Honourable Minister of Information and Communications, the erstwhile NAFDAC strongwoman, Prof. Dora Akunyili launched a project called the rebranding of Nigeria which in a nutshell, despite all the big grammar, basically had to do with changing the way we perceive ourselves and the way foreigners see us. Rebuilding our national image was a thing of pride and urgency in other to emphasize and highlight our good points instead of the bad ones. Good talk, if you ignore the fact that the Honourable Minister lost her phone at the occasion. Welcome to the real Nigeria.
At 52 years, Nigeria has really come to stay. Necessity condemns us to co-existence. The truth is that the geographical entity called Nigeria, never mind that we are yet to attain nationhood and never may, at this rate, has coalesced into one solid structure around and within which several very diverse tribes and world outlooks have tried to carve a niche and compete with each other for the resources available mainly in one geopolitical zone of the country. There has come to be some, well, if not understanding, then mere acknowledgment that we will all carry one international passport and use one currency.
Achieving this has not been easy. In Nigeria's unimaginable odyssey, a brutal civil war was fought and the geographical entity known as Nigeria remained intact. However, nationhood, which ought to be the hallmark of any serious people, has continually eluded Nigeria. Without mincing words, this is attributable to poor, unimaginative leadership. That is when it is not being outrightly kleptomanic.
Briefly, in the sixties, Nigeria was one of the newly independent African countries that held out so much promise in Africa. Then it fell to the scourge ravaging Africa at the time, soldiers, who had no training in civilian administration took power promising to fix things and ended up worsening them. In the aftermath of the civil war came the oil boom. Nigeria emerged as a regional economic power thanks to vast reserves of crude oil found in the swamps of the area where the Niger River flows into the Atlantic through numerous tributaries, an area now known as the Niger Delta region, hotbed of militancy in Nigeria. According to a military head of state then, Nigeria's problem was not money but how to spend it. He then proceeded to place orders for cement in quantities that would have satisfied all industrial and commercial requirements for about 22years! Since Nigeria's problem was how to quickly expend her resources regardless of generations unborn, she then decided to pay the salaries of striking workers in a neighbouring African country!
After that came the return of what seemed to be democratic rule, at any rate there was a civilian government. And with it quickly came the austerity measures designed to pull the economy out of the woods where successive military regimes have repeatedly raped it almost to death. But again that civilian experiment did not last because either the civilians got too greedy or the soldiers could not wait any longer for their share in Nigeria. They are stakeholders, too, after all. All through well into the nineties, soldiers occupied Government Houses, determined currency exchange rates, set economic targets and controlled educational policy! Professors, medical doctors, economists and other professionals left the country in droves. The country seemed forlorn, besieged by dark forces (and dark goggled ones, too), deserted by her citizens who fled to exile for their lives, pariahed in international circles she hitherto had commanding influence. Nigeria became a bad, nasty dream until divine intervention came in the form of an apple.
Then came the latest experiment in civilian rule (not democracy, mind). From 1999 till date, Nigeria has had the singular misfortune of having inflicted on it, the most visionless, corrupt and inept rulership in written history. This is a most impartial judgment given the size of resources available to it and the peculiarity of both the country's constitution and the political society which gives and allows the president of the country wield enormous almost unheard-of powers, powers Suharto possessed in Indonesia and set that country on the path of Industrialization.
This bird's eye view of Nigeria's political history searches for a credible historical perspective and judges its chief participants rather harshly. Corruption and sheer political brigandry have been the bane of governance in Nigeria. Given the enormity of human and material resources in Nigeria, it is simply criminal for the ship of the Nigeria state to flounder so dangerously especially in issues any serious country ought to have resolved eons ago. In Nigeria, we still discuss and tear out our hair over issues like power supply and credible elections and no end seems in sight for the resolution of these foundation stones of any modern democratic society. Issues serious minded countries like our sister Ghana have taken off the shelf still form the only menu of national discourse. I wonder how some present and past public office holders manage to look their foreign counterparts in the eye whenever they meet. A decent person would die of shame! Not our politicians. That human attitude of feeling ashamed of wilful failure is totally alien to them. That's why one will see the few convicted politicians in our midst still wielding influence especially in the ruling party.
The very idea of rebranding presupposes there is in existence another less desirable brand of whatever product seeking to be re-presented to the world. The Nigeria Project, up to now, simply stinks as evidenced above. St. Jerome, philosopher, said "if an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than the truth be concealed".
The people of Nigeria have often been touted as the happiest people on earth. And why not! How we love our owambes, parties in remembrance of our parents who died 30 years ago, how we love to show the world that we have arrived by celebrating lavish wedding anniversaries. You cannot take it away from the Nigerian, he loves to work hard and enjoy life. The Nigerian is warm and hospitable; never mind the deviants.
Now, to lord it over these peaceful, fun loving people who didn't ask to be lumped together in the first place, is the Nigerian politician who can best be described as a modern day dinosaur who will eat anything, not excluding human flesh. The warm Nigerian spirit is serially abused by these dinosaurs whose love for power and its attendant material booty, has extinguished their moral sense completely. The peaceful, friendly Nigerian culture, which indeed is the country's real traditional image, has been actively invaded and consumed by moral putrefaction exemplified and uplifted by her political leaders - the African concept of 'shame' has taken flight. (Only in Nigeria would you see a politician on trial for corruption, raising his arms and acknowledging cheers from crowd rented to sing his praises like some freedom fighter!). The damage the Nigerian politician has done to our ideas of good and bad is simply unquantifiable. And if a people are really what they think, then the Nigerian image has effectively been wrought out of context by brazen acts of infamy committed by our politicians against the Nigerian state.
The words of Pyotr Chaadeyev calls to mind the Nigerian politician "...anchorites in this world who have given it nothing, taken nothing from it, added not a single idea to the sum of human thought, contributed nothing to the perfection of human reason and distorted everything which that perfection has conveyed to us". The destruction of our moral values is most visible among those to whom we have entrusted governance. Winning elections in Nigeria has become a sure means of "making it in life".
And because, in the words of Sophocles, ancient Greek author, pride breeds the tyrant, swollen with ill-found booty, the Nigerian politician has inflicted on the people, a brand of misgovernance so transparently and patently evil that a desperate effort to rebrand the country has to be undertaken. The image of the country has been terribly battered by its leaders that Nigeria has ceased to be taken seriously in the comity of nations.
The image of a country is not set by drug barons, prostitutes or advance fee fraud scammers for every country has its own deviants and social misfits. Rather, the international image of a country is set by the response of governments to whichever socio-political challenges it faces. It is noteworthy that countries like South Africa , United States of America and a few South American countries have the highest crime rates in the world with violent crimes topping the crime charts. But it is equally noteworthy that these countries still remain business and tourist destinations. South Africa hosts the world next year.
In the mix of nations in the international market place, one distinguishing feature of an American is his pride in his country and his confidence in its willingness and ability to go to war if necessary in his defence. In addressing its domestic issues, the American sees a decent level of sincerity in his government's effort to tackle everyday issues. The response of any American government to everyday issues determines how long that government stays in power.
In our present democratic milestone, it is simply unthinkable that a whole country's university system has shut down entirely and there is no visible response of a civilian government to this development al catastrophe. In fighting crime, we have seen huge, mindboggling sums of money go into security with little to show for it. Most streets in Lagos provide their own security. Where police chiefs are regularly accused (occasionally convicted, even) of bribery and corruption, who then do you take a case to? Kidnappers now have a field day in the country. (A recent story in the east has it that the kidnappers even asked for 50,000 naira for the victim's feeding until the family raises the ransom!) As seen earlier, these crimes are very much present in other climes but the difference is that in the United States for instance, it is no longer fashionable to kidnap for monetary ransom for the simple reason that the FBI has an almost 100% success rate in solving such crimes. At any rate, the citizen is sure of a rapid and honest response. Not so here.
That is what governance is all about. Simply put, since man is unpredictable and deviants exist in every society, the burden of good governance (hence, image brand) lies not in the total prevention of social and economic ills, but in the provision of credible, pragmatic and proactive solutions in nation building. This, our past and present leaders have woefully failed to do.
Since the Nigerian political leader has refused to shed the garb of greed and narrow personal aggrandizement and honestly engage in true nation building as evidenced by a conscious and apparent radical reform of ALL sectors of national life, it is sincerely posited that any effort at rebranding Nigeria will fail abysmally. This is at the risk of sounding doomsday but if nothing is done to rehabilitate the already failed Nigerian state, any repackaging will only be cosmetic, ephemeral and a journey in self deceit.
The Nigerian politician is the greatest and most formidable obstacle in any honest effort to rebrand Nigeria. The Nigerian politician is the most visible Nigerian in the international sphere, yet it is he who is arrested in foreign cities with boxes of hard currency while the people whose welfare he has sworn to uplift languish in poverty. With one hand the Nigerian politician gestures frantically for economic aid while with the other hand, he shares loot from the public coffers he is entrusted with. Who put a rat to share cheese? Who put a robber in the bank to count money? The world simply laughs at us. They laugh at the deceit of the people who parade themselves as our leaders.
Because of the grave ills ravaging the Nigerian state as perpetrated by politicians and all sorts of 'leaders'(in uniform and out of it), the rebranding effort has to go beyond mere launching ceremonies where people are talked at, traditional dances held and government officials and politicians go back to the unfortunate culture of lootocracy which has become the norm in Nigeria. The average Nigeria simply sneers at such grandiose ceremonies.
The rebranding of Nigeria has to start from organising credible elections. The Federal Government, in its wisdom, threw away the only recommendations of the Uwais Panel on electoral reform that would have made any difference to the status quo, and adopted a whole lot of others which, speaking in a Nigerian way, is simply, old story.
The rebranding of Nigeria has to start from the political class. It is not for nothing that they say that a fish begins to rot from the head. Once the present government sheds its sleepy mien for once and summons up the needed political will to thoroughly overhaul the electoral system to eliminate abuses and reflect the true wishes of the people, only then would the system throw up men of integrity and purpose who are able to cleanse Nigeria and represent her to the world anew.
In the present scheme of things, politicians, who are the drivers of national life, owe no-one any sort of allegiance (except, of course, the allegiance they swear to in dark places), and since they have no score card to keep and no electorate to present it to, they are wayward in their dealings, considering their personal comfort paramount in office. Every decision concerning the welfare of the society is subject to personal interest. Vital sectors of economic and social life are hijacked by vultures that make pecuniary returns to the politician who made such ungodly predator-like incursion on our collective patrimony possible.
In a 'working country' (as against a failed one), the simple reason that a politician knows he has to answer to the voters periodically has been known to cause many to deliver on their electoral promises. No sane political party will go to polls with universities closed down for months on end, the financial sector in disarray, the much noised-about amnesty agreement with the Niger Delta militants badly threatened, extra-judicial killings still rife among the country's security forces, and the country's only societal opium, football, practically dead and buried. But believe me, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party will go to polls next year. And Nigeria, being what it is (concrete reality as against illusory image), the PDP will still win an 'earthquake victory' and claim a dubious mandate.
Until Nigeria adopts all recommendations of the Uwais Panel, criminalizes electoral offences and sets the machinery in motion to see corrupt politicians in jail (not the present EFCC arrest-detention- and-bail- for-life round robin), there will be no rebranding a product which is bad and stinks.
Redemptive effort to save our country from the menace of politicians who, hyena-like, foist themselves on the entrails of the nation, is only done through a credible electoral process. This process will throw up genuine leaders whose hands and faces will be clean enough to show to the world as Nigeria's new image.
Nigeria -Great Country!
Nigeria -Great People!
Nigeria -Horrible Leaders!
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