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Philosophical Constructs
In recent times, probably far back in time, Nigerian leaders have been
crafting some philosophical constructs in their
deliberate attempts not only to differentiate, but to
distance their administrations from the previous ones
that had either actually grown unpopular with Nigerians
or needed to be rendered unpopular by all means
necessary, including demonizing them.
This is considered necessary in order to legitimize their usurper regimes
of military adventurers or their civilian counterparts,
as the case maybe. The whole effort is usually geared
toward securing the goodwill of Nigerians even if only
temporarily in order to help stabilize their illegal
regimes, at least for the time being, at their most
troublous and uncertain beginnings.
Therefore, unlike other more stable nations where regardless of politics,
mature incumbent leaders somehow always find reasons to
laud their predecessors’ achievements in office even
when they belong to opposition parties; crediting them
for the success of one development program/ policy or
another as it should be in any civilized environment,
their Nigerian counterparts are stuck with the habit of
distancing themselves completely from the programs and
policies of their immediate predecessors, especially in
military regimes. Treated like some impressionable
kindergartens who could not think and reason for
themselves, Nigerians were told by the new strongmen in
power that their predecessors’ administrations were
headed by devil incarnates. And as such, their policies
and programs were evil and satanic, both in forms and
contents, and must therefore be done away with.
It sure would make no sense for a successful coup plotter to be heard
lauding the government he had just overthrown to high
heavens. On the contrary, he would make sure its
legacies were rubbed out completely from the face of the
earth, including even badly needed ongoing development
projects for which billions of naira had been expended
or committed under subsisting contracts. It mattered not
to the military junta whether the nation would benefit
from the projects or not or wind up incurring severe
contract cancellation penalties; all in the name of
contract reviews that serve no real purposes than to
line their pockets at the nation’s expense.
However, while military regimes acquired notoriety for this deleterious
affliction, it is by no means limited to them as their
civilian successors found reasons to copy from them.
This is one of the bad legacies of the military the
present civilian governments must eschew in all its
ramifications. And thank goodness, Jonathan seems to be
doing just that by continuing with the policies of the
late president, Musa Yar’Adua. But Yar’Adua too was
guilty of this evil.
Yar’Adua found reasons to indulge himself in this wasteful past time for
two years in regard to several of OBJ’s policies and
projects that he inherited, including but not limited to
the Nigerian Independent Power Projects (NIPPs), the
mega billion naira Mambilla Plateau power project, the
railway modernization project, as well as the
implementation of the power and energy sectors reform
initiatives; all of which were undertaken under the
Obasanjo administration but soon abandoned by Yar’Adua.
But he shot himself in the foot, for, had Yar’Adua been
a little more broadminded and surefooted in governance,
he might have left an enduring and tangible legacy of
vastly improved power supply by, at least, completing
the NIPPs, many of which had reached advanced stages of
completion when he took office. The glory would have
been his and his alone and the nation much better for
it.
Sad to say though that in his rather naïve efforts to please his
implacable foes he chose to follow the negative
drumbeats of the opposition elements against Obasanjo
and wound up achieving nothing tangible in two and a
half years before he died. I don’t want to sound
uncharitable to the late leader who was understandably
weighed down by his debilitating health conditions. But
it is fair to say that Yar’Adua died with most of his
initiatives still on the drawing board, including his
signature program, the Niger Delta Amnesty program,
after dismantling OBJ legacies so far as it was within
his powers so to do. Those he couldn’t dismantle like
the GSM revolution and EFCC, he simply ignored while
fiddling endlessly with his so-called 7-point agenda
that never got off the ground—a disposition that earned
him the epithet—“Yaraslow” from disappointed Nigerians.
He was indeed a study in the art of indecision and
procrastination.
Obasanjo too caught the flu in 1999 when he came to office the second
time and equally abandoned Abacha’s Vision 2010 which
the nation had invested in just because Abacha, who had
already expired at the time he came to power in 1999,
sent him to jail and therefore his enemy number one.
Anything Abacha, had to go whether good or bad; the baby
had to be thrown away with its bathwater! And his Vision
2010 was interred with him.
While OBJ could be forgiven for dismantling the policy of one who wanted
him dead in incarceration like he did to Obasanjo’s
former second-in-command, Shehu Yar’Adua, it should
nevertheless be made clear that governance is not a
personal thing but a public business, therefore the
settling of personal scores has absolutely no place in
public governance. As such, good policies inherited even
from an enemy need not be thrown overboard merely to
spite a former leader. If we continue to go down that
road the nation is condemned to underdevelopment. The
result is a Nigerian landscape littered with abandoned
projects with hundreds of billions of naira going down
the drain, just like that. No questions asked.
Many of these abandoned projects have had to be re-contracted out by
subsequent administrations at double if not triple their
original costs, a good example being the defunct Lagos
Metroline project undertaken by the Jakande
administration and, if my memory serves me well, at an
estimated cost of N2.8bn (arguably a lot of money back
then). This project was callously abandoned under the
Buhari administration and now costing the Tunde Fashola
administration a whopping $2.6bn for the first two lines
alone of the seven lines proposed for which a down
payment N8.05bn is reported to have been made for the
Blue Line to be constructed by the now ubiquitous China
Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC).
Yet this whole Lagos Light Rail project is a vastly scaled down version
of the more ambitious Jakande’s abandoned Metroline
project. Even if the costs had not gone up this
astronomically, the fact remains that Lagosians have
been denied rail services for 27 odd years since 1983
when the Jakande administration was booted out of power
by military adventurers, no thanks to Buhari—and that,
indeed, is the real cost of abandoned projects in the
nation—denial of services to the generality of the
citizenry to which they’re otherwise entitled in a
modern nation/state in the 21st century.
And that should give the reader just a little window to peep into
Nigeria’s world of waste created by her callous and
unthinking leaders who would refuse to proceed with
inherited projects unless the contracts bear their
signatures. Yet these leaders are quick to introduce
their own pet programs, projects and policies after
abandoning the ones they met on the ground and turning
the hand of the clock back with similar fate awaiting
them after they might have left either voluntarily or
forced out. And with that the cycle of waste and
underdevelopment continues unceasingly.
However, their sloganeering mantras somehow still live on in the memories
of Nigerians though defunct and abandoned by their
successors. For Muhammadu Buhari, it was “War Against
Indiscipline” (WAI), arising out of the gross
indiscipline and egregious corruption that defined the
previous Shehu Shagari administration. For Olusegun
Obasanjo, otherwise known as “OBJ”, it was “Due Process”
and “War Against Corruption” in his second outing as
Nigerian leader, arising out of the profligacy and
monumental corruption that characterized the previous
Abacha regime, coupled with his determined efforts to
retrieve the multi-billion naira loot of the
bespectacled late general stashed in bank vaults abroad,
particularly in Swiss banks. And for Musa Yar’Adua, it
was “Servant Leader” and “Rule of law,” arising from the
perceived brusqueness and imperial disposition of the
Obasanjo presidency.
Seeking legitimacy arising principally from his stiffly contested
presidential mandate, the late leader wasted no time
crafting some couplet of governing mantras that sought
to distance his style from that of his immediate
predecessor in office. “Rule of law” and “Servant
leader” came in handy to help calm frayed nerves in the
opposition even if both meant very little and largely
tokenistic in practice. They still remained benchmarks
for assessing his administration’s overall performance
and leadership style, regardless.
PLDM Paradigm
And lastly but never the leas;, for Goodluck Jonathan it is “Promising
Less and Delivering More,” (PLDM), arising from the
litany of failed promises in the past, interestingly,
including but not limited to Yar’Adua’s failure to
implement electoral and the power reforms that he had
promised the nation during his inauguration, both of
which never saw the light of day and had become
incubuses on the path of his administration till his
abrupt end.
Confronted with such an unflattering generational record of failed
leadership Jonathan decided to flip that paradigm of
more promises less delivering and turned it on its head
with the following words:
"I know you are tired of empty promises, so I will make only
one promise to you today. The only promise I make to you
my friends, fellow citizens and Nigeria, is to promise
LESS and deliver MORE if I am elected,” he promised. And
with those few words, a new era is born in the nation.
What then is PLDM, the reader might ask? PLDM is a simple construct just
like its author, Jonathan, and nothing complicated to
understand and appreciate. It is simply a paradigm that
simply replaces promises with performance rather than
the other way around as we have been used to in these
parts of the globe. In Jonathan’s own words written in
his Facebook declaration:
“I do not want to win your affections by giving you promises of things I
would do in the future which others before me have given
and which have largely been unfulfilled.”
"I know you are tired of empty promises, so I will make
only one promise to you today. The only promise I make
to you my friends, fellow citizens and Nigeria, is to
promise LESS and deliver MORE if I am elected.”
At the heart of this paradigm is DELIVERING on already
promises made, as opposed to regurgitating the same old
promises or adding new ones to them. It is not a promise
to deliver either. It is simply delivering without more!
It’s a policy that places performance over noise making
promises. But that is just words which in and of itself
is a promise. What is the practical demonstration of
this new paradigm? Here again is Jonathan:
“My team and I made no promises on adequate fuel supply
in Nigeria. We simply did what was expected of those who
govern, we delivered it, and you are living witnesses to
that. We made no promise to revamp the textile industry.
“We delivered a bailout package worth 150 billion naira
that is being dispensed as I write. We made no promises
of securing the highest U.S Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) aviation clearance, the Category 1
Certificate which enables Nigerian registered airlines
to fly to ANY U.S city. We delivered. We made no promise
to give Nigeria a brand new INEC under a proven
God-fearing and incorruptible leader. We placed Nigeria
first and delivered. We made no promises of protecting
your loans, deposits and investments in the banking
industry over and beyond what is covered under the
Nigerian Deposit Insurance Scheme.
“We delivered it via AMCON. Rather than tell you what we
could do to improve power, this administration
demonstrated it by initiating a brand new national Super
Grid as well as launching a concrete Road Map to the
Power Sector with realistic goals tied to realistic
dates. I understand from some of your mails that there
has been some small improvements in electricity supply
in some communities. We met an economy that was
beginning to slow due to the global recession. Today,
the economy has verifiably grown by 7 per cent this half
year ending in June.”
Getting on board Jonathan knew that there was nothing else left to be
promised that had not been promised by his predecessors
in office before, but left unfulfilled. All the promises
that needed to be made had been made. He was not going
to add another layer of promises to the existing layers.
If half of the promises made by past Nigerian leaders
were fulfilled Nigeria would have been on the moon by
now and basic social necessities like good roads, water,
quality medical and educational services, and
electricity would be taken for granted in the country.
More than enough promises have been made. The only thing
conspicuously missing was their fulfillment and that is
the area he needed to address. Expectedly that is what
Nigerians have been crying for all along! To paraphrase
what one American mattress commercial says, “That is
what their backs have been aching for!”
That, in a nutshell is the philosophical plank on which the Jonathan
administration now rests. However, it is so easy to
promise but difficult to fulfill promises made by
others. Yet fulfill he must because governance is a
continuum and because he has committed himself to that.
By so doing he is seeking to change the narrative going
forward—a narrative of poor leadership and failed
dreams. And by changing the narrative, he is hoping to
restore the people’s faith in their government, which
has been badly shaken, indeed battered beyond
recognition—which is why Nigeria is now a nation of
seemingly incurable cynics, skeptics and pessimists. He
recognized that a litany of unfulfilled promises had
turned a once hopeful, positive and forward looking
people into chronic pessimists and self-doubters who do
not for a moment believe in themselves much less in
their government.
Amid the drumbeat of cynics and naysayers Jonathan is
seeking to turn this around and make Nigeria work again
for Nigerians and prove the cynics wrong because
“We
are delivering on our promise towards electoral reforms,
adequate power supply, and peace in the Niger Delta. On
these and other reforms, we will not relent,” said the
president on the occasion of his N500m fundraising
dinner haul at the Abuja International Conference
Centre, (ICC).
But note the words carefully: He is not promising to
deliver; he didn’t say he has delivered. He says “we are
delivering,” indicating work in progress, not promises.
Constraints and Limitations
That said, while it may be easy to judge a leader based on the
fulfillment or lack thereof of promises made or
inherited, it may not be so easy to judge a leader based
on his philosophical postulates. The reason for this is
because philosophical postulates are intangibles or
conceptual objects that are not always amenable to
institutionalization. In this sense therefore we must
begin to distinguish between mere sloganeering and real
development programs or tangible policies associated
with particular administrations.
It must be recognized in this connection that slogans are not executable
categories but development programs are. Therefore,
while some of these philosophical paradigms were
programmatic and therefore executable, others were
entirely conceptual and border on mere sloganeering. As
such, they’re not amenable to institutionalization to
make them permanent.
Thus or instance, while OBJ succeeded in institutionalizing his Due
Process paradigm comprised in the Due Process Office and
the EFCC both of which were able to outlive his
administration, others never cared to articulate and
institutionalize their governing philosophies mainly
because they were not conceptualized as executables in
the first place.
For all his failings, OBJ has proved to be one of the smartest, if not
the smartest leader Nigeria has ever had, if only for
this reason alone. Sensing that his legacies might be
rubbished, he took his time to institutionalize some of
them, including the war against graft in the form of
EFCC and Due Process even before the so-called “third
term” fiasco. But for that deft move, Yar’Adua and his
AGF, Akaase Aondoakaa, would have made the war on graft
and EFCC a thing of the past, just like IBB did to
Buhari’s WAI.
EFCC is still around today despite everything thrown at it because it has
legal and physical structures that cannot be dismantled
and thrown overboard by succeeding administrations
without hell being let loose and going through tedious
and contentious process of abrogating the laws
establishing them. Yar’Adua’s attempt to whittle down
the powers of EFCC through his AGF after he sent its
head packing elicited uproarious reactions from
Nigerians so much so that the administration had no
choice but to let EFCC be as is even though the
administration had nothing but death wish for the
anti-graft agency that was after its corrupt
ex-gubernatorial patrons.
The same is equally true of the Due Process Office which he likewise
institutionalized with the Public Procurement Bill he
proposed and sent to the National Assembly before he
left office; eventually passed and signed into law by
President Yar’Adua in July 2008 as the Public
Procurement Act, giving birth to the Public Procurement
Bureau.
In point of fact, OBJ himself was severally quoted to have promised that
his reforms would be legally encoded to ensure their
survival after he might have left office, and that’s
precisely what he did. Now, that was a very smart move
on his part that I would recommend to President
Jonathan.
Taken together, both represent Obasanjo’s anti-graft policies that remain
legislative and institutional landmarks after his exit.
The point being made here is not to sing the praise of
Obasanjo (he has received some knocks already here), but
to underline the fact that “Due Process” was not just an
airy slogan as Yar’Adua’s “Rule of Law”. On the
contrary, it was an executable policy complete with its
legal and institutional framework, and so also is the
“War on Corruption,” both of which have become national
institutions and heritage, just like Gowon’s National
Youth Service Corps (NYSC).
Other leaders were not so smart as OBJ and had their legacies tanked.
Together with Buhari, WAI was one of the first
casualties of the IBB coup that swept Buhari and the
late Idiagbon out of power in 1985. IBB, whose regime
proceeded in earnest to institutionalize corruption
rather than Buhari’s WAI, wasted no time disbanding the
crude, ad-hoc WAI military structures Buhari had used to
terrorize the masses while leaving the captains of
corruption untouched, which by the way, was why it was
easy for the evil genius to disband them without
incurring public outcry as was Yar’Adua’s case with
EFCC, because the masses were relieved of laboring under
Buhari’s discriminatory, heavy handed, military
jackboots that routinely violated their basic human
rights and decency.
Similarly, Yar’Adua’s servant leader and rule of law mantra were more of
fanciful slogans than well articulated and coherent
governing principles and could therefore not lend
themselves to institutionalization in such a way that
they might become his enduring legacies. And so, there
are no monuments erected for them—and no monuments for
Yar’Adua either after his demise; in fact his slogans
are gone with the wind. And this is because, as earlier
indicated, they have no institutional platforms to stand
on.
In the same vein Jonathan’s PLDM mantra may not go beyond verbal
pronouncements, because it is not otherwise amenable to
institutional construct that could outlast his
administration. As of today, PLDM is just so many words
without structures like Yar’Adua’s “Servant Leader” and
“Rule of Law” mantras. President Jonathan needs to
translate this philosophical construct into permanent
structures that could outlive his administration.
But even in the absence of that it could still become a potent
philosophical force and a compass that not only drives
but guides his administration’s goals and objectives if
deliberate efforts are made to internalize it on the
part of government’s officials, at least. PLDM could be
transformed into a potent instrument or tool for focused
and purposeful leadership and governance throughout the
polity, and it seems to have found a life of its own.
Already government’s officials are being asked, in fact,
admonished to talk less and do more, the most recent
being the advisory from the AGF to the chairperson of
EFCC, Mrs. Farida Waziri, to talk less and do more in
his reaction to her so-called corruption list sent to
the PDP. And what’s more, INEC chairman, Professor
Attahiru Jega, Chairman of INEC, the electoral agency,
is similarly being asked to talk less and do more.
Gradually but steadily, the message is taking hold and
sinking in, one head at a time. And if that happens, it
will be a breath of fresh air in the Nigerian polity.
The whole idea is to get public officials to simply perform their duties
for which they were either elected or appointed without
unnecessary grandstanding or inundating us with empty
promises they know will not be kept until they leave
office. And all that sickening ceremonies of governors
calling the whole world to witness the commissioning of
boreholes, taxis and buses or some feeder road tucked
somewhere as their crowning achievements must stop. The
widespread practice trivializes the art of governance.
If state chief executives have nothing better to do with their time, they
have no business being in their states’ executive
mansions in the first place. Only the commissioning of
major development projects should attract the presence
of state governors and the president, for that matter.
The commissioning of minor projects must be left for
local government officials or commissioners, and that is
if they must be commissioned at all before being put to
public use. Why formal commissioning before being put to
public use, anyway? The practice is utterly wasteful and
must be stopped except for major projects as indicated
above if state chief executives truly know their
onions.
Odd-Man Out
However, it has become obvious to the discerning members of the public
that the chairman of INEC, Attahiru Jega, has not been
entirely sold on the idea. He is one government’s
official in the Jonathan dispensation who has yet to
imbibe the administration’s new credo of promising less
and delivering more.
Since his well received appointment a few months ago he has been running
his mouth like a canary at every given opportunity in
utter disregard for the administration’s disposition of
promising less and delivering more. He has instead been
promising more and delivering less, and thereby turning
the president’s mantra on its head. In other words, he
has been talking more and doing less.
Part of the reason for this could be found in the very name of his
agency—“Independent---“ by virtue of which he is not
beholden to the directive or philosophical orientation
of the administration. He is his own man living in his
own world unfettered by the strictures of public
service. He gets to set his own rules and goes by his
own dictates. After all, he is not part of the
presidents’ cabinet. He belongs neither to the
executive, legislative, nor the judicial branch. He’s
simply independent and towers above all, including those
who appointed him and those to whom he cries for money.
As the head of INEC he is expected to show his independence at all times
and there is no better way to demonstrate his
independence than to do the very opposite of what the
administration is doing and that means promising more
and delivering less. It seems Jega has discovered that
the only way to assert his independence is to talk more
and do less. That way, he has succeeded in distancing
himself and his electoral body from the dictates of the
administration. He has refused to follow the
philosophical dictates of the administration and
continues business as usual. Pray, how much more
independent could he be?
The bearded, publicity hungry INEC chairman has found a cheap and
effective means of proving his independence by simply
talking, and talking until the elections are over, or
rather until the elections are forgotten entirely, while
the nation waits for eternity for the award of the
contracts for Direct Data Capture (DDC) machines, which
alone have taken him nearly half a year to award and
will probably take that much longer to deliver. And that
is if they’re delivered at all. There is always a handy
excuse for non-performance right up there in his
sleeves. He has plenty of them up there, all designed to
suit particular occasions as the need arises.
Under the barrage of criticisms from both the National Assembly and
concerned Nigerians, he has quickly moved to announce
the training of those who will operate the
yet-to-be-delivered DDC machines. I guess the trainees
will use the pictures of the machines to do their
drills. It’s all in his theoretical world. As a
professor, Jega probably didn’t have access to or need
no real machines to train his students. He probably was
content with Marxist theoretical postulations in the
lecture halls as a socialist academic with no need for
machines. After all, Communism/Socialism needed no
laboratories to test it. And if ever there was such a
need the tools existed not in Nigeria but in far away
China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union; all outside
his immediate grasp. Jega probably still thinks that
he’s on sabbatical at INEC doing his lecture rounds with
his staffers as students.
And each time he runs into rough waters he raises high decibel alarms.
First it was about the amendment of the Electoral Act
for which he was not only duly consulted by the
leadership of the National Assembly in the amended
Electoral Act and the constitution passed, but his
inputs and timelines were duly incorporated in the Act
and the amended constitution. The amended constitution
was gazetted back in July 2010, and the amended
Electoral Act was signed into law by the president back
in August precisely on the 12th within just
three days after it was presented to the president for
his assent. That should pass as one of the fastest
presidential assents ever given to a bill passed by the
National Assembly presented to the president for his
assent.
However, between the consummation of the amendment of the Electoral Act
and its transmission to the presidency for presidential
assent, Jega cried out raising the alarm that its delay
was hampering his ability to prepare for the elections.
With the signing of the Electoral Act, into law,
however, Jega went to town talking more and doing less.
He dredged up another excuse for not doing his job. This
time it was funds. A whopping N78bn naira was requested
for ordinary computers and scanners just for revising
the Voter’s Register alone, again blackmailing the
presidency and the National Assembly to sign off on the
requested amount else the nation could as well forgot
about 2011. His highly inflated figures which were
computed on the basis of windfall profit for the
suppliers that was questioned by the lawmakers but
nevertheless left almost intact by the National
Assembly. No one wanted to be accused of standing in the
way of Jega and INEC. Whatever he wants he gets. Period!
If he wants a thousand human heads to be sacrificed to
the gods of INEC to ensure smooth, free and fair
elections, so be it. They will be delivered to him in a
presidential jet—one of those that were recently
ordered. Like a spoilt child whatever Jega wants he gets
without question---and without delay too!
But does he ever get enough? He’s always asking for more. Like Oliver
Twist he has gone cap-in-hand pleading for financial
assistance from EU members who called at his office to
ascertain his level of preparedness who went back
utterly disappointed at his absolute lack of progress,
only for him to use the occasion to again blackmail the
National Assembly on the fresh amendments he has
requested. This raises the question as to whether Jega
will not spring another surprise on the nation about
lack of adequate funding. What else is next in Jega’s
trick box? But wait a minute:
If the nation thought that with adequate funding and the passage of the
Electorate Act as well as the amendment of the
constitution, everything was in order, it again got a
rude shock when Jega went to town declaring the 2011
elections impossible with the timelines mandated in the
Electoral Act and the Constitution which he was privy to
in the first place!
Because he was talking more and doing less, he soon realized he had run
out of time and therefore impossible to meet the
statutory and constitutional timelines for the conduct
of the elections. With that declaration he has set the
nation up for failure. This declaration has set the
political class scampering to find a way out, which
invariably translates to another amendment of the
amendments that have already been carried out on both
the constitution and the Electoral Act.
This man has totally messed up the nation’s constitutional order and the
electoral process. The nation’s sacred document is being
messed up like a piece of trash; not even an ordinary
law has been subjected to this unedifying treatment at
the behest an underperforming university professor who
is finding it extremely hard to come to grips with the
real world.
Now, the worst time to carry out constitutional and statutory amendments
is during an election when politics is already thick in
the air. Nothing gets done during elections. There is
always gridlock during election years in the United
States, for example, and although young, Nigeria’s
parliament is witnessing similar results at the moment.
The senate failed to pass the amendments proposed in the
bill before it due to political calculations both by
inside and outside forces. And if the National Assembly
is having this difficulty one can only imagine what it
will be like in the state legislatures.
However, sensing an opening to dump the blame of potential failure on the
doorsteps of the National Assembly, Jega came out
flaming on 10/11/2010, warning that delay in the
amendments he requested was dangerous to the conduct of
the 2011 elections and could return the nation back to
square one. In his words uttered in response to the
pleas by the European Union Election observers for him
to ensure free and fair elections as reported by The
Guardian Newspapers 10/12/2010 edition, Jega had this to
say:
“Let me say here that we have faced some challenges
which have set us back by two weeks now, in terms of the
procurement of the Direct Data Capture Machines. These
things are addressed by the so-called 10 per cent rule.
Whatever can go wrong will go wrong sometimes. And
unfortunately, in spite of everything that we did,
something still went wrong and set us back, and we were
also very concerned about that. That was why when we
were talking about how tight the timelines were, we were
worried about that.
“Our worry is not necessarily the new time-frame. We
need to have the legal instrument in place and if there
are delays from the National Assembly about it,
obviously that will also affect how soon we can roll out
our plans for the conduct of the polls. We will continue
to engage all stakeholders in order to make,
particularly the National Assembly members, realise that
the faster they are able to conclude the amendment
processes, the better it will be because there is no
time. If we are going to get the extension and it takes
up to November or December, it is of no use or at best I
would say, we are perhaps back to square one, because we
will need a very clear legal frame-work for us to
proceed with our preparations”.
Now, here is a man who has admitted to his own delays in
awarding ordinary contracts for DDC machines trying to
shift the blame on everybody else but himself and in
fact blackmailing the National Assembly about the nation
going back to “square one” if he did not get the
amendments in October. Here is a man that got his
request for funds approved since August and the funds
promptly released to the commission. Yet he could not
award a simple contract for computers and scanners and
waited two whole months before realizing he had run out
of time for the elections.
He botched the computer contracts right from the
beginning only to begin to run his mouth again such that
a fellow academic
Senator Adego Efrakeya had to
call him to order with these biting words to Jega:
“You should talk less because we have heard a lot of
reports. You are talking more. One has to be careful the
way you talk. If you have fears, why not come to the
National Assembly, talk to the Senate President. He is
there to listen to you.”
Come to the National Assembly and talk to the Senate
President about his fears? Not Jega! The honourable
senator doesn’t get it. Jega would not quietly express
his fears to the leadership of the senate as advised by
the senator. Rather he wants to put the blame for his
failures on the doorsteps of the National Assembly.
Period. He has carefully set them up as the fall guys to
take the blame.
Now, if the award of computer contracts has proved such
a daunting challenge to Jega how in the world would the
nation and the world expect this man to deliver credible
elections in 2011 when such simple issues as contract
awards are causing him terrible nightmares? That is the
question that the nation must begin to grapple with now
before it is too late and before his “back to square
one” threat becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As a Tribune reporter puts it: “If
the man continues with the undue grandstanding we have
seen since August; if he fails to fix things in the most
practical ways, he could be unwittingly returning the
nation to the dreaded “square one.”
With due respect to this reporter, we’re already back to
square one! We’re back to where we started already. The
whole process of constitutional and electoral act
amendment is beginning afresh and Jega has not moved one
inch from where his predecessor, Professor Maurice Iwu,
left off. Which other square one are we talking about,
the square one of square one? Anyway, I’ll leave that to
the mathematicians to figure out the result of that
mathematical formula, because I’m not a mathematician.
What is clear to me, however, is that this man has
literarily held the nation by the jugular. He has become
the quintessential blackmailer. Rather than perfecting
the electoral process for which he was hired, Jega is
busy perfecting the art of blackmail at the nation’s
expense and preparing the nation for the ultimate
failure of the 2011 general elections.
He has succeeded in foisting on the nation a state of
inertia where it can neither move forward nor backward
until a looming disaster is upon it. He has held us all
hostages to his wiles and guiles by subjecting the
electoral process to unnecessary contortions, twists and
turns.
And this is a man who belongs to the class of so-called
progressives who were loudest in condemning the former
chairman of INEC, Maurice Iwu, who was literarily
bundled out of INEC to please the types of Jega in the
nation. Nobody cared to listen to the avalanche of
problems confronting the electoral body under Iwu. He
was singled out for vitriolic attacks on his person by
the myopic Nigerian press and its patron saints in the
opposition. The result is Jega; the result is the mess
that has become the electoral process; the result is the
unmitigated disaster that awaits us if no drastic steps
are taken to make this man sit up and face his jobs as
man, not as a parrot.
If the nation thought Iwu, who successfully midwifed the
2007 general elections was a failure Jega is promising
to be a disaster waiting to happen. The man Iwu must be
chuckling in retirement. He had told this man, Jega,
that there was no need to embark on a fresh Voter’s
Register, and all that he needed to do was to update the
existing one and sanitize it where needed; in other
words to build on the records and achievements on the
ground which seemed reasonable and cost effective too.
But Jega preferred to rebuild the house from the ground
up instead of fixing the leaks in the roof even though
he knew he had no time to do it with elections around
the corner and the nation in a hurry to get things done.
He wanted his own date with contractors. This man
preferred to award new contracts; he probably had not
been doing so as a university professor and former ASUU
president. Now is his time! The lure of multi-billion
naira contracts and its many benefits was too strong for
Jega to resist and that has brought us to square one.
An indication of this came from the Jega himself during
his recent lecture delivered at the Trenchard Hall of
the University of Ibadan in which he was reported to
have declared that “although he had expected that there
were going to be problems on the ground when he took the
job of INEC Chairman, he had, however, been astounded at
the level of problems facing the commission, such that
there could be ‘a crisis of expectation’ at the end of
the day,” and adding that “the crisis of expectation
could come about when everything wrong had been put
right, yet due to some factors and apathy of Nigerians,
things still didn’t work out.” There he goes!
Apathy of Nigerians, he said? What the heck is this man
talking about? What apathy? Does anybody still need
convincing that this man is preparing the nation for the
ultimate fall? Does anyboby need a soothsayer to divine
where the nation is headed in 2011? Does anybody need to
be told that this man is not up to the job he has been
contracted to do? By the way, what were Jega’s
qualifications for the job in the first place? Has he
held any executive position in the past to prepare him
for such a demanding job at a time of great national
urgency and expectations? How was he vetted for this
job? Was he given the job purely on the basis of his
socialist leanings and academic qualifications or on
tangible and demonstrable cognate experience in
executive functions?
Do you want to hear some more excuses for failure from
Jega and his persistent efforts to condition the minds
of Nigerians for possible failure of the 2011 elections?
Here again is Attahiru Jega in yet another speech
raising yet another alarm about insecurity in the nation
as reported by the African Herald Express:
“…some
recent security developments have now placed security
issues on the front burner as we strategize for the 2011
polls. The threats to security are many especially in
terms of recent developments in our national life;
abductions, and other forms of insecurity. The competing
demands on our resources send a sense of trepidation and
news reports about arms build-up and arms proliferation
is frightening to even the hardened mind”
The question to ask is this: must Jega be looking for
and raising alarm about every imperfection in our
national life that could negatively impact on his job as
INEC chairman? It is his duty to discreetly manage the
imperfections whatever they may be and not to cry and
raise alarms on the pages of newspapers. If every head
of every agency goes to town complaining and raising
alarms about the problems he is facing on his job
nothing will get done. Must Jega be whining, complaining
and crying everyday on the pages of newspapers? Must
this man be allowed to disturb our peace all the time by
continually raising fears about the forthcoming
elections?
Doesn’t that show that he’s not matured enough for the
job to begin with? Can’t he do his job quietly and
discreetly without dragging all of us into the mix all
the time? Aren’t Nigerians already aware of the state of
insecurity in the nation? Do they need a Mr. Jega to
remind them? Was he not aware of this situation before
he accepted the job or is he just finding that out now?
What does that say about his maturity and experience for
the job?
The public profile of Jega emerging is that of one who
has sensed his inadequacies looking for excuses to
justify his imminent failure and trying to pass the buck
on others. Jega is seeing failure starring at him in his
face. And that would explain why he is seizing every
opportunity that comes his way to raise alarms and pass
the buck on other agencies. To him that’s the only way
to absolve himself of blame. But he’s miscalculated.
Should our fears materialize in 2011, Jega will not
escape the fate that befell Maurice Iwu and all his
predecessors-in-office, right from the nation’s
independence. No electoral helmsman has escaped that
fate, however much he tries to pass the buck. Jega is
condemned to reliving similar fate.
Therefore, while it was politically expedient to remove
Iwu at the end of his tenure, it was not wise to do so.
Whenever political expediency is allowed to override
wisdom, the result is Jega—leading the nation into a
dead end.
Those who wanted Maurice Iwu out by all means necessary
should be held accountable for the looming Jega fiasco
and imperilled 2011 elections. They put us in this bind
and must get us out of it before it is too late.
Can somebody help teach the professor the difference
between the classroom and the boardroom? Can somebody
help whisper these words into his ears: “Welcome to the
real world...!” This might just be the missing link.
Hey, you never know...!
Franklin Otorofani, Esq.—Attorney and Public Affairs’ Analyst
Contact:
mudiagaone@yahoo.com
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Published
November 2nd, 2010
