Nigerian Liz-Trussification

By Olusegun Adeniyi

It was heart-breaking to watch the hospital video of the late former Big Brother Naija housemate, Patrick Fakoya, aka Rico Swavey, following the automobile accident that eventually claimed his life. But this is not an issue on which one can rush to judgement. “You people should stop making video. Somebody is dying and you people are making video”, one of the nurses could be heard remonstrating with the recorder. Since the Lagos chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), has decided to join the state government in their investigation of the incident, I enjoin people to wait for the outcome. “We want to appeal to the general public that we allow all statutory bodies that have the power to investigate the matter to conclude their findings and give a detailed report,” Benjamin Olowojebutu and Ismail Ajibowo, Lagos NMA chairman and secretary respectively, wrote in their joint statement. “Passing a guilty verdict on healthcare workers before the investigation is concluded will not do any good to anybody.”

While the advent of social media and the craze for ‘followers’ has bastardised most rules of civilized conduct, the dignity of someone battling for life should matter to people who have a duty of care, whether they be friends or clinical staff. In many countries, filming is not even allowed within hospital wards for several reasons. The Moore Law Firm, an American legal company posted that “someone who is trying to record can disrupt a doctor’s ability to provide care. The focus should be on the patient, but with someone in the direct vicinity trying to film everything that is happening, there are several mistakes that can arise.”

Unfortunately, as it so ever happens, most of the comments below the video clip on social media were about how “Nigeria happened to Rico”, which is typical in a society where people have learnt to deflect responsibility. We always blame ‘Nigeria’ when our compatriots fail to do the right thing, rather than hold them to account. This problem did not start today. While the young generation may have patented the phrase ‘May Nigeria never happen to you’ to knock the country, the generation before them also used ‘Nigerian factor’ as an excuse for failure. A famous line in the inaugural speech of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua on 29^th May 2007 captured it succinctly: “Let us stop justifying every shortcoming with that unacceptable phrase ‘the Nigerian Factor’ as if to be a Nigerian is to settle for less.”

Despite the evident problems in healthcare delivery in Nigeria today, it is important for us to await the outcome of the current investigation into the circumstances surrounding the last hours of the late Rico before we draw conclusions. The challenge is that we have managed to create an industry out of every mismanagement of our national life. With the health sector in shambles, our medical practitioners are leaving the country in droves. And given the level of desperation, especially by young people for whom dwindling opportunities make them look abroad, it is also no surprise that charlatans are using every means to dupe the unwary. That’s the only way to explain why a Pastor would advertise a ‘Japa Anointing’ church programme, asking people to come with their international passports, so that he could pray for them to secure Visa to whichever country they seek to emigrate.

As I have written in the past, this is part of a larger malaise. What we are dealing with today is the viral elevation of money to the status of god, such that every aspect of our national life has become transactional: religion, business, politics, sex, friendship etc. And in the desperation for social recognition, there is no fraud that cannot be packaged and sold to our people. For those who still remember, shortly before the late gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Prince Abubakar Audu was buried in November 2015, a female ‘prophet’ appeared on the scene. With the aid of some young people, she broke the door to where the corpse of Audu was kept with a promise to raise the dead. It was a futile exercise.

It is the right of Nigerians to emigrate abroad should they choose to, but we cannot stand for any ‘Japa anointing’ charade. And since these countries that our young ones run to were also built by people, we must begin to envision and work for the Nigeria of our dream. That of course appears too much for our politicians as is evident in the 2023 general election campaigns. We do not need those who regale the people with a litany of our woes. What we need at this most difficult period are practical solutions to the myriad of problems confronting our nation in all spheres.

On Monday in Lagos, the senior energy specialist of the World Bank, Mr Arsh Sharma, listed Nigeria as the most energy deficient country in Africa. “There is no other country other than Nigeria that is having that kind of energy crisis. Nigeria has over 90 million people without access to electricity. This is the largest energy deficit in the whole of Africa,” he said. Same day, the Waziri Adio-led Agora Policy, a think tank that conducts policy research, released its first report which concluded on a sobering note that “Nigeria’s economy is not in sound health”. Changing the narrative, according to the report which interested readers can access at www.agorapolicy.org, would require “removing the progressively ruinous petrol subsidies, increasing tax revenue, curbing the growing and suffocating appetite for debts, ending restrictive trade practices, and adopting a more realistic and more transparent exchange rate regime” etc. And perhaps to confirm that when it rains in Nigeria it actually pours, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) disclosed also on Monday that higher commodity prices had pushed inflation to 20.77 from 20.52 a month ago.

With the unprecedented floods of this year increasingly turning our country into one vast Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) camp, the misery of millions has been exacerbated. If 41 percent of our population already live below the poverty line, going by World Bank statistics, one can only imagine what will happen next year with “76,168 hectares of farmland partially damaged and 70,566 hectares of farmland are completely destroyed by the great deluge,” according to the federal government. To compound our woes, the rising water levels have also compelled the Nigerian Liquified Natural Gas (NLNG) to shut-in their operations with dire implications for both domestic gas prices and foreign exchange earnings.

When you add national insecurity and the crisis of our social sector like education to the foregoing, you get a picture of a troubled nation. Yet, those who seek our votes in the coming elections are busy making promises without telling us where they intend to get the money. This was the kernel of Tuesday’s column, ‘Liz Truss and the Lessons from Britain’, by Reuben Abati. Using the current political turmoil in the United Kingdom to illustrate his point, Abati made compelling arguments about the danger of infidelity to campaign promises, the reality that the grass is not always greener on the other side—a message for the ‘Japa’ generation—and the challenge of leadership in the age of discontent. The simple lesson, Abati wrote “is that politicians must learn not to over-promise. Nigerian politicians promise heaven and earth. They promote manifesto and covenants that even the principal candidate has neither read nor seen. When they are taken up on the issues later, they are ever ready to say they never heard of such a policy. Every major stakeholder in the UK is attentive. Position and power come with responsibility and accountability.”

However, one significant point that Abati missed is that were Truss to be a Nigerian politician, she would still be riding high in popular imagination. In a country where ‘body language’ alone can do the magic for the first year (or even the entire tenure for some people), ‘Liz-Trussification’ is the name of the game in a milieu where politics is both shallow and superficial. That explains why, at a time when we rely on borrowed money to fund recurrent expenditures, our politicians are still promising Eldorado. Yet they know, and we know (and they know that we know) that the treasury is not only empty, but we are neck deep in debt. Now, let’s look at Truss.

Campaigning for leadership of the Conservative Party (and by implication for the position of Prime Minister), Truss said her priorities were ‘growth, growth, growth’ in the economy and prosperity for the greater majority of Britons. “I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply. And I will deliver on the National Health Service,” she pledged. But the moment she unveiled her agenda, people did the arithmetic. And they knew immediately that things did not add up. The general uproar that followed was predictable.

In the past two weeks, Truss has done a U-Turn, sacked her Chancellor of Exchequer while at the same time doubling down on her fantasy programme. But even if she remains as prime minister, the power and aura are gone. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) described Truss as running a “hand-to-mouth government, living hour by hour”. ‘The Economist’ has summed up the situation in a pithy one-paragraph post: “Liz Truss has already secured a place in history. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest in British political history. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6^th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23^rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of the queen, and she had seven days in control. That is the shelf-life of a lettuce.”

To be fair, Truss’ policy is based on the Conservative Party ideological proposition that a rising tide lifts all boats: When taxes are low (and in UK, citizens and corporate bodies pay heavy taxes), the economy will improve, and a shared prosperity will result. That was the gamble she took that has failed so spectacularly. In our own context, the government is simply Father Christmas who doles out goodies without any expectation from citizens by way of taxes. It may also be important to note that the parliamentary system of government being practiced in the UK tends to allow accountability through debates on current issues that affect the people as they break. Even if we discount the primordial issues that negatively impact our country, the presidential system tends to wait for elaborate procedures to hold leadership to account. Despite these differences, not only has the Nigerian system grown distant and aloof from the people over time, our breed of politicians hardly understands the value of responding to the immediate needs of the citizenry.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of what I call ‘Liz-Trussification’ was not because United Kingdom citizens do not want to pay less tax or have their energy bills cut. But rather because they could see very easily that there was no Manna from heaven to pay for these ‘luxuries’. Here in Nigeria, we allow ourselves to be deceived so easily by politicians who cannot deliver. Their empty promises include revamping and diversifying the economy, repositioning the social sector, tackling insecurity, creating jobs for our teeming young population, conjuring the Naira to command the same value as the dollar, and even building a flyover from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sahara desert, while offering free education/medical services to citizens.

This is the campaign template at every election cycle which has brought Nigeria to its present sorry pass. In other countries where politicians take the people seriously, campaign promises are accompanied by tax plans. And that for me is the most enduring lesson from the current political travails of Ms Liz Truss. Until we get to that point where we begin to ask those who seek our votes how they intend to get the money to fund their campaign promises, we cannot progress as a country.

Echoes of Clinton’s Abuja Visit

For readers who have either written in or called to know my view on the political process as we inch towards the 2023 general election, let me reassure them that at the appropriate time, I will offer my perspective on the leading political parties and their presidential candidates. In what I plan to be an election series, I may also look at the gubernatorial contests in a few states. For now, what I find disturbing is that many of those who seek our votes in 2023 are still trapped in the same old politics that have not in any way advanced our country. In the course of a conversation about Nigeria yesterday with Governor Atiku Abubakar Bagudu of Kebbi State, he forwarded to me the 26^th August 2000 speech delivered by the then visiting American President Bill Clinton to the Joint Session of our National Assembly in Abuja. Although the point Bagudu was trying to make was on debt sustainability and the role of private capital (Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the United States as explained by Clinton), it is other aspects of the speech that I find rather instructive. I have excerpted below about a tenth of the speech (which is quite long) as a reminder of the task of nation-building that lies ahead.

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I know that decades of misrule and deprivation have made your religious and ethnic divisions deeper. Nobody can wave a hand and make the problems go away. But that is no reason to let the idea of one united Nigeria slip away. After all, after all this time, if we started trying to redraw the map of Africa, we would simply be piling new grievances on old. Even if we could separate all the people of Africa by ethnicity and faith, would we really rid this continent of strife? Think of all the things that would be broken up and all the mountains of progress that have been built up that would be taken down if that were the case.

Where there is too much deprivation and too little tolerance, differences among people will always seem greater and will always be like open sores waiting to be turned into arrows of hatred by those who will be advantaged by doing so. But I think it is worth noting for the entire world that against the background of vast cultural differences, a history of repression and ethnic strife, the hopeful fact here today is that Nigeria’s 250 different ethnic groups have stayed together in one nation. You have struggled for democracy together. You have forged national institutions together. All your greatest achievements have come when you have worked together.

It is not for me to tell you how to resolve all the issues that I follow more closely than you might imagine I do. You’re a free people, an independent people, and you must resolve them…The world needs Nigeria to succeed. Every great nation must become more than the sum of its parts. If we are torn by our differences, then we become less than the sum of our parts. Nigeria has within it the seeds of every great development going on in the world today, and it has a future worth fighting for.

Ten years ago (1990) a young Nigerian named Ben Okri published a novel, ‘The Famished Road,’ that captured imaginations all over the world. He wrote of a spirit child who defies his elders and chooses to be born into the turmoil and struggle of human life. The time and place were modern Nigeria, but the questions the novel poses speak to all of us in a language that is as universal as the human spirit.

In a time of change and uncertainty, Okri asks us, “Who can dream a good road and then live to travel on it?” Nigerians, as much as any nation on Earth, have dreamed this road. Since Anthony Enahoro stood up in a colonial Parliament and demanded your independence in 1953, Nigerians have dreamed this road in music and art and literature and political struggle, and in your contributions to prosperity and progress, among the immigrants to my country and so many others.

Now, at the dawn of a new century, the road is open at home to all citizens of Nigeria. You have the chance to build a new Nigeria…

ENDNOTE: When a society is so weak that the majority of young citizens seem uncertain about tomorrow, what you get is the current situation in Nigeria. But from recent documented accounts, some of our compatriots who are ‘Japa-ing’ may be jumping from frying pan to fire. Hence, the main take-away from Clinton’s speech of 22 years ago is that at the end of the day, the only enduring solution is to rebuild our country for peace and prosperity. That is the challenge of the 2023 general election.