Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the Lead City University, Ibadan, Tunde Oseni, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the ongoing constitution amendment and the crisis in the governing All Progressives Congress (APC), warning of dire consequences if the party is not careful.
Tinubu will be inheriting a country that is probably more divided than it used to be, an economy that is on its knees, a country in which insecurity has festered. What areas do you think the new president should concentrate upon to bring immediate relief to Nigeria and Nigerians and solve some of the problems?
I think firstly we have to recognise the reality that things were not as this rosy when we had the military in terms of human rights now. I want us to look at democracy from 1999 till today. We cannot say it has been all negative. I think there have been some positive parts of it, human rights, for instance and of course that is still debatable. But at least largely speaking, we have got it right in terms of human right records and in the area of economic expansion in terms of the number of people going into entrepreneurship and people owning their businesses.
There are three key issues President Muhammadu Buhari promised he would improve upon namely security, economy and fight against corruption. If we rate Buhari on the three criteria, he can barely get a pass mark because security has not really improved the way people want it. Maybe some progress has been made in terms of Boko Haram or organised terrorism. But in terms of internal security and people being able to sleep with their eyes closed in their own homes without fear of armed robbery or kidnapping, things have not improved. In terms of the economy, there has not really been an improvement too. But we have to put this in perspective that the economic crisis in Nigeria is not unique to Nigeria because globally speaking, whether you talk about the US, UK, Canada and other developed countries, COVID-19 did a lot of damage to global economy and this also affected national economies, if we can put it that way. But that does not mean we can excuse a national government from improving its own economy because whereas other countries are facing similar problems, they are taking practical steps to come out the COVID-19-induced economic hardship. So, in terms of economy too, President Buhari has not done much. But I think if we want to be fair, we can see some improvement in terms of some specific infrastructure, particularly in the rail sector and construction of bridges including the Second Niger Bridge and the environment has also been relatively speaking conducive for some companies to come up. A perfect example is the Dangote refinery that has just been launched. We could have been doing better in agriculture if more attention had been paid to it in the last eight years. We can say the microeconomic variables are not that favourable to Nigerians, but there has been some expansion, though expansion does not mean growth and even when you grow, you have to develop too.
In terms of corruption, it is debatable and subjective to see whether President Buhari has curbed corruption or not. The most general criterion to look into that is the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International. With that one, we discovered that Nigeria has not really done much in terms of fighting corruption. But it is corruption perception and of course perception could be a function of reality or it may not actually tell us who is actually corrupt. When we say a country is corrupt, we are actually talking about government. But what about the non-governmental structures, the banks, those in the private sector? Are they also not culpable? Are they not the ones fuelling and encouraging corruption in the public sector? I think on a scale on security, things have not really improved. In terms of economy, maybe average and in corruption perception too, it is average. Nevertheless, we should give credit to the Buhari administration in terms of some of the infrastructure that he was able to put in place. Probably because he is a retired General and so his idea of economic principles or policies may not be that fantastic. If he had assembled a better team, he should have listened to that team. I know some individuals in his economic team are very sound. Maybe some of the policies they proposed were not attractive to him or maybe he did not implement them. The government of Buhari is not a failure, though in relative terms it has not improved the lives of Nigerians the way we expected.
On the incoming administration of Senator Bola Tinubu, I want us to look at the idea of Nigeria being more divided than ever from the perspective that we just had a presidential and all over the world, presidential elections are divisive naturally along all cleavages of ethnicity, race or region or religion. Even when Barrack Obama won particularly his second term, as popular as he was, some individuals in some states in the US were even calling for secession from the country. It was that divisive in the US. Despite the fact that the UK does not do a presidential system, Scotland has been saying it wants to separate from the UK. So, no country is fully united because human beings are always asking for more freedom and good things of life. The government in power is always the scapegoat because it is responsible, security and development of the people. Since 1979, we have not really had an election that would give us ethnic champions so to speak as we had in the 2023 elections. In APC, we had a Yoruba as candidate, in PDP, a Fulani man and in the Labour Party, an Igbo man as presidential candidate.
So, the ethnic cleavages were blown up and it was like we had the [Shehu] Shagari-[Chief Obafemi] Awolowo-[Nnamdi] Azikiwe kind of thing. It was a repetition of history.
As for the incoming president, winning an election is not enough. He now has to re-unite or unify the country. In doing that, he has to make sure he has a government that is seen to be fair to all. Some people call it government of national unity. We can give it any name, but that government has to be seen to be fair representative of our diversity, including ethnicity, religion and region because those are the three things that divide Nigerians. The centrifugal forces that divide Nigeria have been there since 1914 when we had the amalgamation. So, nobody can just wish the away like that because they are natural entities. But what we can do is to use policies and politics to reduce the negative implications and consequences of such cleavages. It is natural, for instance, that the next Senate President has to be a Christian. We are not saying the Muslims are not good enough, but we have a president and a vice-president that are both Muslims and that issue has been controversial. It will be fair also that the Senate President comes from the South because the outgoing one is from the North. So, we need a government that can unify the country.
Secondly, we need a government that will quickly deflate people’s fears in terms of how secured they are. Security should be the number one thing because you can only govern a secure people anyway. So, he needs a security architecture that is holistic. It is not all about physical security alone. Those who threaten other people also have insecurity. Some of them have food insecurity, human insecurity issues, financial security and so on. So, he needs to look at the whole security architecture of the country and see how he can quickly, though it may take a year or two. He needs to bring the governors and the security agencies together. If it is possible, he should appoint those he knows can work more effectively than those who are there now. Some research has shown that some individuals like insecurity because that solved their own financial insecurity. For instance, some think the fight against terrorism has become an industry and therefore there is no way you can actually tackle insecurity without first tackling the corruption in the sector.
But the most important thing the incoming president should do is that we need what I call developmental decentralization because much of the crisis and disunity that we have seen has been as a result of over concentralisation of power in Abuja, thinking that everything is about the president and what happens at the centre. When we over-centralised power, we remove attention from the local realities. Therefore, the people will not be able to hold their governors, house of assembly members and local government chairmen, where they are allowed for function, to account. So, everything will just be at the centre which will be overwhelmed and the president will just be micro-managing. Therefore, no development will percolate to the various parts of the country. So, we need to decentralize for development. This developmental decentralization can take the form of restructuring which means we should give more powers and responsibility to the state governors.
Another aspect I think we can use is not necessarily regionalism, but regionalization. What do I mean by that? In the South-West for instance, we need to use the DAWN Commission. So, if we have a DAWN that is funded very well by the governors of the South-West, and we have the same thing in other five zones and we able to concentrate effort at the regional level, there will be healthy rivalry which happened during the Awolowo era. Of course, that one was a constitutional regional government. But this one I am proposing is one of development system of government which can help us. This way, we will not over-centralise the responsibilities and power and money. The outgoing Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, Festus Keyamo, was saying his own position was not constitutional and some people asked him why he took the position. The truth of the matter is that there are some issues in the constitution that have to be taken care of. The most important for me is how to decentralize governance and make sure governance and development percolate and everything does not just hover around the centre. If the incoming president continues with his intellectual ideological orientation of true federalism that should not be difficult because he has always been a federalist.
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