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Goodluck Jonathan, Jigawa Visit and the
Alternative Way Forward
By Adagbo Onoja
Newsdiaryonline 14/3/11
 At
a time like this when Nigeria
is in dire need of cementing her nationhood, a consolidated
meeting between Sule Lamido, the noted master of political
reconnaissance and the sitting President of Nigeria, as would
happen later this week during Goodluck Jonathan’s visit to
Jigawa State, is an event fit for carpet
reporting. Carpet reporting is the reportorial tradition
epitomized in our clime with Dele Giwa’s Up, Up Close on
President Shehu Shagari many years back. The assumption is that
it is the details of the eye contacts, backslapping, decided
dumbness, stops and similar other psycho-dynamic cross fires
that actually tell us the real stuff of the men, (and women) who
wield power and their essential motif. And carpet reporting is,
therefore, the operationalization of the democratic presumption
that no man is so good as to lead others without the express
approval of those others. Somehow, that sort of reportorial
invasion called watching the power game has been missing from
Nigerian journalism, perhaps because opinion and constructedness
dominate contemporary Journalism.
Whether GEJ’s visit is carpet reported or not, one thing is
certain. Politically, the President will never be the same again
after Jigawa. Jigawa will baptize him politically. For one, he
is sure to be welcomed by a crowd that will both intimidate and
humble him. He is going to meet the real Nigerians, those in
whose name the Nigerian power elite talk glibly but do not know.
They are the simple folks, those millions of Nigerians with back
breaking existence whose fears, aspirations and desires have yet
to be incorporated into the discourses of Nigeria. They are simple in taste,
they are patriotic and they take their religion seriously. But
because they take their religion seriously, they are also
manipulated. As early as 1987, the radical Historian, Dr. Bala
Usman had come out with a book documenting how the Nigerian
elite use religion to divide the masses. It is titled The
Manipulation of Religion in
Nigeria, 1977-1987.
Two, the President
will find Jigawa very, very instructive, Jigawa being the last
bastion of Talakawa politics in
Nigeria. The government and
leadership of Sule Lamido has made concrete attempts at
expanding the material base of democracy in the sense in which
radical populists understand it as government of the poor and
the numerous as opposed to the interests of the powerful few.
And these show in:
1.
History making introduction of a monthly stipend of N7000 (about
two dollars a day) to the most disadvantaged social category in
Jigawa State such that he could subsequently say that nobody
goes to bed hungry in Jigawa State solely on account of the
money to buy basic food;
2.
The Talakawa Summit which provided a platform for those who
suffer poverty to tell the story of their lives in their own
words. Again, this has never happened in that manner in the
history of
Nigeria;
3.
The programme of capital injection into rural livelihood which
offers some cash capacity to identifiable local producers with a
view to enhancing their productive scope. An outcome of the
Talakawa Summit, this is distinguished from other credit
facilities not only in terms of collateral free requirement but
also by the productive specificity of the award vis-à-vis the
capitalist revolution in Jigawa;
4.
The life time opportunity in the policy of automatic foreign
scholarship to all best 100 best performers in NECO/WAEC in the
context of the collapse of the university idea in
Nigeria;
5.
The flooding of Jigawa, to borrow the artist’s framing of the
state wide provision of water;
6.
The free medical services for all pregnant mothers and children
in the first five years of their life;
7.
the rehabilitation and modernisation of all secondary schools in
the state;
8.
The building of a World class specialist hospital for the state;
9.
The construction of a state capital from the scratch;
10.
The provision of the smoothest road network in Nigeria;
That all these and more were done on the strength of an average
monthly allocation of N3.4b, about the least in Nigeria, should
interest us all.
Collectively, these are potent symbolisms or signifiers of the
possibility of Another Nigeria or a New Social Order which the
rentier character of the Nigerian state has denied the Nigerian
people. Instead of the responsive and the responsible state,
Nigerian politics has been marked by great turbulence embracing
graft, embezzlement, electoral corruption, violent conflicts and
mendacity. The country is thus perpetually in search of the way
forward. If you ask the average Nigerian, you get all sorts of
answers such as lack of quality leadership, ethnicity,
corruption, imperialism and dependency. Surprisingly, no one
mentions the more specific but most fundamental or dangerous
reality of Nigeria being a rentier state.
A Rentier state refers to a state which receives, on a regular
basis, substantial amounts of external economic rent (i.e. rent
as reward for ownership of all natural resources as different
from income generated by a landlord). In this way, external
rents tend to liberate the state from the need to extract income
from the domestic economy because the external rents enables the
government to embark on large-scale public expenditure programme,
without resorting to ‘taxation’.
Subsequently, the state becomes an allocation state as
opposed to a production state.
The state becomes the primary source of revenue itself in
the economy. The primary goal of the allocation state is
spending.
In other words, the contradiction of the Rentier State
is, since the government distributes benefits, attention is on
how those benefits are accessed. Hence, maneuvering for personal
advantage within the status quo is always superior to any other
approaches to public affairs. In this maneuvering for personal
advantage, merit, talent and work are not as strategic as whom
one knows, chance or goodluck. Hence, the pervasiveness of
rentier mentality, the speculative, windfall mindedness or
opportunism and mendacity in Nigerian public life.
So, in a Rentier
State like Nigeria,
struggle for access to external rents is the most important
subjective consideration in explaining the individual and
collective behaviour of the people. The result is
the impossibility of democracy in a rentier state. By
impossibility of Democracy in a rentier state is meant the
incapability of the state and the unwillingness of the various
interest groups and actors to abide or be restrained by the
democratic ethos in the struggle for access to state power and
control of the external rents.
This is the primary
contradiction for countries like Nigeria.
It is this primary contradiction that all the phalanx of
therapies such as series of revenue allocation formulae, federal
character, quota and zoning have been designed to address. But
the recent zoning debate has shaken the fragile elite consensus
embedded in all these therapies, including the competitive
co-operation as well as the co-optation that worked very well in
the First
Republic.
In this context,
the message of Jigawa and the role of its leaders like Lamido in
Nigeria’s politics of
development offer a lot of hope. That hope is in the potentials
of social justice as the ultimate unifier of the real Nigerians
and whose material comfort, mental and cultural re-positioning
is the ultimate foundation of national security.
Again, in changing
the object of politics from elite haggling to the people’s
welfare, Jigawa remains a reference point in the argument of her
governor in his May 2007 Inaugural Address that “it
is about time government and governance in Nigeria concentrates
on eliminating some of the historical nightmares of the Talakawa.
Nigerian politics has not been defined by such categorical
assertions of the strategic direction.
It is only good and
proper that the Presidency is aware of such developmental
sentiments in one part of the federation, that office being the
ultimate arbiter, both at the level of the symbolism and actual
powers of the President as the appointer of an array of
ministers, service chiefs and in being the Commander-in-Chief of
the Nigerian Armed Forces.
This is particularly so in the context of Goodluck Jonathan in
the sense that, by class origin and circumstances of ascendancy
in power, he is best equipped to shift the substance of politics
from mere haggling over elite interests to the era of what a
Governor Sule Lamido has also called ‘Confronting the Historical
Nightmares of the Talakawa in Nigeria’. How best this
confrontation with mass poverty and its associated agony and
ordeal for the majority can be accomplished will not come from
the accumulated wisdom of one person. Power should empower GEJ
to be able to fish out a core of dedicated developmentalists who
can fine tune the urgent and long term policy responses to the
unacceptable level of poverty in Nigeria.
It is a historical responsibility for GEJ to counter the
divisiveness which greeted his ascendancy in power with policy
approaches that will unify Nigeria. His
impending visit to
Jigawa
State should be an
opportunity to be totally baptized in the sense of a conversion
from politics of obsession with elite squabbles to the politics
of radical populism. He can see the justification for that
conversion in the banners inbuilt in the achievements of
Governor Lamido already listed.
These are some of the reasons why Jigawa should be a turning
point for Mr. President in terms of the justification for an
ideological about-turn to a radical populist approach to
leadership and use of power. The ambition of every politician is
to be used by God to wipe the economic, cultural, religious and
other identity tears of the masses.
Wiping the tears of the masses in Nigeria is one of the reasons for
the formation of the PDP in the provision of safety nets for
Nigerians promised by the PDP at its formation in 1998. There is
no better way of waving radical populist banners and providing
Nigerians with safety nets than giving life and momentum to
certain, concrete pro-people policies. That is how GEJ will make
history. And that is how PDP can rule for 200 years. That is the
length of time the Acting National Chairman of the PDP has
shifted how long PDP will rule Nigeria.
That is how all these
scenarios of doomsday, crisis and collapse can be completely and
permanently repudiated. And how the kind of critical mass that
will put Nigeria on the global map will
emerge.
Welcome to Jigawa, President Goodluck Jonathan.
Related:Lamido’s Ark and Iconoclastic Politics in Jigawa
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