As the ship of the Nigerian state seems rudderless, unsure of anchorage and lost at sea, its political leaders appear clueless, unconcerned, unperturbed, aloof and bereft of ideas and solutions to myriads of problems confronting the so-called giant of Africa. The socio-economic woes and heightened insecurity of lives and properties of the Nigerian people is a cumulative effect of many years of faulty and mostly neo-liberal economic practices that are built on a corrupt political structure. Consequently, 26 years of unbroken civil democratic rule has not yielded dividends in the form of improved welfare and security for the Nigerian state and its people.
The resort to unbridled neo-liberal economic practices by successive administrations since 1999 has successfully eroded Nigeria’s productive base, thereby increasingly reducing Nigeria to one of the most impoverished, traumatized and terrorized countries in the 21st century world, with its people besieging Southern Africa, Western Europe, North America, South East Asia and the Middle East as economic refugees. And this resort to corruption-prone neo-liberal economics is not a product of genuine pragmatism but a lazy way out of the hard work of making life easier for the Nigerian people through the abdication of government’s role in the means of production to the individuals under the guise that “government has no business in business.” It is this system that has given rise to crony capitalism of the worst kind imaginable, which has resulted in the economic capture of the Nigerian state by its political leaders and their cronies.
The unwillingness of Nigeria’s political leadership to tame corruption and reposition the public sector across the three tiers of government to take its rightful position as the driver of the economy through its policies, regulations and investments in critically strategic sectors such as energy and steel production is primarily responsible for the suicidal economic policies of removal of petrol subsidy and the floating of the national currency. And the effect of these twin policies on the Nigerian people has been misery, poverty, hunger, deprivation and many other forms of human indignation. With prices of goods and services going through the roof due to high cost of energy for production and logistics, while wages remain constant but thoroughly depreciated due the naira devaluation, Nigerians are currently grappling with the toughest times in the country’s 64 years history as an independent country. But, sadly, its leaders have no solution to the problems they have created, or so it seems.
In response to the agony, pain and misery of the Nigerian people that are choking from the suffocating economic idiocies of government, their political leaders are urging them to “tighten their belts” and make “sacrifices” today for a better tomorrow. But as is the case with every aspect of leadership responsibility, Nigeria’s political leaders are failing to lead by example in the direction of making sacrifices for the collective good of Nigeria. Rather than tighten their belts, members of the ruling elite in Nigeria have loosened their belts to consume the collective patrimony of the people in perpetual preservation of their privileges.
Like drunken sailors in charge of a sinking ship, the ruling class in Nigeria has made no commitments to cutting down on the cost of governance, containment of waste, eradication of corruption and undertaking the hard work of getting Nigeria’s economy to be productive and export competitive. Under their watch, the giant of Africa has been reduced to a beggarly Lilliput of a country that is now surviving on aids and loans. While the people they were elected to govern and provide security and welfare barely exist in poverty, misery, hunger, deprivation and terror-induced trauma, the political leaders of Nigeria are living in luxury of government-funded lifestyles in a manner that suggests a complete lack of empathy and intention to find a way out of the challenges confronting Nigerians.
At a time when their collective failure of leadership has resulted in a complex web of complicated socio-economic challenges that now pose an existential threat to the Nigerian state, the ruling class has not found it essential to commit the required class suicide in their own self-enlightened interest in order to halt Nigeria’s slide to state failure.
By committing class suicide, it has become imperative for the political leadership of Nigeria to substitute corrupt patronage system in favour of a few with comprehensive good governance for all, corruption with integrity, impunity with the rule of law, and absolute fidelity to the spirit and letters of the Constitution in the administration of Nigeria.
Most importantly, the government of Nigeria must be reformed and repositioned to be above board like Caesar’s wife, to be able to take its rightful place as the driver of the economy, as any government that cannot do business has no business in government.
The incompetence, corruption and misrule of the elite in Nigeria has stretched the Nigerian state thin and rendered it fragile, while exhibiting serious symptoms of state failure, leaving the Nigerian people questioning the relevance of the concept of democratic to their overall development.
In Nigeria, the legitimacy of democracy is steadily being eroded on account of the undemocratic conduct of the operators of the system. And the hopelessness and frustration is such that those on board a sinking ship may not stand by and watch it sunk by the drunken sailors in charge.