State of the mess ( 2)
AMORE acceptable name for mess is, of course, challenge. This word is the great mover of human progress and development. It oils personal ambitions like nothing else. No one seeks power to clean out the mess because the task seems limiting and infra dig, even. They prefer to take on the more elegant task of tackling challenges and solving existing problems.
All leaders are engaged in the eternal struggle to defeat challenges in a manner that leaves their countries much better than they found it. It is a task fraught with potential disappointments and disappointments. How each man meets the challenges determines his place in history. In the endless contest for power, also known as politics, the contest is between those who think they can do a better job of taking on the challenges than those tackling the challenges and whose capacity seems inadequate to level a molehill.
President Muhammadu Buhari knew this. When he challenged President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015, he offered himself as a more competent man, equipped with the capacity to pull the nation out of the morass of its historical failures, end the squandering of its riches and wasted opportunities that had kept it in perpetual circular motion as a nation destined never to break out of being potentially great. He said Jonathan had no capacity for anything, hence the mess was piling up and threatening to drown the country. The majority of the electorate believed in his marketed capacity to clean up the mess. They gave him their votes.
In his first inaugural speech on May 29, 2015, Buhari put his fingers on where he believed the mess was. He said: “Insecurity, pervasive corruption, the hitherto unending and seemingly impossible fuel and power shortages are the immediate concerns. We are going to tackle them head on. Nigerians will not regret they have entrusted national responsibility to us. We must not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix the problems.”
Sure, we could. The promise of new leadership is hinged on the belief that it offers a chance for a paradigm shift in the style, the substance and a new perspective in governance. Buhari offered a caveat we failed to notice at the time. There were obstacles, huge obstacles, that might slow his smooth sailing into the dawn of a new Nigeria. He noted that “… with depleted foreign reserves, falling oil prices, leakages and debts the Nigerian economy is in deep trouble and will require careful management to bring it round and to tackle the immediate challenges confronting us, namely, Boko Haram, the Niger Delta situation, the power shortages and unemployment among young people. For longer term we have to improve the standards of our education.”
It was morning then on creation day. Now the sun of his time as president is heading down east. It should be possible for us to look around and ask how much of the mess he has cleaned up. We noted last week that the “pervasive corruption” he identified has shown it is not afraid of the president. The mess here
remains disturbing because corruption has become even more pervasive and defied institutional struggles to clean it up. It has even mutated into a more tolerant phrase such as family support. Giving someone family support is an act of benevolence, not corruption. This two- part series is not intended as a verdict on the Buhari administration. History is waiting in the wings for that. Because of space limitation, a comprehensive assessment of the state of the mess is beyond the scope of this two- part series. I, therefore, chose to look at the state of the mess by briefly examining two of major areas of the accumulated mess that the president fingered in his inaugural speech, namely, the economy and education, although to be fair, he only mentioned education as an aside.
The management of the Nigerian economy has never been friendly to our political leaders. In one way or the other, it has floored each one of them in succession and continues to intimidate us with an inhuman face sansmilk of kindness. It is unlikely that Buhari would emerge at the end of the day as an exception to this hostile rule in the management of our national economy. I think the president failed to see that the mess in the economy created much of the mess in all aspects of our national development. Tackling the mess should begin with taming the rogue. Despite years of passionate lip service paid to its diversification, the economy is still almost totally dependent on crude oil export earnings. Each time buyers pay less for oil, our economy sinks or at best dances to the drum beats of our failure to plan against this repeated eventuality.
So far, Buhari has shown a disinclination to take the path less travelled to chain this rogue. He has consistently and unadvisedly even, taken the path of least resistance with his easy resort to foreign and domestic borrowings. The mess here has become much greater because these loans, totalling some N28.63 trillion last year, is a burden for the present and on the future. Last year the government paid N1.2 trillion to service the debts. The wisdom of borrowing may be impeccable but whatever necessitated them cannot make for a proper management of the economy, let alone end its years of accumulated and diffused mess.
I can see the broom but I cannot see that it has swept out the mess here.
Our educational system has been a huge mess for as long as anyone can remember. The foundation of our educational system, the primary school, has been, and remains, a total mess, firmed up as it is on mush. I thought this would rate above average on the scale of the president’s identified mess in the country. At the time he assumed office in 2015, Nigeria presented a glittering but false image in its educational development, touting the number of its public and private universities as sure evidence of what it has made of the future of its young men and women in developing their mind and intellect as future leaders of Nigeria.
Under Buhari’s watch, the number of Nigerian universities has further ballooned. I am sure he must be mightily pleased with that. As of last year, there were 43 federal uni
a“Our educational system has been huge mess for as long as anyone can remember. The foundation of our educational system, the primary school, has been, and remains, a total mess, firmed up as it is on mush. I thought this would rate above average on the scale of the president’s identified mess in the country. At the time he assumed office in 2015, Nigeria presented a glittering but false image in its educational development, touting the number of its public and private universities as sure evidence of what it has made of the future of its young men and women in developing their mind and intellect as future leaders of Nigeria