Opinion
Stefan Dercon, ‘Elite Bargain’: Can The Nigerian Ruling Class Be Born Again?
Published
5 months agoon

By Tunji Olaopa
The “again” in the title of this piece is of course, in a manner of speaking, evangelical, but it indeed signals a repetitive necessity that the issue of leadership has generated in Nigeria’s governance and political discourse. The reason is remote and proximate. Since independence, Nigeria has struggled with getting good governance right in ways that would have transformed the quality of life of Nigerians, far beyond the colonial denigration and devaluation of their lives. And in the next few months ahead into 2023, it will be another opportunity to make a momentous decision again about the fate of Nigeria, in the hands of the new set of leaders that would be elected into various offices. Thus, as Chinua Achebe said long ago, and as the entire world now knows, leadership is key to governance and development.
Chinua Achebe was very emphatic in his diagnostic simplicity: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership…. 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.” With the recent publication of Gambling on Development (2022), Stefan Dercon (and thanks to Aighoje Aig-Imoukhuede’s AIG and Patrick Okigbo’s Nextier seminal events that brought the Oxford economics professor to Nigeria’s discursive space) has brought a rather ingenious and seminal twist to the understanding of Achebe’s fundamental diagnosis, and a new depth to the discourse on leadership in Nigeria and Africa. This volume is coming on the heels of three significant discursive insights that have animated our understanding of leadership and development in Africa. The first derives from Max Weber, and his conviction about the role and place of values—religious, cultural, social—in transforming societies and achieving sustainable progress. From Jeffrey Sachs, we began contending with the idea of lifting Africa out of underdevelopment through the infusion of foreign aid and technical support aimed at lifting poor countries out of extreme poverty. By the time Acemoglu and Robinson got into the discourse, the attention has changed from geography and climate to institutions and institutionalism as the sine qua non for development and progress.
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With Gambling on Development, we reach another fundamental discursive height. Prof. Dercon’s argument is simple but fundamental: development will only occur if and when the Nigerian elite take a risk and gamble on it. Gambling on development implies that the elite will deliberately overlook any other variables that could distract from that fundamental objective, especially in a postcolonial context. Mariano Grondona, the Argentine sociologist and political scientist, renders this in terms of temptation. For instance, the political class with the 3rd and 4th national development plans was deeply tempted, and fell into the temptation, to neglect development objectives and instead squander the overflowing petrodollars on white elephant projects, hence the state failure of the ‘70s. In response to the question of why some countries prosper and others fail, Dercon insists that the answer cannot be found in the right or wrong development policies alone, but rather in what he calls “development bargains”—the willingness of a country’s elites—political and economic—to commit elite suicide (be ‘born again’ in a manner of speaking) and bet on economic growth and development. Committing elite suicide means that the elite will deliberately make the decision not to feather their own nest with the enormous resources that the country has to instigate growth. We can look from Singapore to China, and from Botswana to Malaysia. Elite bargains, argues Dercon, must give way to development bargains.
This analysis implicates the Nigerian political and economic class that is always the most vociferous when it comes to their commitment to national development, but whose talks become just that, mere talks, when it comes to a proactive commitment to development dynamics, commencing from personal example that Achebe alluded to. Gambling on Development speaks about the urgent need for a critical mass of elite game changers, in the mold of a leader like Lee Kuan Yew, propelled by the insistent vision to create a change space for development bargains, and to deploy a bridge-building strategy that rallies others to that vision based on a national consensus. This is the personal example provided by Nehemiah as recorded in the OT of the Christian bible. When he heard about the state of the wall of Jerusalem, Nehemiah had a choice to make between elite bargain (after all, he was a respected elite in the court of King Artaxerxes of Persia) and development bargain. He chose the latter, and then went on to create a broad national consensus around the vision of rebuilding the wall, and strategically going about it.
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It is so difficult to quarrel with Prof. Dercon on such an irreducible argument that a country like Nigeria needs to escape from the development determinism undergirding such historical causalities like slavery, colonialism, dependency dynamics, or structural imperialism. And of course, contrary to Sachs, foreign aid can only achieve any modicum of development if and only if the national elite bets on economic growth through a thorough mustering of intellectual self-confidence and competence that initiate a development agenda founded on local reality and strategies. From Dercon’s perspective, elite bargains must be relocated into an elite nationalism that possesses the surest means of achieving development bargains. It is this nationalism, as the examples of the Asian Tigers have demonstrated, that bind the political and economic class to the goal of activating a democratic developmental state that can harness the creative and entrepreneurial energies locked into a country’s human, political and generational capitals. Elite nationalism reformulates the trajectories of a country away from self-destructing to self-recreation. While popular participation remains entrenched as a critical dimension of democratic governance, it is the elite that remains saddled with the crucial responsibility of generating a change space where critical leadership dynamics can be birthed out of the capacity of the elite to rally state and nonstate actors and agents around development vision, agenda and strategies.
Gambling on Development therefore demonstrates not only the ideological poverty of the Nigerian elite, as well as its crass mobilization tactic around ethnicity and religion as the basis for strengthening elite bargains, it also fundamentally reveals that this elite bargain is on its last lap. And this is because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are precious few options available to the Nigerian elite if Nigeria will not tip over the precipice. And this is all the more so in the face of the evaporating advantage conferred by the oil revenue as the funding source for the rentier and neo-patrimonial culture that backstops elite bargains, and the nation’s virtual regression into bankruptcy.
There are however so many significant questions that loom very large in engaging with Gambling on Development. First, what instigates the elite to deliberately commit elite suicide and abandon elite bargains for development bargains? This question ties in with another: if the fundamental focus is on the elite that is already grounded in hierarchical privileges, what roles do the people as citizens play in terms of popular participation and civil society vigilance? How does democratic participation inscribe elite nationalism in a mutually reinforcing collaboration to keep buoying the development bargains? The eventual emergence of a democratic developmental state in Nigeria must be grounded on the complex sociological realities and political dynamics that lock the elite into a frenzy of primitive accumulation and extractive logic that harm the citizens through the debilitating development agenda that fails to transform their lives. A lot of hope is therefore left with the elite — in the forms of the godfathers and national principalities — self-transforming without any popular social forces initiating the elite hara-kiri.
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To achieve development bargains, founded on the demise of elite bargains, there must be a process of sociopolitical revaluation that is hinged on the complex collaboration between elite nationalism and citizen vigilance in spite of the huge burden of stomach infrastructure. The elite, that is, must be forced to reassess its value system. This is the fundamental implication of the “change begin with me” mantra translated into a leadership dynamic that holds every leader up to the rigor of personal example. This brings up again the understanding of a leader possessing the Nehemiah complex—the transformation of a society through an initial and disciplined realignment of the mental, emotional, cognitive, spiritual and cultural mindset of the leadership itself. This is how Carol Pearson, in The Transforming Leader (2012), captures this Nehemiah Complex: “if we want to make significant and long-lasting changes, we must look within before we look without. By bringing our inner world (our thought processes, perspectives, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, capacity for staying centered in the midst of turmoil) into alignment with our outer world (our actions, how we lead, how we live the work, how we work with people), we are better able to transform our leadership and bring about the change we seek.”
Translated into the legacy framework demonstrated by the Asian Tigers, leadership in the Nigerian contexts must derive from a vision that privileges the local and the national peculiarities as the foundation for development transformations. The leadership of the Asian Tigers, as national thinkers, were very clear about the limited and limiting capacities of the neoliberal economic agenda and strategies as the panacea for Asia already locked into unequal dependency relations with the West. This permits them to subject every international aid and development agenda and paradigm to policy and research interrogation that sift what is beneficial from what is pernicious. This requires upgrading and facilitating the capacities of their national and independent think tanks and policy research expertise, to really think and then to act in collaboration with government development objectives. The Confucian value framework also came in handy in undermining self-serving politics and zero-sum logic that kill development initiatives.
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But then, Gambling on Development opens up vistas of analyses and insights that refocus critical attention on elite behavior and politics, and their impact on the difference between prosperity and poverty in national development discourse. When all is said and done, elite nationalism is critical in pushing a state towards redemption, with full consciousness that the time-bomb of possible Rawling Option or Arabs Springs looms. As we approach 2023, Nigeria is in a state that sorely needs national redemption. We cannot even begin to imagine the alternative.
.Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies
(NIPSS), Kuru, Jos .
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Opinion
Overcoming Policy Execution Trap As Nigeria’s Development Challenge
Published
2 hours agoon
March 21, 2023
By Tunji Olaopa
If I am asked to give a succinct and apt summary of the entire challenge faced by the Nigerian state in terms of her policy architecture and development management, in spite of contestation in the development literature, I will not hesitate in stating clearly and unambiguously that it is the challenge of policy implementation; the whole dynamics of getting things done. By elimination, the implication is that the challenge cannot be located as that of the dearth of development ideas, insights, models and paradigms. Right from her independence, Nigeria has been inundated with several ideas, both local and global, about development policy and frameworks. And yet, policy outcomes keep getting bogged down in the murky waters of political shenanigans. This means that the new administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu has its challenge mapped out, in red, for it.
There is no shying away from this postcolonial predicament that has limited and kept limiting Nigeria’s capacity to honour the terms of her social contract with Nigerians. Hence, the Tinubu government will soon be inundated with the impatient agitations of Nigerians for a quick and tangible fix that will address their sufferings. And they are justified since they have not been given any real deal for the past sixty-three years of sovereign independence. And the new administration is obligated because that is the reason for seeking office in the first place.
Prof. Olaopa’s new book on public policy and development challenges
How then can we begin to understand this policy execution challenge? It is simple: how can an administration in Nigeria transition from governance vision and policy intention to policy outcomes that elevate and transform the quality of life of its citizens? Failure to understand and give critical and political attention to this question lies at the heart of the governance failures of successive Nigerian administrations. The new Tinubu administration cannot afford such a glaring mistake. And so, a fundamental case must be made out of the question of how policy intentions get circumscribed in the dynamics of policy execution that occasions policy failures in past administrations.
Modern states all across the world are distinguished by the traditional four functions they discharge as part of their administrative responsibilities—security i.e. securing the sovereign territory against lawlessness, policy formulation and implementation, governance regulation and service delivery.The capacity to perform each and all of these functions very well within an integrated framework in the governance context is what delivers the dividends of democratic governance to the citizens, and it enhances the state’s competitive and human development rating in global reckoning. With these functions, we have the metrics to differentiate between high-performing states like China, India, the United States,Botswana, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirate, Germany, Rwanda and the Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea), and low- or even under-performing countries like Nigeria that is still cluelessly stuck within a dysfunctional vicious cycle within her arrested development.
From the perspective of governance, there must be something these states are getting right in the connection between leadership, politics, and policy articulation. For instance, there is a trajectory of relationship that links elite bargains to development bargains. In other words, development is a
function of elite nationalism and the extent to which the political class of a state can commit elite suicide and gamble on development on behalf of the people they are leading. In Nigeria, low
manifestation of elite nationalism has made it really difficult for the political class to set aside their personal and egoistic class interests in ways that enable them to clearly and ideologically discern and navigate the deadly developmental landmines strewn all over our governance landscape by the
neoliberal implication of ideological apparatuses and frameworks to which Nigeria is beholden. And here, the factor of development gamble of the Asian Tigers’ elites comes into bold relief. From within the ideological ambit of the developmental state, the leadership of the Asian Tigers were able to define a policy space that consciously and critically weighed the benefits and shortfalls of external influences, especially the type that came from the World Bank, IMF and the other cohorts of the neoliberal policy dynamics. Their developmental circumspection paid off!
Since we cannot argue that Nigeria has been stumped by the lack of vision documents, development plans and blueprints, or even policy expertise, the locus of the new administration’s focus must be directed at the possibility of mustering the political will to undermine the mystified Nigerian Factor, and face the global neoliberal consensus in order to begin the crafting of an enabling policy architecture to drive development. And to achieve this translates to creating the delicate balance between ‘doing the right things’ (a function of decision making quotient) and ‘doing it right’(project and change management effectiveness), and overcoming the various political, cultural, structural and systemic constraints that trapped past well-meaning policies and intentions of Nigerian leaders in the dynamics of implementation.
There is first the conspiracy of elitist interest that ensures there is a poor resource allocation that focuses on elite bargain than development calculations and taking care of the national interest. Other constraints follow: (a) the disconnect between policy design and implementation due to weak implementation planning, risk assessment and incompetent change management strategies; (b) unstable and poorly managed macroeconomic policies; (c) policy and project discontinuity; (d) public service low capability readiness; (e) political interference; and finally (f) deep-seated political and bureaucratic corruption. In essence, development has failed not because Nigeria lacks the blueprint or paradigms to make it happen, but due to the dynamics of the politics that the political elite plays with Nigeria’s development potential.
Let me outline what we can regard as the “politics of policy implementation” that Nigeria has played for many years, a politics the new administration must take into serious consideration if it
does not want to fall into the category of failed administration right before it commences. This politics throws Nigeria’s development and policy non-performance right into the frame of the 2005 World Bank review findings about policy and development projects in Africa. According to the finding, 29% of development projects ever get completed, 45% of on-going projects are rated as satisfactory, while 26% of such projects invariably get cancelled. Such a review can never backstop a solid development project of a developmental state.
The politics of policy implementation in
Nigeria is founded on the following assumptions and practices. One: there is that dangerous presumption, that the new administration must resist, that once policies and development plan are designed, they are automatically implemented by the public service. And such a presumption is against the background of a scant investment in implementation analysis and planning, as well as the failure to facilitate the capability review, determine public
administration system’s capability readiness, and strengthening of the MDAs as the powerhouse of government administrative functionality. The MDAs, that is, are not working according to any
specific theories or praxis of change that can guide the functional integration of blueprints or paradigms. This kind of policy inattention draws attention to the policy contradiction: launching a
national development plan and strategy that are not implementation- ready in terms of adequate capability review of the MDAs integral to ensuring implementation success. Two: this
presumption is compounded by the uncritical reliance of past governments on policy experts and consulting firms who are tasked with designing high-end policies that are then dumped on MDAs whose capability reviews and implementation readiness have been neglected in the first place. The
extroversion of the policy design is then compromised by poor functional integration. The truth is that most of these consulting firms lack the appropriate deep content and solution frameworks that are in tandem with the context of policy dysfunction they are supposed to work with. Three: governance policy or project are hardly subjected to feasibility test determined in terms of scope and expectation that are captured by their framework of time, cost and risk assessments before
they are pushed into implementation. This makes it very difficult to benchmark funding projections for these policies and projects against revenue estimations, as well as facilitating in-built flexibilities that enable the policies and projects to adjust to volatilities and contingencies.
All the issues raised above constitute binding constraint that will undermine any governance possibilities the new administration requires to make a success of democratic governance. Undermining the binding constraints demands returning to the fundamentals. The first and most significant is that the new administration needs to interrogate the framework of how government business is currently being conducted. Governance successes are necessarily a function of how government business engages the complexities of the policy design and execution processes within a results-oriented frame. And that entails undermining the structural gaps between policy objectives, development strategies and policy outcomes. This demands second, setting the public service on a performance curve with the institution of a performance management system. This means that the public service must, for example, unfailingly now deploy KPI-based metrics to replace the cumbersome annual performance evaluation report (APER). And at the backend, it becomes imperative to have a monitoring and evaluation system supported by databases that enable staff and program continuous assessment, human resource development rooted in iterativep performance gap identification, supervisors-staff dialogue and multisource feedback mechanismsf for overall national development policy tracking and reporting.
The governance mantra must be on getting the balance between doing the right things and doing it right. And this cannot be achieved through the wanton multiplication or even duplication of
governance plans, programs and blueprints. What is needed is sequencing the blueprints into a coherent and feasible implementation programme, with the right amount of political will behind it. This gives the success of democratic governance a 95% chance of succeeding. The new administration needs that fighting chance!
. Olaopa, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor of Public Administration .
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha
Adamu: A man who rigs his way to power carries a moral burden!
Orezime: A moral what?
Adamu: You heard me, didn’t you?
Orezime: I’m not sure I heard you right. Moral what you said?
Adamu: A moral burden, I said!
Orezime: Hahahahahahaha! You make me laugh! Are you from the moon?
Gani: Or Mars?
Emeka: In which country? In Nigeria? That principle does not apply in Nigeria! There is no moral burden on anybody in this country! The election which produced Bubu in 2015 was rigged. Where are the two million voters from Kano State who voted in 2015? Was an INEC official not burnt alive after that election? The one which brought Obj to power was also rigged by the forces which wanted him to ease the tension of the Abiola tragedy on the Yoruba people. Yet those men had the temerity to preach against corruption!
Orezime: The international community winked at the whole exercise.
Gani: Yes! That’s why those two could only preach; they couldn’t really act decisively. A moral burden? They spoke from both sides of their mouths on the issue of corruption. The late President Yar Adua confessed that the election which produced him was compromised. An honest man, he didn’t live long enough to right the wrong of the period!
Orezime: That’s why I laughed when Adamu talked about a moral burden arising from rigged elections.
Bankole: In the ideal world, any power that is stolen and acquired through a dubious means imposes a moral burden on the power holder. No matter what the person does, that power remains stained.
Orezime: What does that amount to in our country? Even the brigands who shot their way to power in the notorious days of military misadventure in Nigeria soon became legitimate.
Emeka: You are going too far in our history. See what happened in Lagos State in the governorship elections of March 18. Ethnic jingoists went about preaching hatred against Igbo people and warned them against coming out to exercise their constitutional rights. Security officials looked the other way when ballot boxes were snatched in broad daylight in places where the opposition was leading.
Gani: A serving state governor personally went about snatching ballot boxes and threatened to shoot whoever got in his way. The same governor declared somebody wanted without recourse to the Inspector General of Police! He worked against the party on which platform he won the seat to spite the party hierarchy!
Adamu: And to think that this is the President-elect’s state. He kept mute through the horrendous attacks on Igbo people in Lagos State just the way the incumbent president has looked the other way when herdsmen went on the loose!
Bankole: Rigged elections are so familiar yet notorious in our land. It was the main trigger to the crisis in the Western Region in the First Republic because the people reacted when they saw a rape of their rights and wishes! It soon snowballed into a conflagration that consumed the nation in the late 1960s. Already, the youths are talking about a protest in the ENDSARSNOW# manner. I hope it doesn’t result in disaster. We have lost too many lives already!
Orezime: What I fear is the rise of ethnic profiling in a supposedly democratic society. To be sure, Governor Sanwo-Olu and the party hierarchy did not single out any ethnic group for verbal attacks. They even courted them. Yet they didn’t caution their followers to stop the degeneration into ethnic hatred. It is a dangerous curve what is happening in Lagos. I don’t subscribe to the Lagos is no man’s land nonsense which some misguided fellows are spewing, but threatening anybody not to vote their candidate is a new low! Can a Sanwo-Olu victory be said to be legitimate if a significant percentage of the electorate is disenfranchised?
Emeka: Good question. They did not stop there. They rolled out the culturally dreaded Oro rituals on election night. Come on! Who is fooling who? The Oro festival was designed to drive fear into non-Yoruba in Lagos. In the 21st Century?
Gani: I am sure the reports from election observers will be damning.
Bankole: I don’t care about those biased observers.
Adamu: Where are we headed in this country?
Orezime: We are on the road to Kigali!
Bankole: May we not travel that route!
Orezime: It’s a good prayer. But what are we doing to avoid the descent into anarchy? Nothing. Those monkeys are simply interested in acquiring power.
Gani: The Obedient Movement seems to have lost steam once it was misbranded as an ethnic agenda to grab power at the national level. Peter Obi needs to tread carefully so he doesn’t become another June 12! Some people are egging him on to challenge INEC through protests.
Orezime: If he decides to lead a protest, it would be within his constitutional right to do so, especially as INEC is stalling on the issue of inspecting elections materials despite an order from the courts. Peaceful protests are guaranteed by the Constitution.
Adamu: No one can be sure whether a peaceful protest will remain peaceful after it starts. That’s the experience the ENDSARS people had.
Gani: It’s not enough to stop people from taking to the streets. Protests are fundamental to democracy.
Adamu: We do not want dead heroes! Mark my words.
Bankole: That’s ominous!
Emeka: It means nothing. Nigeria must change. We cannot go on like this forever! Things are just going down. No cash. No fuel. No power supply. No security. No nothing. Peter Obi gave a glimmer of hope. Now that has been dashed to the ground.
Adamu: Rigging will remain a moral burden each time our President-elect travels outside the country, each time he meets foreign observers, especially those ones who have a dossier on him. History will also judge him and assess how he came to power. This applies to all the states as well where some politicians have turned themselves into demigods and have compromised poor INEC officials with mouthwatering sums. This is not how to build a democracy. The votes must be counted and must count. Seventeen people have their lives during the governorship and House of Assembly elections. We are supposed to count ballot papers, not bodies. Sad!
Bankole: The moral burden of rigged elections is on all of us. Without our connivance there would be no rigging. We can only hope that this will end some day!
Emeka: Tough luck!
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By Tony Afejuku
On Thursday, 2 March, 2023, the Financial Times based in London, England published a blistering editorial on the February 25, 2023 Presidential election which up to now is the talk of everywhere beyond our shores. The said Financial Times editorial was entitled “Nigerians badly flawed election fails to set an example.” Indeed, it was a positively blistering presentation as any positively blistering presentation can be. Professor Olu Obafemi FNAL; NNOM drew the attention of the literati to the editorial that argued succinctly that “If Tinubu’s victory is challenged the courts should take a hard` look.” In his summation of the editorial Professor Olu Obafemi, who headed the debating literati, said he had nothing to add to the efficacious editorial but he would be happy – by my inference – to have the viewpoints of others. Thereafter the debate began. The arguments and counter-arguments began. Whose will was INEC propagating: Was it its will or the will of the cabal in the presidency or the will of the Nigerian people?
By the way, be it noted here and now that the Financial Times, though headquartered in London as already indicated, is owned by Japanese, by Nikkei, a Japanese holding company with “core editorial offices across Britain, the United States and continental Europe.” Why this point is necessary here will reveal itself in the debate I hereby tender to fit my creative and journalistic purpose. But you will notice that there is a shift in focus from the substance of the editorial to the question of anti-black or anti-African Western propaganda.
This is how Professor Ademola Da Sylva, FNAL puts it:
“The Western media are so powerful that they have their ways of turning non-Western genuine patriots and revolutionaries to look like some nameless demons all because they failed to toe servile line as underdogs! Idi Amin, for example, might not get it right in his choice of modus operandi, but he knew what he wanted for his Uganda people. His successful ejection of the British Asians was one of his policies that did not go down well with the hegemons because it devastated the British economy. So the Western media descended on him and painted him as a blood-sucking Dracula! Of course, there were Uganda compradors and cronies of multinationals from within who tried to undermine Amin’s revolution, too. Dedan Kimathi was also considered a “terrorist and a bandit” by the British imperialists; they got him arrested and hanged him, but we know he wasn’t a demon they tried to make us believe he was! Furthermore, no matter what we may think of Mugabe, the immediate past Zimbabwe President, he meant well for his country, he revoked the licences of large parcels of fertile lands, and also a large chunk of the lands from the White occupants and re-distributed the lands among the black peasants. That was ordinarily unthinkable in Africa by an African leader who wanted justice and equity for his people, but he did it and called the bluff of the West. Again, the Western media took over from there, painted a devil of him, and many Africans uncritically swallowed the gambit, too! The first accusation of the West against these patriotic leaders has always been that they were antidemocrats! Democracy is anti-African governance principles. It is the primary reasons why we never get it right, but it has always paid the West because it keeps Africa underdeveloped to the advantage of the West. The truth is: Why would you want to change a leadership that is up and doing, responsible and responsive, and doing very well, why? That principle foregrounds our sense of monarchy. A king remains on the throne for as long as his reign brings progress and security. Where a king fails, as in the cases of the indigenous Yoruba Obas, he is made to commit a voluntary suicide, and another Oba replaces him. Anyway, let me pause here.”
Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano’s stroke goes thus: “My view is that if humans have (or bear) an original sin, according to Christian eschatology, and if humans need to pray and carry out religious duties to be worthy of divine grace, and if secular education requires progressive edification of humans, and if humans are brutes unless they are inserted into a humane culture complete in all its sides (as Matthew Arnold has argued), and if the classical calculators looked forward not to human nature, with its brutal immersion in self-interest and wars and strife, and if humans have repeatedly to struggle to rise above their petty narrowness, then how can their voting behaviour or action be perfect, pristine or excellent? Those who expect a perfect electoral behaviour or outcome in a country brutalized by a savage economic policy and an insensitive and thieving cast of state officials, and the electors riven by religious and ethnic divisions are expecting a miracle. Yet at the local level, the electors did succeed in electing a new set of people to represent them. The problem with macro analysis is that it is positivism at its worst. At the micro level, the elections were expressive of the will of the people. In Kano State, for example, the newly formed NNPP swept the board with more than 18 out of the available 22 seats for the House of Reps and 2 out of the 3 Senate seats. Thousands turned out to vote. Finally, why should we believe anything the Western press says about us? Look at their reporting of the war in Ukraine. They keep saying, against the evidence and the facts, that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia, despite the former being slaughtered on the battlefield and having lost a staggering number of soldiers.
“Humour comes from the ridiculous and the ridiculous from the comical. Here is an example of a statement that is hilarious because it is ridiculous and ridiculous because it is comical: “Ladies and gentlemen, meet the newly elected President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Reverend Mullah Professor Mr. Mallam IBK of Madagascar!”
Do I have any doubt that our readers will find it hard and uneasy to follow the mind patterns and strokes of the debaters who are trying in their peculiar ways to say something tangibly tangible about our will as voters and INEC’s will as electoral umpire? Not at all!
To be continued.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
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