Tag Archives: Chinedu George Nnawetanma

How Nigerians Are Finally Waking Up To Their Responsibilities – By Chinedu George Nnawetanma

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It was a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Robert H. Jackson, who said that “it is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.” Nigerians, it seems, are beginning to wake up to this responsibility.

Over the years, Nigeria, like many of its counterparts in Africa, has been particularly plagued with bad leadership. The late literary icon, Professor Chinua Achebe, singled out bad leadership as the bane of Nigeria’s development as a nation in his 1983 seminal work, The Trouble With Nigeria.

In his words, “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

Since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, Nigeria’s democracy has been truncated thrice: in 1966, 1983 and 1993; spawning a total of 8 military juntas in the process. And it’s not that the civilian leaders have been paragons of virtue, either.

The current president, Muhammadu Buhari, toppled Nigeria’s second civilian administration in 1983 as a young military officer. As a “democrat,” he rode to power in May 2015 on the mantra of a CHANGE from the status quo. But almost two years on, Nigerians are yet to discern any distinction between his administration and what they are accustomed to.

The country entered its first recession in two decades in mid-2016. The unemployment rate has soared to 13.9%, inflation is at 18.3% and the local currency, the naira, has plunged from an exchange rate of N210=$1 in March 2015 to about N506=$1 in the parallel markets as of February 10, 2017.

Much of this worsening economic condition is due to the government’s laxity and fitting of square pegs into round holes. For instance, it took President Muhammadu Buhari nearly six months to appoint his ministers while the country virtually drifted in autopilot. When he eventually did, he conflated three of Nigerians most critical ministries – Power, Works and Housing – and handed it over to a lawyer; appointed a scandal-plagued ex-governor of an oil-rich Niger Delta state into his cabinet; and named a sports minister who would go on to declare that he was against Nigeria’s participation in the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Ordinarily, Nigerians would have taken this lying down. But, empowered by the social media and exposed to happenings in other parts of the world, they’ve had enough. A popular musician, TuFace Idibia, organized anti-government protests in many cities of the country, leveraging his celebrity status to galvanize support from the masses.

Though he would later pull out at the last minute, citing security fears, the protests went ahead as scheduled on Monday the 6th of February, sparked off several other protests and became the top trending story in Nigeria during the week.

What is heartwarming is not the protests themselves. Protests have been organized in Nigeria before, even during the military interregnums, with some recording higher turnouts than this week’s. The take-home is the fact that the latent activist in many Nigerians was awoken.

As more and more Nigerians become equipped with the internet and other channels of information, they will not only learn from history, but also from current world events the importance and gains of imbibing the culture of holding elected officials accountable. I hope that these demonstrations represent a giant leap in this direction, rather than a fad whereafter everyone retreats to their comfort zones.

 

Chinedu George Nnawetanma is a Nigerian writer and social commentator. He can be reached via chinnawetanma@gmail.com and followed on Linkedin.

Nigeria | The intersection of inept leadership and docile followership – Chinedu George Nnawetanma

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It was the great novelist Chinua Achebe, widely regarded as the torchbearer of the modern African literature, who declared in his seminal work, The Trouble with Nigeria, that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” He went further to add that “there is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

Professor Achebe wasn’t mincing words when he made that germane contribution to Nigeria’s existential discourse. There is indeed nothing wrong with the Nigerian character, nor with the land or the climate. As a case in point, many other countries that share similar topography and climate with us, such as Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia, are doing so much better than us in almost every index utilized in assessing the quality of life. It is a pity that 33 years after its publication, Nigeria still grapples with the very same challenges explored in The Trouble With Nigeria.

However, there is an often-overlooked dimension to it all. It was the French lawyer and philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, who opined that “every nation gets the government it deserves.” It is one thing for a country’s leadership class to be seemingly perpetually plagued with utter ineptitude and it is entirely another for a citizenry to tolerate it for so long.

Twenty-nine years of intermittent military rule preceded by almost a century of colonialism may have had a lasting, transgenerational psychological effect on the Nigerian populace wherein they perceive individuals in positions of authority as demigods who ought to be worshipped, adored, feared and celebrated, instead of the public servants that they truly are.

It was Anthony Hamilton Millard Kirk-Greene, a British historian, who, in his compilation of documentary records of the amalgamation of Nigeria by Lord Lugard, described the instruments necessary for the successful working of the Nigerian system as ignorance, fear and military terrorism. With what has been the norm since their departure, it is difficult to argue against the possibility that this template was handed down by the British to their anointed successors upon the country’s independence in 1960.

Since its establishment as a country, civil disobedience and revolts in Nigerian have often been met with brutal repressions by the ruling class and their armed agencies. The Ekumeku Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western Igboland, the Women’s War of 1929 in the southeastern Nigerian city of Aba, the Coal miners’ Uprising of 1949 in the then Eastern Nigerian regional capital of Enugu and the pro-Biafra protests of 2016 are just a few instances of these.

Consequently, the Nigerian citizens have become apprehensive about holding their government accountable by pressing for their rights, electing instead to endure whatever comes their way, a learned helplessness that has earned them the infamous “suffering and smiling” tag. Even more worrying is the ethno-religious dimension wherein some sections of the country align with leaders of the same ethnicity or faith come rain or shine to spite perceived rival groups and to take their own slice of the so-called national cake, a situation that has only been exploited by the ruling class to wreak more havoc and consolidate their power and influence.

Nigeria will never be emancipated from its existential crisis and perennial doldrums as long as the callousness of its leaders is matched by the indifference, timidity and aloofness of the followers. Robert H. Jackson, a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, once said that “it is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”

Those words are probably truer for the present-day Nigeria than they ever were for a 1950s America. Perhaps, not since the Civil War has the country had it so bad. Economic recession, insecurity, insurgency, secession, disintegration, impunity, corruption, nepotism, ethnic chauvinism and bigotry are words that have become all too familiar to the average Nigerian and hover like a dark cloud over their daily lives, thanks to a maladroit government. And it will only get worse until each and every Nigerian wakes up to their responsibility of keeping their government at all levels alive to their statutory responsibilities, even if it resorts to staring down the barrel of a gun.