Last week, former President Olusegun Obasanjo delivered the keynote address at the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
The address, titled: ‘Leadership Failure and State Capture in Nigeria,’ pulled no punches. Obasanjo fully agreed with the late master storyteller, Achebe, that the “trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.”
Obasanjo proceeded to surgically dissect Nigeria under the leadership of Bola Tinubu, describing the country as a ‘failing state’ plagued especially by misery, corruption, and insecurity.
By now, we have come to expect these ‘letters’ or dissection of the performances of every other Nigerian president from the former president. Obasanjo has always likened himself to Ezekiel in the scriptures, “…a man who has been destined with the watch, with the vigilance, with the responsibility to his people to speak up and speak out;” and who, during that watch, has no sleep and no respite.
Therefore, since leaving office as military Head of State in 1979, he has taken it as his duty to speak up against virtually all the Heads of State and Presidents that have governed the country bar himself.
Wole Soyinka, his kinsman and eternal sparring partner, particularly disliked Obasanjo’s ‘watchman’ role, famously describing it as ‘watching and preying’ on others. Interestingly, Soyinka too, was an ‘enfant terrible’ of bad governance in Nigeria.
But since his friends got into government, he has uncharacteristically gone silent or become philosophical. Not so with Obasanjo. But I digress.
There is no denying the veracity of the conclusions reached by the Balogun of Owu. President Bola Tinubu and by extension, his All Progressives Party (APC) has presided over the worst economic period in Nigeria’s history, overseeing the more than halving of Nigeria’s GDP from $568 billion in 2014 to a mere projected $199.7 billion in 2024.
This has compounded all of Nigeria’s problems, including abject misery, hunger, corruption, insecurity, ethnoreligious and sectarian conflicts, and the real prospect of the country sliding into ungovernability and chaos soon; for no society has been able to survive the current rate of Nigeria’s economic deceleration without radical changes.
Even in rich and capable states, periods of economic downturn that led to widespread unemployment, business closures, plummeting stock prices, decreased consumer spending, a loss of confidence in the financial system, and a sharp decline in living standards have risked social unrest and revolutions and have always resulted in radical changes in government.
In Weimar Germany, for example, hyperinflation in the 1920s led to the full embrace of fanatics like Adolf Hitler. In the United States, the great depression led to the dismantling of more than a decade of Republican electoral dominance and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who conceived and introduced the New Deal that eventually saved capitalism, put people back to work, and revived hope in the American economic system.
As a reward, FDR became the only President in the history of the United States to win four presidential elections in a row. What about the great British Stateman of the 20th Century, Winston Churchill?
Despite his unparalleled brilliance and courage in leading Great Britain to victory in World War II, he and his conservative party were voted out of office the same year, 1945, because ordinary Britons felt the Labour Party was better attuned to meeting their immediate ‘bread and butter’ needs than luxuriating in the triumph of war and saving the British empire.
The world over, incumbents are severely punished for presiding over periods of economic stagnation, inflation, or rising unemployment. But in Nigeria, despite presiding over the destruction of the Nigerian economy; despite presiding over world record-breaking unemployment, business collapses, near total obliteration of the middle class, and the hurling of over 100 million Nigerians into abject poverty, the APC continues to win election after election with aplomb while taunting suffering Nigerians complaining about the state of the country to do their worst.
Obasanjo correctly pinpointed the reason for this anomaly – the manipulation of elections where those who vote decide nothing; but those who count the votes decide everything. He correctly fears that the consequences of this brazenness may be too severe to contemplate: Hear him:
“Politicians corruptly getting themselves declared as winner in an election where votes do not matter and asking winner declared loser to go to court where justice cannot be assured is the easiest and best way to kill electoral democracy.”
I have chosen to focus heavily on Obasanjo’s reference to the economic collapse precipitated by the ruling APC because all the other problems he mentioned – electoral malfeasance and manipulation, judicial corruption, mismanagement and state capture, porous borders, crime and insecurity, manipulation of ethnic/religious fissures, etc – are all symptoms of or find expressions during periods of economic decline.
All other societal problems are easily solved, settled, or even shelved aside in times of economic prosperity. Individuals and groups would be preoccupied with productive activities trying to build wealth rather than focusing on ethnic bigotry/conflicts, crime, or even being used to rig elections.
As world events have continued to show, democracy, liberty, and such abstract concepts and rights mean nothing to people in the face of economic hardship. People all over the world, from the United States to Tunisia, to Azerbaijan, will prioritise economic freedom – the so-called ‘bread and butter’ issues – good jobs, zero or low inflation, economic growth, and well-being, over abstract ideals like liberal democracy, freedom of association or even of expression.
It is in that light that the late Claude Ake, Nigeria’s finest political theorist, thinks that for democracy to succeed in Africa, it will have to “de-emphasize abstract political rights and stress concrete economic rights”.
Obasanjo courageously spoke the minds of many Nigerians who look on despairingly as the APC continues to hurl millions of Nigerians daily into abject poverty while deploying divisive ethno-populist rhetoric to keep the people distracted and incapable of uniting for collective action.
But no one is deceived. The only lucrative endeavour in Nigeria currently is politics. The youth and anyone desirous of making anything out of their lives must leave the country to achieve their goals. That is not a situation to be proud of.
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