Ours is supposed to be a human society. An enclave of living beings imbued with intelligence and so expected to be a thinking environment. But from the look of things it would seem we are not a thinking people. The seal of poor governance culture is on every aspect of what we do. We know this much and many have had to blame religion, ethnicity and others, but we hardly give attention to unserious leadership class. This is different from mediocre leadership group. This about a leadership class that is equipped and knows what to do, and which in fact begins well but midway deviates to something totally unnecessary and even unwanted. This trend has been with us, but in recent times it is gaining unprecedented notoriety following frequency in occurrence. Before I reel out some of the events and leave you the reader to ponder over them and reach your conclusions too, I take privilege to recount a story I told on this page few weeks back.
I was in Israel in at the head of a delegation. We arrived Tel Aviv airport around four O’clock in the morning; next was going through immigration formalities. Doing so provided opportunity for a very young Israeli security officer to engage me. “Where are you people coming from?” he tried to find out. “Nigeria” I blotted out with a tinge of pride. “Very disorganized, poor country” was his next interjection. I said that can’t be true, ‘We produce oil in huge quantity and we are doing very well’ I retorted. The fine gentleman began to laugh, his voice pitch high enough to attract attention of others standing near.
The young man began to lecture me and that was a surprise when we take note of the kind of elements we recruit into our forces and their obvious limited knowledge on world affairs. “You don’t assess a country by income, high income is great but creative deployment of the resources to critical sectors to stimulate healthy society is greatest.” I told him we do that, but he never wasted time to reply, “If you do then it is not done in a creative way, hence you don’t have the expected results, you people have money but less than 20 per cent of the population is rich, they have all the money while the rest of the population is stranded; your infrastructure is comatose, meaning something is terribly wrong. I can tell you one of such – your oil wells are in the hands of individuals; that shouldn’t be. In reality doesn’t it look terrible or even scary? Do your leaders appreciate the level of distortions such an arrangement releases on the larger society?”
At this point I hadn’t a good answer; it was a jab to the chin. Such blows send acclaimed boxers straight down to the floor. It was something near an uppercut. Till today even to the point of you reading this I don’t know why individuals own our oil wells. I don’t understand the nature of this kind of capitalism. If you have an answer let me know and I pledge to pass it on. Few days back, President Muhammadu Buhari met with billionaires. A critical review showed they all have their roots in oil business. In fact that is their mainstay, one or two from the lot added oil business commerce; none is into critical productive endeavours. Cement and sugar are not in the category of lifters of backward societies. If any still wonder why we have remained dependent, now you know one interesting reason: we have a leadership class busy creating “unproductive” rich men and women.
The system is bad, we have known this much for decades and it is retarding progress. The surprise is, it is thriving because it is encouraged by a leadership class that will lean on it to survive unproductive retirement years. Nothing more, nothing less! It is a system borne out of conquerors mentality, spoils of war are hardly preserved or nurtured, they are shared. All our billionaires move and act in ways suggestive they have more money than they have need for; one of them was very bold to tell us he has much money, spending has become a challenge. This is the kind of vituperations you get when recklessness has become a norm and people benefit from the chaos it introduces. Nigerians don’t know how much tax the billionaire in question pays or better still the productive endeavours he is into all we know is that he is very rich.
Developed nations made mistakes and that much history has recorded. A friend said to me few weeks ago, the difference between us and those societies is focus and determination. Developed societies had and still have this attitude of never letting a mistake reoccur a second time. This is not the case with us, our leadership do not only encourage a repeat of the ugly and divisive, they make sure it comes in a more dangerous dimension the next time. The way we have managed crude oil exploration, sales and accountability has not been without huge concerns for decades. Our omissions each passing day throw up negative infusions into our development processes, complicating our various challenges. This alone should constrain us to be on our best thinking mode whenever correctional efforts are in motion, but every effort to fix errors seem to pull the worst from our leaders. It took all of 11 years to produce remedial measures for the oil sector, but less than a year to get a law to establish the North East Rehabilitation Commission which is mainly about spending, yet critical as the oil sector is those who chose to pursue change couldn’t make a great job of it especially in the areas that should matter most.
Now in the Petroleum Industry Bill just passed, our legislators want to give host oil communities five per cent of gains and 30 per cent to what they styled “frontier” states which they think might have oil deposits. The fund will be dedicated to the search for new oil deposits. See the wickedness based on vicious instincts. At the time bonding of our society should be uppermost in the minds all, our leaders especially those with responsibility to push out this bill were unable to clearly tell us which zones constitute frontier basin zones and why prospecting for new oil wells should be a top priority at time the economy is in shambles. How come they couldn’t come very clear with definition of host community?
They told us host community is where oil exploration currently goes on, those likely to suffer consequences of oil exploration or those having oil facilities. By this definition nearly every state in Nigeria is now an oil producing community because it is either the community harbours a refinery or has petroleum pipelines running through it. This is taking ethnic politics to ridiculous level; it is very unfortunate to note that those who gathered and came out with these positions are those who never cease chanting that the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable.
We have been spending money since we became independent searching for oil in arid region not because in real economic terms it is the best policy, it has to be done as an economic equalization project. ‘The South is giving us so much concern because oil is domiciled in their area, so let’s find ours’ This is the illogic that has driven the skewed dream all this while. While the country had money such a costly gamble could be tolerated but at this point same leaders have ran down the society to the point of borrowing to eat, what is the sense in it? Why would giving the host community enough money be such a contentious matter? It is happening because there is no vision, whims and caprices of individuals and groups have become state policies. We can see where this disposition has left all of us. Only butchers in leadership won’t be terrified of what they see.
Finally, the Electoral Act! Bane of bad society, the kind we are in is lack of quality leadership. Recently, in a forum they made so much issue of money, religion, ethnicity, nasty political patterns, my response was simple: allow all tendencies play on but let’s have a sanctity of the electoral process, let the people’s sovereignty not be tampered with in anyway. When it is time for elections the people definitely know what they want. What makes democracy a change agent is the ability to change leadership personnel,. We are down because we allowed cogs in the democratic wheels.
Now that we have opportunity to effect changes in that regard and move towards credible polls, our legislators moved in a manner suggestive they know credible polls is an idea whose time has come, all this while they on to a great dance but at the time it mattered most they returned to their old attitude. They want electronic transfer of election results out of our polls, at a time we should have gone far beyond this level to having electronic voting system in place. Holding the rest of the society back in the hope that a small clique would benefit has been there with us and the truth is, it has not offered us any good, rather it has damaged the pillars on which our society was built. The effect is going beyond destruction of foundation to threatening to eat everybody up.
We have a responsibility to put a halt to such machinations that haven’t helped anyone so far. Nigeria has potential to offer all constituents what they desire, what has come between it and the desire is poor leadership. Poor leadership has thrived because good men who are by far higher in number chose to leave the leadership to second rate leadership cadre. This omission is proving too costly on all terms. It should be reversed. Truth, justice and equity must be returned or we continue to reap instability which currently plagues the land with a capacity to upgrade to something more terrible.