Across the country today, life has become nasty and brutish. Insecurity pervades and inheres every space. From North to South, bandits and terrorists hold sway. Entire communities and, in some cases, local council areas, are effectively in the hands of felons. The military, hobbled by internal security engagements, is struggling to find reasonable solutions to the persisting orgies of violence carried out by Boko Haram, bandits and nomadic herdsmen. On its part, the Nigeria Police Force, circumscribed by its own internal contradictions – widespread indiscipline, corruption and warped values – cannot arrest the steady slide in its performance, and has no tools of civility with which to repair its battered image and alter the negative emotions that it evokes in the average citizen.
Politically and economically, the country wobbles, due in large part to governance irresponsibility. The country has the largest number of out-of-school children in the world and, worse still, is the global capital of poverty. The quality of life available to the average Nigerian is abysmally low: power supply remains poor and social infrastructure is either woefully inadequate or in some cases non-existent. Nigeria has no railway structure that anyone can be proud of: speaking of underground railways sounds like committing treason. Essentially, the country manufactures nothing, except perhaps a rapacious ruling class adept at committing economic brigandage. Across the country, ungoverned spaces are increasing and ethnic, religious and partisan fissures are widening by the day.
From the federal to state and local government levels, the country is currently under the siege of misfits in political office. Brigands, certificate forgers and ethnic warriors reign supreme. The quality of public speech is suspect and public policy is geared towards protecting the interests of those who buy their way into power, committing barefaced electoral frauds and violence. Those entrusted with power are, with only a few exceptions, guilty of treasonous abdication of responsibility.
There is, therefore, no better time than the moment to tinker not only with the warped structure that has enabled the current anomie but also the entire concept of governance itself as well as the leadership recruitment process. It is time for national soul searching; it is time for solemn assemblies at all levels of governance, and among the three arms of government. On current evidence, the three arms of government exist only to further the parochial interests and proclivities of those who inhabit them, not to ensure good governance and the happiness and prosperity of all Nigerians. No arm of government has fulfilled its raison d’etre. There seems to be a grand conspiracy among members of the three arms to set the country backwards.
By October 1 this year, Nigeria would have attained 60 years of independent nationhood. Whatever it has achieved in all those years, the point cannot be missed that it has not achieved the dreams that birthed it. There is nothing shameful in going back to study the details of those dreams and aspirations. The country must have a constitution that works, a leadership that has the necessary vision, a vibrant civil society and a forward-looking media and academia committed to the task of social re-engineering. It is time for a new order.