh said.

He called on Lagos State Government and well- meaning people in the country to help them in getting justice for the victim.

The police spokesman, Bala Elkana, stated that the woman and her husband came to Bariga Police  Station to a report that their house girl had committed suicide.

Detectives were said to have visited the house and suspected foul play with the position of the rope and bruises all over the body which confirmed that the girl had been tortured to death and the boss decided to hang up the girl to make it look like suicide.

He said: “The police moved on with their investigation and found a lot of sign of violence on her body that she has been tortured before a rope was put on her neck.’’

He added that the police removed the corpse and deposited it in the mortuary for autopsy to further ascertain the cause of the death.

Elkana said the matter has been transferred from Bariga police station to Panti for further investigation while the couple have been arrested and will be charged to court.

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Boko Haram Attacks: Buhari Summons Urgent Meeting Of Service Chiefs

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President Buhari and the Service Chiefs in a meeting. (File photo)

Ostensibly alarmed by the latest killings of dozens of soldiers by Boko Haram insurgents, President Muhammadu Buhari has summoned an urgent meeting of Service Chiefs to find ways to stop the trend. 

He has also dispatched the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali, to the neighbouring Republic of Chad for an urgent meeting with President Idris Deby and his defence counterpart. 

Knowledgeable sources said in Abuja on Friday that the president is worried by on the deterioration of security situation on the Nigeria – Chad Border that has led to the recently increased Boko Haram terrorism in the area.

The sources which did not want to be named in Abuja said: “Nigeria has a Chad  problem in the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) put together to secure the Lake Chad basin areas and repeal the Boko Haram terrorist attacks against all the countries neighbouring the Lake.”

The sources noted that Chad is believed to be having their own internal security challenges and this has reportedly led to their pulling away their own troops manning their own border around Lake Chad,  saying: “That lacuna is being exploited by the Boko Haram terrorists, who go in and out of Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon to launch terrorist acts.  This is a clear illustration of the fact that terrorism is beyond national borders.”

When contacted, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, confirmed that the Defence Minister is going to Chad but said he is unaware of the purpose. 

Meanwhile, the military authorities are said to be in the process of identifying the families of the latest victims with a view to making contact with them. 

Credible sources revealed that it is the reason the president is yet to make any pronouncement on the matter. 

“The President has called an urgent meeting with the Service Chiefs, as well as the fact that families of the latest victims of the Boko Haram are being identified and contacts made before a government pronouncement on the tragic attacks. This, it is understood, is the reason for the silence of the government over the incident,” the source said. 

 

Sourced From: Tribune

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