Daily Independent Online.
*
Thursday, July 01, 2004.
The
President’s 30-year ambition
By Valentine Amanze
E-mail: [email protected]
“There is a lot wrong with our electoral system. We can say it is one of the dangers to
our democracy. We must ensure that
people have confidence in the system, to make them believe that politicians can
campaign and win genuinely. I believe that PDP will rule this country for the
next 30 years, in the first instance.
I will work for it and I am ready to die for that if need be. I know we have a party that can
guarantee peace, unity, and progress, maintain the rule of law and make Nigeria
one of the strongest nations in Africa and the world. God forbid that we disappoint ourselves, the nation and
world.”
Those were the words of President Olusegun Obasanjo
while addressing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) local council chiefs at a
seminar, recently. The President
was not done yet. He also charged
the council bosses to start thinking of how to perpetuate themselves in office
where the law allows them unlimited tenure, asking them to crave the title:
“CP” (Chairman Perpetual).
However, despite conventional opinion, Nigeria has been unfortunate in
its leadership. A basic element of
this misfortune is the virtual lack of modesty and commitment to ideals that
would usher the nation to greater heights.
The irony of the address is his acceptance that there
is a lot wrong in the nation’s electoral system - the system that
brought him to power, while also insisting that people should be convinced to
have confidence in the system. How
can Nigerians have confidence in the system that is wrong, which induces
elected council chiefs to perpetuate themselves in office “where the law
allows them unlimited tenure”?
For Christ sake, the President should be told that in democracy, people
choose their leaders and not the other ways round.
The President vowed to die for PDP and that the party
would rule Nigeria for 30 years.
What a vaulting ambition!
Does the President sound patriotic enough? I had anticipated the President to vow to die for Nigeria
- an act of a patriotic leader - and not for PDP. It is unfortunate. How can he also boast
of making Nigeria a great nation in the midst of poverty and official
corruption? He never told us how
he would make Nigeria great. We,
Nigerians are not impressed by empty boasts. It didn’t start today.
In August 1979, General Olusegun Obasanjo, as a
military Head of State, during his “Thank You Tour” of Ogun State,
said: “Nigeria will become one of the 10 leading nations in the world by
the end of the century”. But
earlier, the same year, precisely June, former Chancellor Helmist Schmidt of
West Germany commented about his country, thus: “Germany is not a world
power; it does not wish to become a world power”.
The sharp contrast between these leaders speaks for
itself - a sober, down-to-earth and dedicated European leader, on the one
hand, and a conceited, presumptuous usurper, without any sense of mission, on
the other.
What Obasanjo declared then is precisely a pervasive weakness of those in the
ruling class. One of Nigeria’s great writers, Chinua Achebe, captured
this in his work, The Trouble with Nigeria: “One of the commonest
manifestations of under-development is the tendency among the ruling elite to
live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic exceptions. This is the cargo cult mentality that
anthropologists sometimes speak about - a belief by backward people that
someday, without any exertion whatsoever on their own part, a fairy ship will
dock in their harbour, laden with every goody they have always dreamed of
possessing.”
It is no doubt that since Obasanjo’s boast of
greatness in 1975, Nigeria has become poorer. Nigeria is not a great nation and can never be one in the
midst of corruption and lack of political ideology and will-power.
It beats my imagination that leadership without
clear-cut agenda for the society would aspire to rule hopeless and hapless
Nigerians for the next 30 years.
Today, we don’t seem to have direction or focus; people are dying
of hunger. What happened to groundnut
pyramids in Kano? What of cocoa
and colanut in Western Nigeria?
And what of palm oil and kernel from Eastern Nigeria, or Benue and Niger
- the food basket of the nation?Until the present leadership addresses
these issues and less of crude oil, we will continue to suffer.
It is disturbing that history, which neither personal
wealth nor power can pre-empt, will pass a terrible judgment on us, pronounce
anathema on our names when we have accomplished our betrayal and passion.
It is only in Nigeria where the President is also the
Petroleum Minister, yet the nation’s refineries refuse to work. Hopeless as Nigeria may seem today, it
is not absolutely beyond redemption. To pull her back and turn around is clearly
beyond the contrivance of mediocre leadership. If PDP strives to rule till the next 30 years, there is
nothing wrong about it, but we need people-oriented programmes.
Perhaps, it is now time for Nigerians to be
courageous to tell their leaders that in as much as they have a right to dream
their dreams of the past, they must not be allowed to block our vision of the
present, or mortgage our children’s chances of success in the 21st
century.
I have examined the current leadership of Nigeria, I
have nothing against it but because I believe quite strongly that if Nigeria is
to avoid catastrophes of possibly greater dimensions than we have been through
since independence, we must take a hard and unsentimental look at the crucial
question of leadership and political power.
