Time to change the story

Iwas reading yesterday an interview that Emir of Borgu Alhaji Muhammadu Sani Haliru Dantoro, Kitoro IV granted to Leadership Sunday. He said President Muhammadu Buhari cannot be expected to clean up the mess that PDP left behind in sixteen years. The royal father is correct; we have been trained from childhood to nod in agreement at whatever a royal father says and I am not about to depart from that path.

What the Emir said re-echoed what government spokesmen say whenever they are accused of failure in one area or another: that they are trying to clean up the mess [or rot] that PDP left behind and that they cannot clean up in three years a rot that took sixteen years to accumulate. Information and National Orientation Minister Alhaji Lai Mohammed is the officer who perfected this excuse, recently joined by higher officials. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said last week, for example, that the APC government will not stop blaming PDP for the mess it created. It is a risky strategy because Nigerians could grow tired of hearing the blames and begin to see them as a lame excuse.

APC did a lot of blaming PDP before the 2015 election. They did it so effectively that majority of Nigerians agreed with them and voted for change. Now, how does it sound if, after three years and with another election already looming, APC keeps saying the rot that PDP left behind is so deep that it is having trouble clearing it? As it is, this game of heaping blames on past rulers has been going on in Nigeria for far too long and it could be a factor in our paralysis. In 1999 for example when the military regime was about to hand over, most of the country’s top politicians congregated in PDP and they told us that they were coming together irrespective of ideological differences in order to kick out the military, which they blamed for everything going wrong in Nigeria.

Just before the 1999 elections NTA arranged a debate between the two presidential candidates, Chiefs Olusegun Obasanjo and Olu Falae. Obasanjo refused to turn up for the debate but he later turned up for a lone interview. He said, very convincingly at the time, that Nigeria had not taken one step forward since he handed over power in 1979. He reeled out figures about the power stations, airports, oil refineries, pipelines, depots, Nigeria Airways planes and Nigeria National Shipping Line ships that he left behind in 1979, which he said were destroyed rather than built upon. In the first four years of this Republic, then Vice President Atiku Abubakar also harped endlessly on this theme, blaming the former military regimes for all the rot PDP inherited. Just imagine, Obasanjo was in charge for eight of the 16 years of PDP rule that we now describe as the rot.

Not that the soldiers too did not blame others for the rot they inherited. Brigadier Sani Abacha’s infamous speech of 31 December, 1983 said our hospitals had been reduced by Second Republic rulers to “mere consulting clinics,” among other charges. Most Nigerians agreed at the time that the civilians had totally messed things up, but by 1999 matters came full circle with civilians accusing the soldiers of totally messing things up.

When the Second Republic actors took over in 1979, they too blamed the soldiers for killing the country’s founding fathers in 1966, for causing the Civil War, for bungling the 1973 census, for reneging on a promise to handover in 1976 and for squandering money on All Africa Games and FESTAC, among other heinous crimes. The Gowon, Murtala and Obasanjo regimes however escaped charges of non performance because the 1970-79 military era witnessed the most rapid expansion of national infrastructure especially schools, roads, airports, hospitals, seaports, oil refineries, oil depots, factories, houses, barracks, secretariats, planes and ships. The soldiers had the luck of Oil Boom but they also had National Development Plans.

Now, don’t forget that when the soldiers overthrew the First Republic on January 15, 1966 they also reeled out a litany of charges against the Founding Fathers. Corruption, tribalism, nepotism and violence all featured in the allegations. Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu even added homosexuality to the list. Some people thought that salvation had come with the 1966 coup; they only had a rethink when we advanced fast into a Civil War that consumed more than a million lives. And to think that only five years before that coup, the Founding Fathers had lowered the Union Jack in Lagos and this country exploded in celebration that the Brits were gone with their racism and colonial plunder.

I am just thinking. Everybody who took over power in Nigeria spent quality time accusing his predecessor of creating a rot and then pretending to clean it up. Old timers have heard that again and again. In the 1970s a story made the rounds in Sokoto that a newly arrived military governor told Sultan Abubakar III that he had come to clean the mess left by his predecessor. The Sultan, who was old and had already been on the throne for four decades reportedly said, “Even the other one, that was what he said when he first came.”

Today, with more reason, we can borrow the old Sultan’s wisdom and tell rulers to please take it easy about all these blame games. Instead of blames, I think it will be better if our rulers unroll a catchy, compact and visionary agenda of rule and proceed to execute it with the fire and fury of the Murtala era, or at least with the steady and deliberate speed of the Obasanjo military era. When Hercules was told to clear the Augean stables in one day, he did not sit down and blame the horses for dropping so much shit. Instead he diverted a river through the stables and quickly washed away the rot.

Other nations do not do things this way. In 1958 when Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, he did not spend time blaming the Qin, Han and Shang emperors for China’s poor state. Instead he rolled out a program to accelerate its economic and social development and within two years a lot of progress was claimed in many sectors, though Westerners said it was a lie. Two decades later when Deng Xiaoping launched The Four Modernisations program, I did not read many speeches of him blaming Mao, Chou En-lai, Chiang Kai-shek or Sun Yat-sen of leaving behind a rot. Instead his program unrolled with the swiftness of the Yangtze River and in three short decades it has made China an economic superpower, while we are still trading blames.

Not only the Chinese. When Emperor Meiji embarked upon Japan’s transformation in 1867, he did not spend quality time blaming earlier emperors, Shoguns or even the Sun Goddess. Instead he unrolled a national program that within fifty years propelled Japan to the ranks of industrial powers. I marvel at the transformation of Vietnam since 1975. Its leaders could have easily sat down and blamed the French, Americans, Ngo Dinh Diem and General Nguyen Van Thieuý for the country’s total destruction in 1954-75.

Even the money that Madam Diezani and Colonel Sambo Dasuki were said to have wasted could be recouped by the national economy within a short time with a smart economic program. In my primary school days I read a booklet that said the US economy grew in 1965 by an amount equal to the GNP of Canada. If we have that kind of growth, we wouldn’t be fretting too much about what we lost in the past, though we should retrieve it if we can. We should however remember that twenty years after his death, we are still talking about retrieving the Abacha loot. So please, isn’t there somebody in Nigeria who can produce a visionary, compact program of rapid national economic expansion?