A Tragedy Sixty-Four Years in the Making

As is often the case in moments of crisis, the current ugly situation in Nigeria has provided occasion for aggressive finger-pointing. That public indignation is overwhelmingly directed at the incumbent Tinubu administration is perhaps to be expected. Among other things, it has been blamed for withdrawing the subsidy on fuel—the lifeblood of the Nigerian economy—without a concrete plan for alleviating the discomfort to the average Nigerian that was bound to follow; for not doing enough to bring widespread insecurity under control; for letting inflation run rampant (according to the National Bureau of Statistics, food inflation in the country peaked at 35.4 percent in January); and for failing to take advantage of a deep fund of Nigerian expertise at home and abroad.

As I said as part of my testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa last week, this criticism of the Tinubu administration is not unwarranted. After a brief spell in which it appeared on the verge of winning over a justly skeptical public, it has quickly regressed into mediocrity, putting together a bloated cabinet that is long on political connections and short on merit, and engaging in reckless appropriation even as it hypocritically hectors the average Nigerian to embrace the virtues of austerity.

Subsequently, a combination of insecurity, anger at the rising cost of everyday items and services, and deepening distrust of the government has unleashed public outrage, leading to protests against economic hardship in several urban centers. The Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) has called for nationwide protests next week.       

Nonetheless, while the foul mood in the country is understandable, and while anger at the Tinubu administration is not misdirected, it would be a grievous error to put all the blame for Nigeria’s woes on its shoulders. If anything, in its most essential characteristics, the administration is a perfect epitome of the Nigerian condition, and much as Nigerians may not like to hear it, the embodiment of a system into which every Nigerian has made a contribution one way or another over the past several decades. Put differently, it would have been surprising if the country did not produce precisely this kind of administration, or found itself wrapped up in its current contradictions.   

If that is the case, it behooves us to avoid the temptation to presentism and instead look bravely into the origins of the Nigerian crisis. This is not to deny that certain things that must be done immediately as a matter of urgency, chief among them the restoration of public safety and public confidence in law enforcement. Across sixty-odd years of independence, rarely has the average Nigerian felt more insecure and vulnerable, and it goes without saying that no policy measure can be expected to succeed if people do not feel safe in their homes or on the streets. While insecurity in Nigeria has many dimensions and layers, the emergent consensus on state police is a move in the right direction, and, on paper, should increase public safety by devolving decisions on security to agents and officials at the local level.

Yet, as most Nigerian watchers know all too well, the fact that something works on paper does not mean that it will work in reality in Nigeria, and apprehension that state police, though an obvious improvement on the current Abuja-centric status quo may not necessarily be the magical panacea for insecurity in Nigeria, is not unfounded. In other words, it seems plausible that, even under local auspices, policing will continue to be riddled with the same impunity and flagrant disregard for the rights and integrity of the individual.     

Why is this so?

The simple answer to this complicated question is that the Nigerian crisis, though political in its manifestation, is in fact normative at its root, and will most likely remain beyond the grasp of the most well-intended policy measures so far as it continues to be conceived in narrowly political terms.

Perennial agitation over the 1999 Constitution is one example of such conceptual misapprehension, indexed most recently by a bill by sixty Nigerian lawmakers seeking “constitutional alterations for a transition to parliamentary system of government.” For the sponsors of the bill, a transition to parliamentary system is necessitated by a desire to eliminate “the imperfections of the presidential system," among them “high cost of governance” and “excessive powers vested in the members of executive” (sic). The point is not that the 1999 Constitution is perfect. It is not, and being an offspring of military rule would seem to be the least of its problems. The point that the legislators, albeit well-meaning, seem to be missing is that no amount of constitutional tinkering will avail in the continued absence of the spirit that makes constitutions work. Constitutions come and go. It is that spirit, an intangible vital force that regulates the conduct of both lawmakers and the public alike that, enduring, makes democracy possible. The poverty of references to it in both the relevant literature and policy conversations points to a striking ignorance of its crucial importance.

A disproportionate focus on the state or the executive is another aspect of this misunderstanding. Again, the point is not that these are not deserving of criticism, but that lopsided attention can lead to a neglect of the dire situation at various subnational levels. To take just one example, local government in Nigeria is a crime scene more or less, and Matthew Page’s reference to it as “a kleptocracy in which those who govern steal from the governed” does not begin to capture the scale of the plundering that goes on there. What applies at the local government level is true for the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). According to Govspend, a government spending tracker, “at least N159.6 billion was paid into private accounts by MDAs in six years.” According to the Abuja-based International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), the Nigerian government “each year allocates billions of naira to non-statutory institutions-agencies that are not established or backed by the country’s extant laws.”

All this points to a need for course-correction that goes beyond finding faults with a single administration, granted that its guilt is not in dispute. At the very least, the reflex dirigisme that authorizes such freewheeling spending must be abjured, followed by an urgent trimming down of a state that is so large as to have no conception of its own extremities.

Either Nigeria learns to swim, or it sinks.