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Despite the demands from the media and from certain quarters of the public that he make an unequivocal pronouncement on the 'Third Term' issue, President Olusegun Obasanjo has astutely refused to go beyond his public commitments to defend the constitution, thus leaving his options open in keeping with the finest martial and political traditions.
These options include a third term agenda which could be accomplished via a simple constitutional amendment. For all the efforts of its framers to make constitutional amendment a tedious process, such a move would be carried out with considerable ease given the pliable nature of the National and State legislatures. It would also be eased by the enthusiasm of the state governors for reasons ranging variously from self interest to the fear of the EFCC.
And regardless of the posturing of certain western nations in the foreign media, when the rubber meets the road, an Obasanjo third term will be accepted on basis of pragmatism as a guarantor of the stability of vital crude oil flow from Nigeria. In light of mounting tensions in the gulf, Nigeria’s geostrategic value as a source of crude oil has increased greatly. In the absence of credible alternative political figures, an Obasanjo third term will not be seriously opposed by the western nations who are shameless and shrewd practitioners of real politik. Although, admittedly, there is an urgent need for constructive engagement between the Federal Government and the restive militants in the Niger delta. It was in the same way that the west postured significantly during the dark days of Abacha but held off from delivering truly damaging sanctions for fear that it would endanger their oil supply. Obasanjo is a man, to borrow from the Thatcherite lexicon, with whom the west "can do business."
There is another value to the apparently measured equivocation on the part of the president. The 'rumoured' third term agenda could also serve the president as a smokescreen while he nurtures his successor shielding him from premature exposure in our highly treacherous political terrain.
Despite the at times hysterical sensationalism that has attended the rumours of a third term there is at least one cogent reason that arguably justifies the idea. It is the need to pilot the fledgling reform program of the government into the safe waters of concrete irreversibility. Much of the institutional and economic reform processes set in motion by this administration remain vulnerable because there have been no concordant political reforms to safeguard them. This is the full meaning of the now terribly clichéd concept of 'continuity.' Many critics have taken issue with this decrying a situation in which an individual is deemed so vital to governance that the constitution is re-engineered for his sake. Frequently we hear statements like, "there are more than five thousand Nigerians capable of ruling this country." These views miss the point. We are right to decry the unhealthy significance of individuals in our governmental processes; it is truly something that needs to be rectified. However we cannot deny that in the highly personalized matrix of politics in Nigeria, individuals are vitally important. It is personalities that breathe life into policies and institutions. It is individuals that propel the machinery of government in Nigeria. This is our reality. It may be a less than satisfactory reality but nonetheless it is the step that we are on in the ladder of our political evolution.
Whenever we celebrate the work of the leading lights of this administration such as Okonjo-Iweala, Nuhu Ribadu, El-Rufai, Charles Soludo, Dora Akunyili et al, we are not necessarily hailing the agencies which they are heading but their personalities. NAFDAC existed long before Akunyili was appointed to its helm. The Ministry of the Federal Capital Territory existed long before El Rufai was made its head. We had a finance ministry long before Okonjo- Iweala was plucked away from the circles of international finance to head it. The same could be said of the Central Bank and a number of other government agencies. The point is that the vitality of these institutions flows directly from the vibrancy of the dynamic personages in charge of them. We seem to understand on a certain level that institutional efficiency essentially derives from personal leadership style and vision. The logical progression of this understanding would be to recognize the dexterity of the president who has assembled this remarkably competent group of technocrats to pursue an ambitious program of national transformation. Personnel continuity at some level is coterminous with policy continuity and thus institutional stability.
In an article, 'Stemming the Crisis in the Education Sector,' Vanguard columnist Pini Jason observed that, "…just as the damage done to the nation will take a long time to correct, sanitizing the education sector will take some years of continuous and determined reformation. Many reform measures do not bear fruit overnight." Jason went ahead to identify some "systemic lapses" in that sector: "…it hardly occurs to anybody that the turnover of administrators in the sector presents its own problems. The Obasanjo administration is in its fifth year, yet it has its third minister in the person of Professor F.N.C Osuji. If Prof Osuji stays as Minister of Education till 2007, there is no likelihood that he will be there after. Compare this with India where the minister of education is serving his thirteenth year in office, while the Canadian Education minister is over ten years in the saddle. The UNESCO Conference in education meets every two years. Research has shown that no Nigerian minister of education has attended the UNESCO Conference twice and none has attended the Commonwealth conference on education, which meets once every three years, twice." (Vanguard Sunday 19th December 2004).
To be sure, Pini Jason, a highly respected journalist is no third term campaigner. Yet in his article which I have quoted above, he has basically established a link between personnel discontinuity, policy discontinuity and the instability in the education sector. Ours is a proto-democracy in which strong personalities are needed initially to invigorate and stabilize our institutions. In older and stronger democracies, it is the institutions that empower the personalities. The paradox of a proto-democracy is that continuity of policy and personnel is what eventually guarantees or lays the foundation for strong institutions.
Having said all this, there is however nothing strange or alien about a proposed constitutional amendment to allow for a third term. (Note that extension of official terms is only one of many changes envisaged by the proposed constitutional amendment). As they say, 'comparisons are odious,' but critics are fond of decontextualized comparisons of Nigeria to other nations. They point to the eight year presidential term limit in America without adding that the 8 year limit was institutionalized only as recently as after the Second World War after President Roosevelt’s tenure. In 2003, some people talked about the so-called ‘Mandela option’- a reference to Madiba’s hand over to Thabo Mbeki after serving his term. They neglected to add that Mandela handed over to a trusted protégé within the context of a healthy political party, the African National Congress, (ANC Founded in 1912) with ideological traditions spanning over eighty years. There is no single political strain in Nigeria that has a history even half as long. These comparisons are odious because they cite developments that have no basis in Nigerian reality.
We are frequently compared to the south East Asian tiger economies; Nations that were, developmentally speaking, on the same level with Nigeria during the sixties. The former Prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew published 'From Third World to First World' a book charting Singapore’s evolution from poverty to economic super power status under his leadership. The book has since become a seminal classic frequently quoted by Nigerian social critics who are never slow to compare the progress of any nation with their own. It is often not stated that one key element of Singapore’s meteoric rise is political continuity. Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore for thirty-one years. The revered elder statesman himself makes no bones about his crucial role in the advance of his country. Many critics exhibit intellectual dishonesty by understating or out rightly ignoring this key component of Singapore’s progress. They have no problem citing examples that suit their arguments while overlooking instances that could buttress a contrary opinion. What makes the ‘Mandela option’ a less pedestrian comparison than say, a Lee Kuan Yew option?
Many of the Asian nations that we like to cite were not paragons of democracy. Their economic progress was essentially charted by undemocratic governments. This is a truth that is worthy of deeper discourse and examination. If non democracies or 'Guided democracies' as Suharto called them can guarantee economic well-being such as China is demonstrating now, then our definition of democracy dividends should be revised. These dividends are values and principles rather than whatever notions of 'better life' that we might have. We have to accept what recent historical evidence suggests: democracy and economic well being are not coterminous. I recognize the incidence of sit tight leadership in third world countries but that does not wholly invalidate arguments for a possible extension of tenure.
Fears that a post Obasanjo Government could reverse the gains of the reform program are quite understandable and entirely reasonable. Policy discontinuity is a major factor in the dysfunction of the Nigerian state. For instance, Lagos state before 1999 was governed by the urbane military administrator Brigadier General Buba Marwa who succeeded in taming the street gangs known as ‘Area boys’ and deploying them to socially beneficial effect as road maintenance workers under the Direct Labour Agency scheme. However, for reasons unfathomable to this day (apart from their obvious utility as political thugs) the Bola Tinubu administration scrapped the DLA without instituting any other mechanism for the continued rehabilitation of the area boys. The result: multiplied numbers of brigands now purveying suburban terrorism all over the Lagos metropolis. This is an example of how society as a whole pays dearly for policy discontinuity.
However third term agenda or not, the key weakness of our present socio-political reality is the absence of a credible opposition party; and indeed the absence of credible alternatives to the subsisting leadership structure. This is what the third term hysteria has truly revealed_ the frightening lack of ideologically centered political platforms. I believe that this is our greatest problem. Personalized politics thrives because of the widespread ideological poverty in our nation. Thus influence tends to revolve around personality cults rather than ideas. The truth that should be readily apparent to discerning observers of our polity is that we have no political parties in Nigeria, merely temporary and highly unstable alignments of interests. This is important in understanding the dynamics of governance that frequently pit the Obasanjo administration against the PDP in defiance of the norms of party solidarity. The point of course, is that there is no party solidarity because there are no parties. Consider, for instance, the speed with which the ANPP divorced itself from its own flag bearer, General Muhammadu Buhari after the 2003 elections. What we have in Nigeria is basically a president with a bold sweeping (albeit not terribly well articulated) vision of national transformation aided by a handful of brilliant reform minded technocrats and a battalion of political foot soldiers who do not necessarily share his convictions. The rest of the space is occupied by all sorts of political jetsam and flotsam and then a minority that are in true ideological opposition to the current administration.
While many occupy themselves with debating the rumour or reality of a third term, I believe that the real question is 'where are the credible alternatives?' ; 'Where are the beacons of new ideas for the next republic?' I wonder why the same energy that we have invested in denouncing something that is still speculative cannot be committed to investigating the lack of viable options in our political space. We have to broaden the parameters of discourse beyond the so called third term agenda to consider the big picture of Nigerian politics.
The spectacular failure of PRONACO to convene its own much hyped national conference has shown us that whatever syndrome afflicting the political class has since infected even the political puritans – the so called progressives. The formation of the MRD and the MDD offers no cause for optimism. Their founders are clearly one time promoters and later losers of the power games of the PDP’s reign and therefore are not credible alternative voices for today. The CNPP, the motley assortment of losing parties in the 2003 elections is content to snipe from the sidelines.
The AD and the ANPP are virtually dead. And the PDP itself is teetering on the brink of an implosion; it is after all only a vast conglomerate of interests held together in an unstable geometry of competing egos. This is the crisis of ideology and the lack of vision that has stunted politics and governance thus far. The puritan progressives are limited by the bankruptcy of their military era isolationist anti-government approach to national issues; an approach they have stubbornly refused to upgrade while confusing newspaper punditry for political relevance.
Their benumbing refusal to participate in the National Political Reform Conference (NPRC) in 2005 is an example of how the puritans shut themselves out of national debate and end up hurling criticisms from the sidelines. The challenge which PRONACO is failing to rise to is not the organization of another national conference but the formation of a broad based ideologically centered opposition party. On the other hand, the political mercenaries of the mainstream are hamstrung by their genuine lack of alternative vision and cowered by their vulnerability to the unpredictable, selective, and at times hypocritical morality of an imperial presidency. For example, very few of the opposition parties can survive scrutiny of their accounts particularly with regard to the grants they received from INEC during the 2003 elections.
The issues and the deficiencies of our proto-democracy are to be expected as a natural by product of our nation’s evolutionary process. We must now focus our attentions on the issues that will define a possible post Obasanjo era. In my opinion, we major so much on a third term conspiracy theory as an escape from proffering an alternative vision for the future. It is clear that none of the parties in existence right now is an alternative to the ruling PDP. They are merely modulations of the culture of political mediocrity embodied by the ruling party.
A truly ideological party should emerge from the ranks of the civil society rather than the political mainstream. The Nigerian Labour Congress NLC and some other civil society bodies were on their way to evolving into a political mass movement. But having exhausted a tired and obsolete confrontational approach and run out of ideas, their leaders have shied away from the arena of political participation and constructive engagement.
The media should rise to the occasion by umpiring an electoral process based on ideas rather than on names. All too often, the media has been complicit in the depreciation of our politics and governance with a frustrating lack of depth in its analysis of national issues. It takes little imagination or intellect to deride those in leadership. It takes far more to propose constructive alternatives. This is why for over twenty years we have spoken with an insufferably smug self righteousness about leadership failure while failing to craft change.
The media could make the next elections a contest of ideas by helping us ask the right questions. What do the possible candidacies of Atiku, Babangida, or Orji Kalu mean for the nation in terms of ideological and policy direction? What ideas are they bringing to governance beyond the worn-out and perforated theses on ‘good leadership?’ On the other hand, we know what to expect to a reasonable extent from a third term for Obasanjo. There would be more privatization, more liberalization, anti-corruption measures would be pursued (however flawed) and there would be greater entrenchment of due process protocols in our institutions. Consequently the economy would continue to grow (particularly the Agriculture and solid minerals sectors) with more opportunities for local and foreign investors. The point here is that a speculated third term agenda seems to have more ideological clarity and substance than the stealth campaigns of those that are purported to nurse ambitions for 2007.
Personally I would like President Obasanjo to hand over to a successor in 2007 and retire after his service to Nigeria. I hope that the next one year will enable him accelerate his reforms and lay the foundations for the next generation of leadership. This would be ideal. I concede that an inability to point to a trust worthy successor (If that is a problem) after all these years is a deficiency in leadership which after all, is supposed to be reproductive.
But I have to say that honestly I see no alternatives right now among those jostling for the presidency. I see only a real cause for panic when I look at our political class.
Realism demands that I recognize the justifications for amending the constitution to enable the president run for a third term in office. Much of the debate over the so-called third term issue has been obscured by hysteria, name calling and ad Hominem attacks on persons. Demonizing a messenger does not and cannot invalidate his message. It only reduces what ought to be robust national debate from the level of ideas to that of a personality contest of the cheapest kind. We have to recognize the fact that corporate Nigeria’s whispered interest in the third term agenda is largely borne out of legitimate fears about the sustainability of the economic gains that have been achieved thus far beyond 2007.
Not every one who considers an Obasanjo third term a viable idea is a mercenary or a huckster. Doubtless there are some third term advocates who might fit that description but then again it comes with the territory of politics. Politics in any clime is not about absolute altruism or selflessness. At its best, it situates governance in the confluence between enlightened self interest and the public good. At its worst, it is a thoroughly self centered pursuit of power; a hideously disfigured model of leadership. Some of us that are willing to consider the third term option are doing so with the former in mind.
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Posted by Robot| 18.02.2006 19:46