Charles Ajunwa
19 August 2008
Lagos — Former governor of Lagos State, Senator Bola Tinubu and renowned public commentator and social critic, Rev. Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, at a public lecture in Lagos last week engaged in robust intellectual discourse on the Nigerian project.
The duo blamed the nation's woes on the lack of a credible leadership. Charles Ajunwa who attended the lecture reports
The Problem of the nation's ineffective leadership resonated again in Lagos last Friday as former governor of Lagos State, Senator Bola Tinubu and renowned social critic, Rev. Father Mathew Kukah, engaged in an intellectual discourse on the Nigerian project attributing the country's social, economic and political problem to lack of committed leadership. The duo spoke at this year's second Nigerian Telecom Development Lecture (NITDEL) entitled "Nigeria: Search For Good Governance, Leadership". They declared that Nigerian leaders have failed the country for not addressing the nation's myriad of problems which has set the country's 's wheel of progress backward after over forty years of independence.
Tinubu, in his lecture titled " Developmental Democracy: A New Political Model Good For The Nigerian Nation" said the continuing dialogue and engagement on the critical and pressing issues of leadership and good governance in Nigeria are mainly tied to issues of poor decision making processes, endemic internal managerial and technical capacity deficits, depleted organizational skills and the educational system that is geared more towards teaching just enough to pass the exam rather than the teaching of critical skills.
Politically, Tinubu canvassed the view that Nigeria does not totally need new political and administrative structures now to tackle the political, leadership, social and economic ills in the country. He gave examples of United States of America and United Kingdom, which are older democracies, that are still retaining the same constitutions and political structures with just fewer amendments but essentially the same theme and spirit which has enabled them to successfully confront and overcome most social, political and economic challenges over the centuries.
According to him, "the key to survival and growth of the two constitutional democracies of America and United Kingdom, is that rather than respond to national challenges by junking the existing systems and replacing them with new systems and constitutions, they confronted the challenges head on and surmounted the problems by building enduring civil institutions that could absorb the shocks of confrontation and come on top"
He said "I have heard it argued that to compare our experiences with those of the United States and United Kingdom is not a valid comparison, that we are different in culture and history, that our future lies in a so-called 'home grown' model of governance. I say that this is disingenuous because all that this argument serves to do is to free us from the discipline of compliance with accepted and relatively successful political and governmental models, and allow us to excuse abhorrent behaviour on the grounds of 'peculiarity' of our circumstance; and it is also escapist because it continues to provide the excuse for political elite in not getting it substantially right so far, on the grounds that they are still searching for the perfect 'home grown' model," he said.
Tinubu, who governed Lagos between 1999 and 2007, cited the example of India, a developing country which in spite of being troubled and ravaged by political, sectarian and economic strife as Nigeria, has retained the same constitution since 1948 and has never adopted the "lazy short-cut of military rule and is gradually and steadily becoming the better for it."
The former governor who frowned at Nigerian's attitude of subscribing to the methodology of new political models, which he observed has been the case any time the country was faced with a problem, said it amounts to wasting massive amounts of time and resources trying to fashion out a new constitution and a new structure.
"We had a fairly balanced 1960 Constitution which recognised the autonomy of the regions and was fairer in its distribution of resources by derivation, but in trying dishonestly to address a purely political problem, we threw that away and replaced it with a so-called republican one in 1963; then we changed again in 1979 then in 1989, then 1995 and finally 1999. Indeed, the 1989 and 1995 constitutions never even took effect. And we all know what happened to the most recent and ill-fated attempt to amend the constitution.
"Where has all this to and fro got us? Nowhere really. None of these efforts at re-creating the country has been able to provide the tools by which we can frontally address our national problems. None of these cosmetic exercises has radically improved on the issues of nationhood, resource allocation, social development, the overall quality of life, the orderly transfer of political power and rational law and decision making in government to the betterment of the citizens. What we have spent most focus on is political power and term limits and such other issues rather than the real challenges of poverty and economy and equality and protection of rights," Tinubu noted.
Present development challenges, according to him, are monstrous and daunting requiring hard choices guided by a central and ethical national spirit. Nigeria, according to Tinubu, needs a 'new' political model that is one to the extent of its internal restructuring, new to the extent that is new more in spirit and application than the mere form, a new way of doing things rather than a new nomenclature.
Tinubu said Nigerians have the culture of 'premature triumphanilism', which is mere declaration of intent on the mistaken premise that merely by stating a thing would come to pass written by Fola Arthur-Worrey in his award winning book "The Daries of Mr. Michael." Nigerians should discard such mentality, according to him, if the country must attain its full potentials. He noted that Nigerian leaders forgot to work towards greatness.
"It was because of their failure to work at greatness, their failure to institutionalise a national spirit that within just six years of the birth of this 'great' nation, we were at each others throats. The mere fact that we so grandly declared the words "unity, faith, peace and progress" on our coat of arms did not mean that these things would come to us automatically. If we did not take time to build institutions that would assure the entrenchment of the ingredients of unity, faith etc., justice, fairness, tolerance and service then we are spouting empty rhetoric.
"'Can our national troubles be cured by the mere reconstruction and renaming of a faulty building? Can we really build an enduring nation on the back of a document whose provisions are observed more in their breach? What is responsible for our continuous disregard for and distrust in election and census result? Surely, if a country cannot agree within itself what its census figures are then surely that country falls short of even the loosest definition of the word /nation', he further explained.
Continuing the former governor explained that the greatest challenge to a modern state such as Nigeria, originally formed not by a mutual consensus of differing tribes and ethnic groups, or an accepted resolution of competitive interests but rather by British expediency driven by economic compulsion and imperial fiat, according to Tinubu, "is to find common meeting point between diverse interests that would be a binding force or spirit that would reflect the words of the first, preferred National Anthem: "Though tribe and tongue may differ, in brotherhood we stand."
According to him, the country threw away the old model and called itself "compatriots" even though the people still had not decided on the way forward or what route to take, noting that nation building is not a rushed process but that which requires a decision making process which is right from the beginning.
For Nigeria to make progress, he said that the decision making process has to be right, noting that nation building is not a rushed process '"it is not by coups and counter coups, by annulling elections, by ad-hoc solutions or short cuts or the blind acceptance of foreign prescriptions such as the 'structural adjustment' or the 'Washington Consensus' or debt relief or reduction in pubic spending. The process of decision making on national problems must be a rational one, one that reflects a representative consensus, one that is based on deep analysis and study of the issues and made in the best interests of the nation and its people. It is a failure of decision making process that has led us into a chronic, severe, even endemic power crisis in spite of all the resources quite literally thrown at the sector," he noted.
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