By George Okunfua
Only the management of The Sun Newspapers knows the reasons this year’s award was brought forward to share a border with the deadline for the purchase of the expression of interest and nomination forms of political parties for the 2023 general election. If it is mere coincidence, it hangs a tale on the nation that is in a flux.
So many things are happening but the upbeat in political activities is relatively drowning the swell of the inclement hanging over the horizon. The masses are doom scrolled already and are beginning to be desensitized to the horrors of everyday killings and kidnappings. No doubt, The Sun has established a huge integrity over its awards and this year’s is no different. But at this material time, the event additionally offers an aside to the heavily burdened national consciousness, as top politicians, presidential hopefuls among them, line up for trophies.
David Umahi, Bala Mohammed, Hope Uzodimma, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Rotimi Amaechi, Chris Ngige, Ahmed Lawan, Musa Kwankwaso and others. Who knows, one of them may end up leading the nation out of its present woes.
Saturday, May 7, 2022, will, therefore, be a theatre of escape from the monotony of relentless tragedies for many wearied Nigerians who will be glued to the live broadcast. If the national grid decides to collapse that day and increase the pressure on the black market that powers I-better-pass-my-neighbour in many homes, the social media is there to fill the gap.
The motto of The Sun newspaper is “the Voice of the Nation” and it has indeed played that role. How wonderful if one of the persons walking up the dais will be the one to restore voice to the voiceless that constitute the national majority. The publisher of The Sun, Senator Orji Kalu, lest I forget, is also a presidential aspirant. Memories fade so fast.
On the October 1, 2002, Independence anniversary live broadcast of the then must-watch Kaakaki morning show, on Africa Independent Television (AIT) Zikist and foremost nationalist, M.C.K. Ajuluchukwu, said Orji Kalu was the only governor in the South East that had the vision of the late Premier of the Eastern Region, M.I. Okpara. Orji is not receiving The Sun award. It will be immoral, hence this angle to my piece ends here but not without adding that the New Telegraph, which he also publishes, has a motto, “Sanctity of truth,” that provides the seminal line to the rest of this piece.
Truth-telling is Nigeria’s major problem. The land is replete with deceitful leaders, paying lip service to nation-building. Hypocrisy, truth’s bitter enemy, is the bane of Nigeria. Even though politics is an algorithm of complex calculations, a game, how long shall the nation be bound to pretenses and still hope for the good of the greatest number? Nations that are incapable of truth can’t learn from the past, while social bonds in composite diversity like ours are broken, setting the people against themselves. This is where we are in Nigeria, hobbled by centrifugal concerns that fix the nation on the book end. We need a different leader, one who can confront the realities and free the nation from the disintegrative shackles of ages fuelling economic doldrums. Nigeria needs a courageous leader with cosmopolitan values, unyielding to provincial considerations. It needs a leader who can provide for the nation a deep mine of experience to checkmate countless flaws that hem progress. Then the uncommon patriotism, strong belief that Nigeria can work for all her people.
We need someone not bugged down by the narrowness of expertise or competence in one area but a generalist who must have a fair knowledge of every sector, a jack of all trades, if you like, the reason being that Nigeria is yet to develop strong institutions.
Of all in the presidential race, none comes close to these revolutionary examples than Senator Chris Ngige and I will explain, starting with courage and patriotism.
There is no better way to express strong support for fatherland than exemplify such like Ngige has done with his three children who graduated from Nigerian public schools with sons and daughters of the poor. Ngige knew the value of the Executive Orders 3 and 5 on backward integration of human resources long before the government he serves ever mooted it. It is this same patriotism imbued with courage that saw him defeat the moral foes of democracy, liberate and lay a new foundation for Anambra State. Even though this choice on the side of the people would later make him lose his seat as governor, he didn’t mind. The same patriotism made Ngige rise beyond the corrosive politics of ethnicity to ensure that the headship of the five parastatals in his ministry is evenly shared among geographical zones, contrary to what obtains in most ministries. Like Zik, whose discipleship he confesses, he is a firm believer in one Nigeria, hence has not disguised strong disapproval for the violent trend of agitation in his South East zone. As governor many years ago, he effectively dialogued and doused the resurgent MASSOB, even reforming part of its ranks into the formidable Anambra Vigilante Group, through a law enacted by the State Assembly. The same act of courage and honest leadership would save the nation thousands of jobs when Ngige stopped the unilateral redundancy declared by banks and financial institutions in 2016. Courageously, too, he engaged the oil majors and equally saved jobs in thousands. This same virtue forced him break the linear cesspool of corruption in the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, and moved it from an agency that could not pay salaries in 2016/2017 to one that could save over N18 billion as of December 2021. Such is also behind that quality advisory he made available to the President, ensuring that government did not downsize its workforce despite two regimes of recession.
Ngige is known for creating new ways. He changed his ministry from a mere dispute resolution centre without capital vote to one creating new skills centres, rehabilitating old ones and using its new position in the ILO governing body, where it was absent for a decade, to influence expertise in job creation, skills acquisition and labour laws that would have ordinarily taken the nation millions of dollars in human capital training.
Quietly, also, he is shifting national emphasis from white-collar jobs to the abundant opportunities in the blue-collar world. He did set such new ways in Anambra when he initiated the return of 56 schools to the missions in 2006, halted the general strike that kept doctors, teachers and students at home for eight and 12 months, respectively, issued an Executive Order through which salaries and pensions were placed on first-line charge and built a phenomenal road network that has defied elements for close to two decades. A foresighted problem solver, his ministry has resolved 1,683 trade disputes and hemmed the nation from sliding to industrial brouhaha, which, alongside insecurity, would have brought the doomsday prediction of disintegration nearer.
Interestingly, no system can work, if the leader has no innate sense of honour and duty. If a leader is not convinced that bounding over a wall for illegality is outside the mores of good governance, no sophistication of that system can stop him. Ngige exemplified this all through his public life, demonstrating that he can successfully lead. In spite, the warped ethical relativism, which politicians, especially from the North, have brought into the time-honoured zoning formula, already accepted as a practice and complemented by the federal character provisions in the 1999 Constitution, is shoring up the Dude’s Law of Duality that, of two possible events, only the undesirable one often happens. With the “harsh pebbles and nails,” according to Bishop Hassan Kukah, already thrown the way of a President of South East extraction, the reality of Dude’s Law stares one in the face. Power to hurt, they say, is bargaining muscle, but weaponizing a chink on one leg of a tripod may see the remaining two crumble under the weight of an unbalanced structure. And that’s the reality we have to face.
•Okunfua, retired director of occupational safety and health, Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, writes from Benin, Edo State