Bennett Omeke
“The
idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal
freeman can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies
striving for the highest standards in every phase of life”
—John W. Gardner
Muddle and mediocrity characterise the
national spirit on Nigeria’s 53rd Independence anniversary, marked,
low-key style three days ago. Mediocrity is the result of the lack of
attention. It is a dilatory, hit or miss, sleepwalking approach to
policymaking and implementation. Take random examples. Share
certificates and licences were released by President Goodluck Jonathan
to 14 generating and distribution companies on Monday as part of a long
advertised privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, an
institution that had long terrorised Nigerians with its combination of
thundering incompetence and arbitrary billing system. But apparently, no
one had given much thought to the terminal benefits of the workers of
the PHCN; and so they erupted in protests threatening to scuttle what
ought to have been a high point of the road map to enhanced power
generation.
Government sets up new universities but
downplays the welfare of the teachers resulting in a shutdown of
universities stretching into three months with no end in sight. A final
example: A fortnight ago, the nation’s gateway, the Murtala Muhammed
International Airport, modelled architecturally after the airport at
Amsterdam, Holland, succumbs to a protracted blackout lasting over four
hours, with attendant, unimaginable confusion. Nigerian governmental and
increasingly societal culture is fixed in the glorification of
mediocrity and muddle signposted by the acceptance of low standards in
governance, art, morality and what have you. Every sociologist, if our
newspapers are to be believed, is a renowned sociologist even if he has
contributed little or nothing to his discipline. Our public relations
culture is drowning in celebrations of excellence of professional
midgets and of politicians stealing the nation blind.
It bears noting, however, that
mediocrity and muddle did not begin with Jonathan; its unfortunate
entrenchment in the last couple of years cannot however escape notice.
Federal character, ordinarily a sensible distributive policy in a
turbulent federation such as ours has been perverted into, not just
federal discrimination as Prof. Sam Oyovbaire once brilliantly observed,
but into federal mediocrity. Is it not revealing that the advocates of
Jonathan for 2015 Presidency are sidestepping the issue of governmental
efficiency to zero in on the need to “reward” the South-South with a
two-term presidency? The 1999 constitution and the doctrine of federal
character in its Nigerian incarnation promote mediocrity in at least two
ways. First, it excuses incompetence or shoddy performance by playing
up turn by turn politics defined in ethnic or regional terms. Hence, a
political office holder accused of corruption can divert attention from
the issue by alleging that it is the Yoruba, Igbo or Ijaw who are
hounding him out of office. Secondly, by limiting appointments to
federal and state cabinets to members of political parties, our
constitution more or less reserves executive responsibility for the
nation’s second if not third elevens. Do I exaggerate? Hardly. In
several democracies, including a few on the African continent, a woman
and herone-year-old baby can go on the hustings, campaigning from door
to door. But here, you need a militia armed to the teeth to even
announce your candidature. Isn’t this why many professionals choose to
stay out of harm’s way by avoiding the tinderbox of the political arena
consequently starving that terrain of their expertise and character?
Mediocrity and muddle are the opposites
of quality time and seminal interventions. They reveal a superficial,
hasty and ill-thought out approach to governance and all else. Consider
that as celebrated journalist and scholar, Olatunji Dare, recently
reminded us, five decades after an American economist lamented “planning
without facts” in an influential book on Nigeria, the World Bank is
pinpointing the dearth of vital statistics on the country as a setback
to development. Describing this lacuna as “the aeronautical equivalent
of flying blind”, Dare wonders how a nation can win the race for
ascendancy when it doesn’t know how many people constitute it, how much
oil is pumped out of its shores or how many names on the electoral
register represent real people. This opaqueness of numeracy and
statistical blind spot, of course, make it easy for corruption to thrive
since no one is sure exactly how much money has been stolen. Is it any
wonder that accounts of government departments are not audited for many
years and at another level mathematics as a subject is dying at all
levels of our educational system? Given the scarcity of reliable data in
our national life, successive administrations including Jonathan’s can
be accused of pretended governance. Pretended governance is a phenomenon
in which leaders make all the motions that suggest they are in charge
but in practice know very little about what actually is taking place to
the extent at least that governance is devoid of evidence-based
policymaking.
To transcend mediocrity and muddle, the
nation, its leaders especially, must spend quality time to ponder the
nation’s problems, in particular the endemic issues of corruption,
administering the terrain in an uncoordinated fashion, growing
joblessness, escalating crime, dishevelled social services, absurdly
high cost of governance, as well as ethnic and religious divisiveness
among others. Having correctly diagnosed the problems and absorbed the
lessons of previous failures, they must come up with creative remedies
to the issues identified. For far too long, Nigerian citizens have been
fed with a diet of slogans which did not improve their lives. A sampler:
Green Revolution; Education-For-All; Vision 2010; Vision 2020; National
Economic Empowerment Development Strategy; Seven Point Agenda, and now
the Transformation Agenda. Part of the reasons for the manifest failure
of these programmes is that they were ill-thought out, borrowed from
other countries without any serious attempt to adapt them quite apart
from the disastrous effort to carry through reformist policies on rusty,
parasitic government machinery powered by you chop, I chop credo.
Mediocrity is ordinariness; it boils
down to lacking in foresight, planning acumen, innovativeness and
thinking outside the box. It is not the mental software that can carry
us into the coveted club of late developed nations on the scale of the
Asian Tigers. We must get back to basics as we appear to be doing in the
ongoing commendable effort to institute a national dialogue to
revalidate the Nigerian nationhood and the terms of association of the
ethnic nationalities which comprise it. Provided it is not hijacked by
power technocrats, it holds the promise of resolving some of the most
urgent aspects of the national question. If we can thoughtfully extend
that sort of fundamental rethinking into national planning, the adoption
of development models which run contrary to the current Bretton Woods
jobless growth model; restart our tottering educational and health
infrastructure and do away with the culture of viewing political office
as a permanent admission ticket to a life of unearned affluence, then we
would have truly begun the transition from the entrenched mediocrity
and muddle that have turned life in Nigeria into a nightmare for many
and an updated version of what Wole Soyinka once referred to as “Wastrel
Democracy”.
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