The Council of the Indispensable

I have watched with disbelief the manner in which a class of people that they now constitute, assume that everything in our national life will be incomplete or invalid, except it has their imprint. Ever since the misadventures of the 1966 -1970 period, there has been a class of people who have pinned Nigeria down under their control in one way or the other. With changes upon changes in administrations, they have remained, co-opting one person or the other from time to time.

There seems to be a recent talk of whether, as part of the constitutional review process whether the senate could not be sacrificed. This drew vary harsh and angry reaction from the senators themselves, amongst some others. There has been no effort to look at the merits or demerits of any suggestion since all that is needed is to ascertain its impact on each individual. If it negatively affects the individual's personal fortune, it is immediately bad policy or suggestion.

There is no doubt that the senate is the place of refuge of choice for governors who have served out their mandatory maximum terms in office and of course would not leave the political environment. Not to talk about so many unnamed former government officials known and unknown to the Nigerian people. They are all recycled and would not allow a change in their worldview and how they would let Nigeria make progress from here on out. Look at the very head of the senate himself. As I had previously pointed out David Mark has been in the business of power play since his participation in the coup of 1975 at only twenty-seven. Today a twenty-seven year old is likely a young unemployed and hopeless Nigerian young man wasting away in his parent's home or in some dead-end job to eke out a living. With his next major participation in 1985, he was given the position of a governor of a whole state and later of a minister, all in his '30s. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with a young person holding a position of high responsibility in the country. But the problem is that now that they have spent a generation in various roles in government, they now say a 30something is now a "youth" that is too inexperienced to hold the same positions they used to hold; and the fact is that there are a lot more of those young people today who are out and out more knowledgeable than them today about what it takes to build a successful nation, not to talk of back then. What they did then is the reason why we are suffering today. He has even tucked himself so deeply in his number 3 position, complete with the GCON that he is now actually a threat to Nigeria's democracy because he is not going to leave that position without all the fight he can muster, regardless of consequences to the nation. That is what his type is used to anyway: the whole country can burn in order for them to have the smallest of advantage in one trivial matter or another.

There are several others also; the perennial presidential aspirant of any guaranteed ruling party Sarah Jubril always ends up as part of the privileged number with access to government funds and position without any Nigerian having the slightest idea who she is and what she does. There is Uche Chukwumerijie who became a known commodity working for a group that took up arms against the Federal Government, costing one million lives, and then went on to work for Sani Abacha again as a hatchet man. What about the great "Jerry Boy," never far from the corridors of power. It is Jerry Gana that established a new standard for the role of Minister of Information in this country which Maku and his predecessors have been following, one of being a cheap-sounding, undignified, mouthy drum major for the government. One forgets that in that capacity, he should be the head of all the agencies of government with respect to the media. We can not possibly call out such people one by one as there are so many of them.

How can a body of 360 people and another of 109 be so voracious in their greed that their expense becomes significant in the finances of a nation of almost 170 million people. It is this "squandermania"--a direct quote from Buhari in 1984-- that was the main excuse for the sacking of the Second Republic. So how can a legitimate question asked about their cost/benefit be so dismissed with disdain. Why on earth do we think we must copy what another country arrived at while trying to formulate a way to govern their own nation, taking all their own peculiarities into consideration. Of course when you're looking for personal gain, simple problems do not lend themselves anymore to simple solutions. It becomes more complex because some of the variables at play are subterranean. In the context of the Nigerian corruption factor I will even go further and say that their job should be done pro bono and only actuals be covered by the Nigerian people. If you think no one will do the job, you just made the biggest mistake. There will be no faster way to rid the governance of the country of corrupt and inept people than to remove the financial incentive for going for it. There are many people who will be so glad to step forward to do this nation proud who can not at the moment because of the lucre attached to those positions at the moment.

Real democracy, and not the present oligarchy, will dawn in this country when ordinary people with no ties to the lords in the corridors of power are able to make their case to the Nigerian people and be voted into office. This can only occur with the necessary reforms both in our institutions of governance and democracy and in the mindset of the ordinary Nigerian...and that is what those who are responsible for the ruin that is Nigeria will fight against until their dying breath.



Oseiwe Ibhagui
@OIbhagui