‘ If We Don’t Fix Our Politics, It Would Be Difficult
Pastor Bamijoko David Okupe has walked great paths in marketing communications from LTC Advertising through Insight Communications to branding and nation building. He shared insights with LEO SOBECHI on Nigeria’s socio- political situation, especially his
TAs the build- up to another election cycle gears up, how would you assess the performance of the Buhari administration from 2015 to date? HERE’S a statement that says, “when the good king rules, there’s joy in the land and when a bad king rules, there’s pain in the land.”
When we talk about the Buhari ( President Muhammadu Buhari) administration, like I keep telling people, although we have to describe the administration by the leader, but whatever an organisation becomes is not solely the function of the leadership as in the helmsman. It is as much a function of the people around him that work together with him. If you heard that the President of a country has been successful and has run a good government, it is because he has surrounded himself with good people, who are able to deliver on the premise of the administration.
So, if you look at world administrations in history, you’ll find that apart from the leadership, the people that formed the engine room, the decision makers, have to be at the same tempo with the leadership. One of the challenges that I see in the Nigerian nation, and I stand to be corrected, is that many administrations have failed, not only the Buhari administration, but also many administrations have failed in succession.
If you remember 2015, when then the clamour was on by the then APC ( All Progressives Congress), to kick out PDP, so that PDP doesn’t ever rule this country again. That presupposes that the PDP administration had failed the people, rightfully so. Having kicked out PDP and now APC has come in, if you look at the indices, it’s not quite much better than it was. To now locate the blame, to now decide where we locate the blame of the administration, we talk about all the key players. I will talk about the President, I will talk about the Vice President, I’ll talk about the ministers, everybody was involved and everybody is still involved.
We all know that the tree doesn’t make a forest and because we have what is supposedly a balance of government, you have the executive arm, you have the legislature, and then you have the judiciary; intrinsically, these three arms are supposed to form government and make government work effectively and deliver. We see the charade and the mess that is going on at these three levels and so, if we’re to be honest, I will not say that it has been a good journey largely.
Every year before elections in Nigeria is usually characterised by extreme hardship. I think the political class deliberately orchestrates it that way, so that there will be more poverty; there will be more hardship. By the time they do that, the little inducements that they give, appears to be very, very big and lures the people to do the things that they want them to do. So, the weaponisation of poverty in itself does not make the electorate to think straight and if the political class must continue to hold on to people like that, they have to keep them at the level that they are so that they’re not able to think otherwise.
Less than 12 months from now, another election will hold and the way the country is, the preparations and so on, do you think the political parties have shown some shining lights of excellence?
There is no political party in Nigeria with any shining light of excellence. None, as we speak today. There may be tomorrow, because what makes a political party a shining light? Let us take one very, very critical component, an ideology. There is no political party in Nigeria today that is based on any ideological principle.
I work with a couple of political candidates; they are largely a visionless people. When you talk about nation- building or when you talk about running a country, I hear contestants or candidates of political parties talking about infrastructure, talking about doing stuff about education, talking about a lot of activities, but we all know that activities are not visions. Activities evolve from visions. Do you know of any political party or any candidate of note at any level at all, whether presidential, whether governorship, whether whatever, who has come out with a clear, concise vision to say that the vision of my administration is XYZ and ABC and that on the basis of that vision these are the things that we are going to do? What we hear them talk about mostly are activities they are going to engage in. And that is why we find that even when those activities are done, that is if they are done, the environment does not experience meaningful growth and development, because houses and bridges don’t make people. They can make people’s lives easier, but they don’t make people.
So, you know, there’s a time there was vision 2020; 2020 has come and gone. So, the visionlessness of leadership of the political parties in question makes it very obvious that there cannot be any shining light.
If you look at most progressive nations of the world, the political parties that vie for positions in those countries have clear ideologies that are driving them. Now, if you look at the Nigerian situation, APC came and said PDP was no good to Nigerians, so Nigerians should come out and vote PDP out. As we speak now, a quantum of the number of the EXPDP now form the APC and we are seeing a lot of cross carpeting going on now; some people crossing over. Of course, it is easy for them to cross over, because there is no ideological basis driving anything. So, you can really be anywhere at any point in time.
Unfortunately, if we don’t fix our politics, it would be difficult for us to fix any other thing. To the extent that we have structures, no political parties that I know in Nigeria consciously, intentionally and deliberately, galvanises membership. If you know any, tell me. Because there’s nothing to offer, nobody can say we want you to come and be part of this party, because this is what this party stands for. I don’t know what any political party stands for.
So, there cannot be any shining light, we are not yet there, our maturity as a people, and even the politics that we run, is not mature enough to be that beacon you’re talking about.
A contentious issue defining this build up to 2023 election year is zoning between the North and the South. How has this leadership selection conversation come to revolve around zoning?
Well, this zoning thing, it’s a very tricky concept and I will say it exactly the way I see it and no harm intended. Zoning and power rotation has dominated public discourse and I keep on asking myself, what does it matter where a good president comes from? What does it matter? Whether he’s a northerner, whether he’s a
Southerner. With all these zoning things, where has it really landed us? Where has it? I’ve tried to go through the constitution; I don’t see any zoning in the constitution. I think the whole zoning concept came about as a result of the amalgamation.
At the country’s independence, if we didn’t practise federal character, then we may not have the trajectory of a lot of people from the North occupying very sensitive positions, because at that time, the North was supposedly disenfranchised; there was gap between the educational standard. So, the federal character, which was actually introduced by the colonial masters, became a basis to have some inclusiveness, to give everybody some sense of belonging.
But, the federal character, the way it was intended, is it the way that it’s being practised now? If we look at it very objectively, the disenfranchised people have taken the federal character thing to levels that I do not believe the originators intended, because now, it has brought about a lopsided arrangement and nobody is asking questions.
If we look at the issue of zoning as we are discussing it now, I think it’s just mischief; it is just mischief for some part of the country to cleverly hold on to power, because if you look at the history of zoning across the two ruling party divide, it’s as if the two parties have discussed together to say that, ‘ oh you know this is the way we are going to go.’
I will not be surprised if in the zoning or no zoning agreements that we have, we still have two prominent candidates from one part of the country. So, the citizens really have no choice but to choose from them. In 2015 and 2019 election, it was between
Buhari and Atiku Abubakar. Now, you can do all the Northeast, Northwest, North central, but typically, there was no candidate that was as prominent as those two candidates; whether the party zoned it or not at that time. Now, what is going on is also not likely to give a different outcome to that.
So, I think the zoning thing is just a mischief used to hoodwink the rest of us. For me personally, and we need to go to the point as a people, where we do not think of leadership in terms of ethnic divides or religion divide. But, it goes down also to the ideology that we’re talking about. Because there is no ideology, we have a largely illiterate and uninformed citizenry that can be manipulated and hoodwinked, to go in particular ways all the time. The combination of all of these things makes citizens themselves to take uninformed positions that are not informed