Three anniversaries in review

This past weekend, three anniversaries conflated to accentuate the perennial debate on what I have often referred to in this space and elsewhere as the Nigerian Condition – Children’s Day, “Democracy Day,” and one year of the Buhari Administration.

Children’s Day, an international event, is the oldest of the three.   It has been marked in Nigeria for several decades, even if not always in substantive terms.  It is also the least contentious.  No one disputes the place of children in the scheme of things.  Everyone is agreed that the future belongs to them, and that everything must be done to make that future secure and sustainable.

Whether the foundation for such a future is being laid now is an entirely different issue, what with shabby state of the public educational infrastructure, the plummeting standard of education at virtually every level, the mistreatment of teachers that seems to have become a fundamental principle of state policy, and the bad examples children see wherever they turn.

There was Senate president Dr Bukola Saraki on national television, regal as always and not           in the least diffident, reading to a group of children to mark the anniversary.  Lost on him was the incongruity of a senior political official, third in the formal national hierarchy, presuming  to serve as a role model for children while on break from criminal prosecution on perjury and relate charges.

Next time he is shown in court on television, not a few of the children to whom he was reading will wonder why he is one day presuming to set them on the right path and the next day peering at them from the Code of Conduct Tribunal’s dock.

Only in Nigeria.

“Democracy Day” was controversial right from its proclamation by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to mark the day he took office, at the end of a rushed transition designed by those elements who survived the attrition and skullduggery of the Babangida/Abacha years to ease themselves into opulent retirement.

None of those who succeeded them had seen the Constitution from which their power presumably derived, not even Obasanjo himself, who usually takes nothing for granted.  But the military were so desperate to vacate the scene, and the politicians so desperate to take over, that nobody asked any questions, let alone inconvenient ones.

When the Constitution was finally released, Gani Fawehinmi, of fragrant memory, warned that it was so riddled with ambiguities that it could not be expected to guide Nigeria to a stable, democratic future.

Gani, our Gani, was right on the mark.

Sham elections, brazen manipulation of the judiciary, thieving by political officials in and out of uniform on a scale beyond belief, scant regard for basic decencies and for rules of civic engagement, came to define politics, with Abuja showing the way.

It is a measure of the extent to which their “Democracy Day” has lived up to expectations that the PDP which foisted it on the nation and promised with Napoleonic conceit to hold power for 60 years in the first instance, is on this anniversary in disarray, hugely discredited and justly reviled for its overweening corruption and its staggering lack of vision. Under the PDP, Nigeria became a full-blown kleptocracy with hardly any redeeming grace.

This, then, is their “Democracy Day,” a monument to pillage and squandered opportunity.

It remains to add that their “Democracy Day” was erected on the epic struggle of Nigerians  and their sacrifice in toil and tears and blood to establish a government based on the pan-Nigerian mandate won in the June12, 1993 presidential election won by the Muslim-Muslim ticket of Bashorun Moshood Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, a sacrifice that the May Twenty Niners  have never summoned the honesty and the decency to acknowledge.

In the hearts and minds of millions of Nigerians, June 12 has a much stronger claim to being Nigeria’ s Democracy Day, and will continue to be celebrated as such with greater eloquence and  conviction than May 29.

May 29  also happens to mark President Muhammadu Buhari’s first year in office.  The appraisals have ranged from witheringly dismissive to mildly approving, with Ayo Fayose’s belonging in a special case of the congenitally lunatic.

“What are the consequences of the French Revolution?” Henry Kissinger once asked the Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai?  “Too early to tell, Zhou told the former U.S. Secretary of State a distinguished historian.  And Zhou was not being facetious.

In that context, one year is too short a period for any categorical assessment of Buhari’s tenure.   It provides an opportunity to review the choices he has made.  It furnishes some indication of the direction, the path the administration is likely to follow.  What seems the most informed appraisal of the moment may in the womb of time turn out to be dead wrong.

Still, it has to be said that Buhari did not hit the ground running, pardon the cliché, as the APC had led the public to believe he would, and as the scale of the mess left behind by Jonathan and his team on every facet of national life demanded.

He took an inordinately long time putting together his Cabinet.  When he finally did, the result felt far short of public expectations, given the challenges of the moment.

He and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo set an inspiring example by making public their portfolio of assets; since taking office, they have together cut a profile that is a sharp departure from the   excess and the vulgarity of the Jonathan years.  But much more than that was required to assure the public that Change, a new way of conducting government business, was on the threshold.

It would have struck a resounding blow for Change, as I had urged in this space, if the President were to declare that he would assume responsibility for domestic expenses for himself and his family and the cost of entertaining his personal guests, leaving the Nigerian taxpayer to pay only for official dinners and such outings hosted by the State House.

Office cleaners take care of their families on the national minimum-wage salary of N18,000 they are paid several months late, if at all.  Why shouldn’t the President do the same?  What is the justification for this tradition whereby a president becomes for all practical purposes a ward of the state, with all his needs and fancies paid for from the public purse?

Ending this pernicious state of affairs would signal Change that the public can embrace even when being asked to show understanding; it would have a ripple effect that will help cut the cost of governance and generate funds that can be invested more productively.

Buhari should certainly be reminded of his campaign promises.  But how much can you do with an empty treasury and dwindling revenues in a global economy in recession?  Given some of the brutal realities the administration now has to contend with, the unpleasant truth is that a good many of those promises cannot be fulfilled in their original  form anytime soon.  But he must move quickly to implement faithfully those that are still feasible.

In the end, however, even the most churlish critic will have to grant that Buhari has broken Boko Haram’s backbone; that he has put corruption on notice that it will no longer go unchallenged, despite the best efforts of pettifoggers shielding behind a strategic ritual they call the “rule of law,” and that he has arrested the drift, the serial impunity and the decadence of the Jonathan years.

This last is almost achievement enough.

Those who dispute it should contemplate where the nation would be today if Dr Jonathan and the Obtainers United had succeeded in suborning election officials to alter the returns of the 2015 poll so that they can remain in control, Potemkin “transformation” and all.

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