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The death, and burial, of Mallam Abba Kyari last weekend brought Nigerians back to their favourite national engagement. It is called blame. At every turn, we look for someone to blame for our national misfortune while ignoring the essentials. And this culture expands the North-South fault lines. Most times, the uninitiated is made to believe that just one man holds the key to unlocking Nigeria and making it become the next big thing on the index of development. Till today, many still blame Gen. Thomas Umunakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, who was killed in 1966, 54 years ago, for taking Nigeria into a unitary government. We have never blamed ourselves for being unable to fashion out a workable government system 54 years after Aguiyi-Ironsi was murdered.
In our contemporary political history, we witnessed the blame heaped on Gen. Sani Abacha after his demise. He was blamed for everything that was wrong with the Nigeria of his era. His Chief Security Officer, Major Hamza al-Mustapha, also shared in the blame. He was blamed for doing his job –protecting the Head of State (his boss) and his family. Then Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Victor Malu (now late), said at the Justice Oputa Panel in Lagos that the Major “was given an assignment far above his rank and age and he discharged it very well.” That testimonial literally shut up some Generals who saw the Major as the Leviathan of that regime.
After Abacha, we blamed Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar for depleting the foreign reserve even when most of us did not understand how government was funded. Some even blamed him for handing over to Olusegun Obasanjo so quickly. Between 1999 and 2003, we blamed northern leaders who had managed Nigeria for squandering national wealth and not building infrastructure. We also blamed them for taking Nigeria to the brink of total collapse. Many argued that Nigeria would have become the next thing after Singapore but for those northern elite that managed Nigeria through the Ibrahim Babangida, Abacha and Abdulsalami years.
In 2007, we walked the same road. We blamed Obasanjo for not making a paradise out of Nigeria. Till today, some still blame Obasanjo for making the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency possible. And when he advises our presidents, many go back to the old question: “what did he do when he was there?”
For many, Obasanjo ought not to talk publicly because he was solely responsible for all of Nigeria’s problems. During the Yar’Adua era, we blamed a certain cabal for not giving his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, a breather. That was essentially the trigger for the “Enough is Enough” protest championed by Save Nigeria Group of Pastor Tunde Bakare.
Then we had President Jonathan. Blames flew from all cardinal points of the country. We blamed his Economic Team. We blamed the Coordinating Minister of the Economy. We blamed Diezani Allison-Madueke. We blamed his wife, Patience. We blamed him for being ‘weak.’ We said he was ineffective. We said he was not a strong leader. We blamed him out of power and still, outside office. Then, we settled for a very strong man, Muhammadu Buhari. We marketed him as the ubermensche that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about in “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” He was the hyperhuman before whom every problem holding Nigeria down would evaporate. We said corruption would disappear from our national life at the sight of him. We took masturbatory pleasure in branding him as the superhuman who was very distant from the ruling elite and who would not indulge in presidential niceties. We expected him to transform the proletariat into bourgeoisie with a snap of his fingers. We blinded ourselves to the real issues.
We blocked our ears to Buhari’s first post-election interview with the BBC in April 2015 wherein he told Nigerians “not to expect miracles.” But that was the expectation. Again, in June 2015, he reminded Nigerians that, at 72, he should not be expected to work like a youngster. Those meant nothing to us because we believed that Nigeria’s problems could be fixed, overnight, by just one man.
When we did not see the results, we started looking for excuses and who to blame. We found one in Abba Kyari. We painted him. We wore him clothes that were not his. And he went to his grave with blames for everything that was wrong with the Buhari administration. Even in death, we still accuse him of not dying when the Presidency said he died. No one applauded him for any achievements of the administration. The narrative is, if it went well, applaud Buhari. If it goes wrong, blame his Chief of staff. But he is out. In a few more days, we shall find someone within the Presidency to heap the blames on.
The fact, however, is that we have been on this blame game since 1914. Every outgone government has been blamed for not making Nigeria into what it is not. In doing that, we play the ostrich and cleverly gloss over the real issue, which is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is needless blaming any particular individual for Nigeria’s woes when we have consistently refused to address the fundamentals of Nigeria’s foundation. A structural engineer knows very well that if the foundation is weak, the building itself cannot be firm enough to withstand the storm. So, the question actually is why do we keep blaming individuals for Nigeria’s woes while glossing over the most challenging task of unbundling the nation to make it work?
When the police force acts nasty, as it often does, we blame the Presidency and accuse it of using the police against the citizenry. Yet, when calls become strong for unbundling the unitary police structure and empowering states for establish their own police, we rise strongly against it. Yet, we hold the President responsible for whatever nasty thing the police do. If states don’t grow as expected, we blame the governor, who in turn blames low revenue from the federation, yet we rise in opposition to a fiscal federation where states are free to administer their wealth. We have made crude oil our economic mainstay. When the price fails, like the COVID-19 forced crash, we blame the President and his team and overlook the need to restructure our governmental systems to make them more productive and effective. For these failures, we will keep going in circles believing that any particular individual has the magic wand to transform Nigeria, when the system is bogged down, and heavily too, by constitutional constraints.
As it is, the Nigerian President is, constitutionally, the most powerful president in the world. Jonathan told us that he wasn’t even using one third of constitutional powers available to the President. With Obasanjo, we understood that a Nigerian President has powers to order the total wipeout of any community that irks him without recourse to the National Assembly. Under Buhari, we learnt that the constitution empowers the president to issues Executive Orders even when they contradict the constitution. In other words, a Nigerian president can effectively run things using Executive Orders. This means that the President has powers to, for instance, order the implementation of the report of the 2014 National Conference, using Executive Orders. Even if he desires to do so, he will be resisted by the same forces that will later blame him for not doing so.
Therefore, for us to begin to get things right and put an end to the cycle of blames, Nigerians must rise and demand the restructuring of the country and the unbundling of many of the choking powers of the President, which centralised the governmental system so that the federation can breathe and the states, or regions, develop as freely and as best as they can using resources available to them. That way, we can free ourselves from concentrating too much effort, and attention, on the presidency and focus more on the regions/states. That is a conversation Nigerians must have and it has to begin with the implementation of the 2014 confab report. Outside this, Nigerians will still go through the years, believing that just one creature in the Presidency is responsible for all the problems created by the amalgamation of 1914.
