Portrait of the Nigerian politician

The average Nigerian politician cuts an interesting picture.

First, he sounds religious and regularly brings up the name of God in his discourse, but deep down; he is very superstitious, in fact, very fetish. The faith he professes does not matter, his faith is actually in the juju and the charms of his spiritual contractors. He feels everybody is against him and has to join a cult group to seek protection from his foes. He does not subscribe to the axiom of a person’s word being his bond, but would rather subject his associates to the rigour of oath taking at shrines in order to extract commitments from them. Because of his faith in voodoo, the Nigerian politician has scant respect for science and technology, the antithesis of superstition, and does little to promote them.

Then, he is visionless. He lacks the ability to look beyond the moment. He lives for the present; he does not believe in preparing for the future. The good book talks of a good man leaving an inheritance for his children’s children but that is not the concern of the Nigerian politician. The only thing he is eager to bequeath to the coming generation is piled debts. It has been said that there is the likelihood of the Nigerian oil wells running dry in less than 50 years even as the nation faces the problem of dwindling resources occasioned by unstable oil prices. Some more forward-looking countries have engaged in using the proceeds from oil to develop new income-generating ventures as it has been done in the United Arab Emirate, where Dubai was developed as the new world centre for commerce and tourism with proceeds from oil. But the slogan here is ‘share and spend the money.’ All earnings must be spent, not invested, forgetting that the nation that spends all it earns will always be at the mercy of the one that saves part of its earnings.

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He is also not sportsmanlike. He must always win or else all hell must be let loose. When he wins an election, the process is fair, but when he loses, there must have been a manipulation of the process. He does not mind destroying the system to have his way. He does not believe in fair play. For him, election is war, and in war, all is fair. He deploys all means to win an election. He will rig, he will corrupt election umpires, he will bribe voters, he will harass opponents with law enforcement agents, he will even maim and kill his opponents and the people he supposedly wants to serve, just to get into office. If he does all of these and the result of the election glaringly shows that the people do not want him, then he resorts to the courts to thwart the decision of the people. The Nigerian politician does not believe the people have the final say on who should serve them, he believes since he has expressed the desire to serve, his wish must be done.

He is self-serving and not altruistic. The Nigerian politician is not interested in anybody’s welfare but his. The federal legislators have indicated that they will not succumb to any idea of their emoluments being slashed despite the financial difficulty the country is currently battling with. Despite running a part-time system, they earn in a month what some senior civil servants earn in more than10 years.

Governors often blame paucity of funds for non-payment of workers’ salaries but even after being bailed out by the Federal Government, many of them were reluctant to give workers their due. They came up with all sorts of hurdles to disqualify as many of the workers as possible from reaping the fruits of their labour. So, what matters to the people is of little significance to the Nigerian politician. Despite what he professes, he does not work for the people, he works for himself.

Now, it is the political class that produces the nation’s political leaders. But when it is a fetish, visionless, un-sportsmanly and self-serving leadership that is foisted on a state, the result can only be catastrophic.

That, unfortunately, is the story of the Nigerian state.