May We Now Discuss the Issues, Please? By Simon Kolawole

Now that we have settled the routine issue of ethno-religious equation ─ the Muslim/Christian tag team, the Northerner/Southerner pairing ─ may we move on to what really matters at the end of the day? I’m talking about the progress of the Nigerian society. First, I must say I am as excited as anyone can be about the progress we are making in our democracy. Many people cannot see Nigeria beyond the doom and the gloom, beyond the drawbacks and the setbacks. Many analyses start with despair and end with hopelessness. “Nigeria is finished” is an all-too-familiar conclusion. But there are still many of us stubbornly counting our blessings, insisting ─ rather recklessly ─ that we are moving forward gradually, even if slowly.


I’ve seen enough to encourage me that Nigeria is not terminally ill. One major progress is that a viable opposition is evolving in this 15-year-old democratic dispensation. It has taken us such a long time but we are getting there. Democracy without healthy competition is military rule in disguise. I have never been comfortable with the absolute domination of Nigerian politics by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a situation that made them arrogant and seemingly invincible. I am thankful that I am alive to witness the birth of competitive democracy in Nigeria, with the advent of the All Progressives Congress (APC). For once, we are going into a general election without being too certain about which way the pendulum will swing. I love it. I just love it.

To be sure, we almost got it right at the very beginning in 1999. Then, the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and All Peoples Party (APP) formed an alliance for the presidential election. They fielded Olu Falae against PDP’s Olusegun Obasanjo. The alliance lost, but that was not the real tragedy. The tragedy, in my opinion, was that Obasanjo went on to systematically decimate and castrate the opposition for the years he was in power. Having sensed the likelihood of AD/APP merging into a strong unit and giving the PDP a good fight in the elections ahead, Obasanjo deployed military, political and economic tactics to sink the boat. He started by giving appointments to the chairmen of both parties. That was it. The parties never recovered.

That said, we have moved forward. We now have a solid opposition. But opposition should not be there just for decoration. It is about competition based on ideas and ideologies, policies and programmes. PDP has been in power since 1999. APC says Nigerians have had enough of them. APC has built its campaign around “change”  reminiscent of Barack Obama’s slogan in his historic bid for the US presidency in 2008. By “change”, I do not suppose APC is saying “just vote out PDP and put us there”. I’m inclined to believe their message is that let us “change” the way Nigeria is being governed. Try us and you will see a massive difference. Am I right?

Let us move to the real debate then. What are the issues that should shape the 2015 presidential election? I will highlight just five. The first is the anti-graft war. We are all agreed that corruption is one of the biggest problems we have. My interest is: how do we bring looters to justice? We have been sacking ministers and trying ex-governors, but nothing has ever come out of it. It is one thing to bring them to trial, another thing to bring them to justice. Since 1999, no ex-governor or minister or commissioner has been jailed. What would Buhari/APC do differently in this regard? Or, if given another chance, how would Jonathan/PDP redeem themselves? Is legislation the problem? Is it prosecution? Is it lack of political will in the judiciary? Let’s debate and thrash it out!

The second topic is insecurity. The carnage in the North-East plus Kano is beyond explanation. The oil theft in the Niger Delta is criminally unparalleled. Boko Haram has put Nigeria on the international terror map. They have added territorial warfare to suicide bombing, and their mentally unstable leader, Abubakar Shekau, is now targeting mosques and emirs. APC has done a very good job of highlighting the failure of the Jonathan/PDP administration in tackling the insurgency. What it has not told us, convincingly, is what they would do differently. And PDP, in seeking re-election, has a lot of explaining to do on why it is taking forever to tame terror ─ that’s if Nigerians are in the mood to listen again.

The third is power. I wish I knew what the problem is. We’ve been discussing 4000MW in the last 15 years. What exactly is the problem? Is it the power plants? Is it gas? Is it rainfall? Ages ago, contracts for power projects were awarded by Obasanjo. They were abandoned by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. They were revived by Jonathan. Since then, we’ve constructed gas pipelines, installed turbines, unbundled the power utility, privatised generation and distribution, and so on. We have done emergency gas. We are reviving hydro plants and building new ones. Many independent power projects (IPP) are on board. So why this darkness? What needs to “change”?

The fourth is the petroleum sector. We’ve been arguing over subsidy forever and ever. We don’t know what to do with the refineries. Obasanjo privatised two of them. Yar’Adau reversed it, with a failed promise that they would “soon” work. Today, they remain half-dead. The Chinese and Koreans promised to build refineries. They are nowhere to be found. So what is the problem? What “change” will APC bring to this sector? In 2012, Jonathan attempted to deregulate the industry by removing the subsidy on petrol, but there was a nationwide anger and he retreated. Will APC retain or remove subsidy? Will they deregulate? We’re all ears.

The fifth, and very, very important, is jobs. Unemployment is as devastating as Boko Haram, even if we do not see it that way. We are churning out graduates every year without churning out jobs. Even those who have jobs are losing them. Unemployment is the engine of crime and criminal tendencies. We often boast to the world about our population, but multiplying like rats is not an achievement if there is no future for those children. Babies who are daily popping out of the labour rooms may eventually end up in the labour market. Government, unfortunately, cannot employ the jobless millions. What will APC do that PDP is not doing yet? Or what does PDP hope to do better?

I am one of those Nigerians who cannot be easily moved by political slogans. I love the music of “change” as rendered by the APC, but talk is cheap. What we need to know now is the content of this “change”. Jonathan has said we should move “forward” not “backward”. Whatever. Let Buhari and Jonathan come out and tell us to our face what they want to do about the Nigerian condition. This is not going to change the minds of voters  most people have made up their minds already but it will brighten the soapbox and give our democratic experience a different push.

Meanwhile, contrary to what you may be thinking, the 2015 election has not been won and lost. No party should be too boastful or complacent yet. It is going to be a fight-to-the-finish. Just saying.

And Four
Other Things...

QUOTA SYSTEM
Something significant happened virtually unnoticed last week: a federal high court sitting in Lagos delivered a judgment that fundamentally questions federal character. In a suit filed by Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, challenging the “discriminatory” cut-off marks for admission into Unity Schools, Justice John Tsoho declared that “administrative acts... which prescribe and apply different requirements, including cut-off marks for candidates seeking admission into federal government colleges based on gender, ethnicity, states of origin and so on, are a discriminatory action that contravene Section 42(1) of the Constitution”. He dismissed “the need for diversity” position canvassed by the federal government. Interesting.

PLANTING LIES?
The smooth-talking Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, may have finally met his match. He has been having a field day terrorising us with statistics on how he has rescued us from a N870 billion fertilizer subsidy scam. But Adamu Bello, who held the same position from 2001-2007, has said from 1999-2007, total subsidy for fertilizer was less than N25bn, disputing Adesina’s claim that N26bn was stolen annually for 40 years. Bello also said statistics from the websites of CBN and NBS show that the growth of agriculture has been dropping under Adesina. This is serious. Adesina must respond. Seriously.

NO TO WOMEN
And so, electing a female governor for the first time is still eluding us. All the talk about political empowerment of women has only succeeded in producing female deputy governors. We cannot even talk about a female president when there is no female running mate in any major party. After the primaries of the major parties, we are now left with only one female governorship candidate, Aisha Jummai Al-Hassan, an APC senator from Taraba state. For all you care, PDP is the dominant party in Taraba. In 2019, we may have to return to the starting block. Again.

IS IT CHRISTMAS?
This week, as you devour Christmas rice and turkey in your cosy homes, spare a thought for millions of Nigerians who are out there in the cold for no fault of theirs. I’m referring to the internally displaced persons (IDPs), especially in northern Nigeria. They did their Christmas at home last year, but Boko Haram and other agents of destruction have brutalised them, leaving them bereaved, dislocated and disoriented. Most of them live in camps across the north. Please reach out to a displaced family today through reputable charities. Show them the love that was born on Christmas day.