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Consider these scenarios:

An employee is
fired for his poor performance on the job, and his lack of integrity.
Two weeks later, he calls his previous employer to ask whether he can
use his/her name as a reference for the application for his next job.
He gets that positive reference.

A CEO is disgraced
out of his role, but immediately finds another high profile role, and
then another and another. The same applies to our political landscape,
as our underachieving rulers continue to reinvent themselves under new
parties and in new roles.

Why do we Nigerians
give each other multiple chances, even when we have demonstrated our
inability to change – or to deliver results – over and over again? From
a very young age, my parents instilled the concept of blacklisting into
me: the belief that through my actions, I could bring disrepute to the
family name. The belief that whatever act I committed would not be
easily forgotten, and that I would not easily get a second chance. The
reverse held true as well – that I would enjoy the benefits of the
goodwill that my parents’ and siblings’ excellent track-records would
bestow on me. Thankfully, I enjoyed and benefited from the later.
People often assumed that I was smart and hardworking, simply because
my parents and two older sisters had proven themselves, over and over
again.

This belief system
in the importance of a track-record was further reinforced during my
university years. As a first year student in the university, the career
counsellors often spoke about the close knit circle in corporate
America, and how easy it was to get blacklisted by all firms, based on
bad behaviour or poor performance at one firm. As students, we studied
the stories of alumni Michael Milken and Joseph Jett who had brought
shame and financial ruin to their companies because of their unethical
behaviours. I remember the mood in the lecture rooms after each of
these sessions, when we often swore to ourselves that we would never
become ‘subject material’ for case studies on ethical failures.

Unfortunately,
there are no similar case studies being conducted in Nigerian schools.
What is it about Nigerians that makes us forgive and forget so easily?

Please, do not tell
me it is our religion! Neither the Bible nor the Koran record examples
of individuals who repeatedly exhibited moral failure and were promoted
to higher positions or reinvented themselves over and over again. Yes,
Jesus instructed his followers to forgive seven times seven a day, and
Saul had a conversion experience, but Jesus and his disciples never
celebrated or promoted mediocrity and immoral behaviour. Please, do not
tell me it is our culture. It is not…or it was not, until we made a
mockery of tradition by putting up chieftaincy titles for sale to the
highest bidder.

A famous idiom
states: ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!” In
the case of Nigeria, shame on us for being fooled over and over again.

Yes, we need a
national ID system that would prevent people from falling through the
cracks under new identities, and we need strong institutions that can
prosecute and punish offenders, but while we wait for all of these to
take hold, we need to rebuild the fabric of our society, and re-instil
in ourselves and our children the importance of a name – and a
track-record.

Whatever happened
to those songs that we used to sing as children? “Good name is better
than silver or gold, and nobody, nobody, nobody can buy good name!” or
“Ezi o mume Ezi o mume, Ezi o mume, were ezi o mume di ka uwe – Good
behaviour, Good Behaviour, wear it every day, just like you put on your
clothes…”

Let’s not regard this as being too idealistic, or nostalgic. We
should teach our children the importance of a good name, and the
realities of blacklisting. And during the upcoming elections, we should
not give second or third chances to people who have demonstrated their
inability to deliver results.

The ongoing general
elections present another opportunity for Nigerian voters to prove that
they prefer the collective interest of their country to religious,
ethnic, regional, or other sectarian agenda. It is important that
Nigerian voters vote for their country, for its survival, stability,
peace, and progress.

The irony that
Nigerians must deal with, however, is their use of the polls once more
to express their unwillingness to rise above primordial interests,
indeed their unwillingness to bring to an end the culture of voting
against nationhood.

Nigerians want
Nigeria, but it seems their hearts are far from the nation-state. Their
hearts seem to be with their ethnic groups, religions, and regions.
Nigerians, in the ongoing elections, would again pretend to be neutral,
while secretly nursing the hope that nation-state is defeated by the
internal identities they subscribe to. Democratic politics offers them
a wonderful opportunity to be hypocritical, to hunt with the federal
hound while running with the ethno-religious hare.

Any candidate that
hopes to win votes across ethnic lines enlists religion, consolidated
by the notion of region. Is anyone surprised? When ethnicity has an
affair with religion, there are no limits to what they can do to make
sure that their scandalous will is done. The brethren of the faith are
happier that they are kinsmen of the tribe. And the twain shall become
one in an unfortunate political marriage. It tends to make things
easier, helping to resolve the dual moral problem of having to choose
between religious affiliation and ethnicity as deciding factors.

Election victory in
Nigeria is seen as the victory of the group, not really the victory of
a particular candidate, or the victory of the entire society. The group
has been to battle to ‘capture’ Nigeria, and its representative, its
commander, alias election candidate, needs to realise this. Is anyone
surprised that after the election, the elected politicians spend a
greater part of their tenure trying to solve the arithmetic of which
reward is adequate for their ‘immediate constituencies’?

Nigeria, in the
choice ladder of many Nigerians, always comes last, for, like a goat
fed by many, the nation-state is such a bastard that cannot be won over
to love only one feeder. Pastors, imams, traditional rulers, executive
members of unions, and relatives have no right to decide for us the
candidates to vote for. Perhaps the difficulty is that their roles as
gatekeepers in the groups we subscribe to are frequently confused with
their roles in the political lives of other citizens. One is not
surprised that, in trying to influence the political decisions of their
fellow citizens, they present their personal views as the ‘right’ and
therefore imperative paths to be followed by others.

Does one expect any
magic from Nigeria’s general elections? Is it not the same citizens who
practise ethnocentrism at the workplace, in social interactions, even
at their places of worship that would go to the polls to elect
‘credible’ leaders for the country?

If, in ordinary
student union and other elections in Nigerian universities, one finds
that the ethnicity and religious affiliations of candidates are
significant variables, what else does one expect university-based
voters, for instance, to demonstrate when they go to the polls in a
federal election? Even book people like us vote against the survival of
Nigeria sometimes! I really pity Nigeria, for its true nationalism is
starved and will continue to be so for a long time. The nation will
continue to be the casualty of the so-called attempts at redeeming it.
Its carcass will continue to be fed to ravenous ethnic, religious, and
regional hunting hordes.

As long as
Nigerians focus on the ethnic, religious, and regional differences of
candidates, they will continue to vote against the country in
elections. As many Nigerians go out this month to help to ‘capture’
Nigeria for sectarian interests, one must not fail to remind them that
in doing so, they make victims of themselves.

It is a mark of
courage, as well as a highly desirable thing, for one to decide to vote
against the sectarian interests of one’s ethnic group, religion, or
region, or even one’s political party. To vote against ideas that put
Nigeria at the service of the ethnic group, religion, or region, is to
declare one’s genuine democratic freedom.

Seek ye first to topple the secret agenda of your own group as a
Nigerian, and your vote would indeed count as a tool for fixing the
broken-down Nigerian machine.

Anyone wanting to
understand the interest generated by the harmonised version of the 2011
appropriation bill recently passed by both houses of the National
Assembly will do well not to look too hard at the numbers.

Until we
comprehensively reform the framework for managing public expenditure in
the country, budget numbers would not be worth the fancy paper on which
they are written. Notwithstanding, the numbers in question tell quite a
story.

The executive bill
for this year’s appropriations, which went to the National Assembly,
was for N4.2tn. At N4.9tn, the National Assembly’s appropriation bill
thus represents a 17 per cent increase on the version sent in by the
executive.

In addition, the
N1.3tn deficit included in the National Assembly’s bill is equivalent
to 4.3 per cent of the economy’s total output. Against this, the fiscal
responsibility act recommends a 3 per cent limit on the annual budget
deficit as a share of GDP.

Consider, however,
that in the period between when the executive sent the appropriations
bill to the National Assembly, and when the latter agreed on the
harmonised version, the price of the major financial driver of our
national budget, hydrocarbon exports, had moved from around US$85 per
barrel (pb) to a little under US$120pb.

With the crisis in
the Middle East and North African region expected to dominate the oil
price outlook all through this year, crude oil prices should remain
elevated well into the first quarter of 2012. Therefore, there is
enough on the revenue side to support higher public spending figures.

Running on this
argument, the harmonised version of the 2011 appropriations bill pushed
the oil price benchmark for the budget up from the US$65pb with which
the executive made its calculations to a more robust US$75pb.

Then, there is the
huge public infrastructure problem with which a country that has the
development rhetoric spot-on must contend with. I do not believe that
the new consensus around the public-private partnership (PPP), being
the new route to plugging the nation’s infrastructure hole, absolves
government of further spending in this regard.

Even if one
concedes that the burden of national provision of physical
infrastructure is now private, that still leaves us with the need to
meet the generally accepted indicative ratios for public spending on
health and education, if the millennium development goals are to make
any sense. Even the much talked about transition in the role of the
public sector from service provider to regulator has to be funded.

Then there are the
gaps in social infrastructure with which we have had to contend. The
rot here is no less severe than with our roads, railways, etc. Except
of course the intent ultimately is to add the police and the judiciary
to the PPP framework, the spending needed over the medium-term to bring
the criminal justice system up to scratch is large, and would come
entirely from the public budget. We could do with a police force with
fewer officers, but a lot more technology. The judiciary too would
benefit from having at least a functioning and networked personal
computer in every courtroom in the country.

On this reasoning,
if we are to spend money on these as part of our development
aspirations, why does the finance minister think the harmonised version
of the 2011 appropriations bill “un-implementable”? Certainly, not
solely because a budget on this basis is likely to be expansionary or
inflationary.

To begin with, the
original bill sent by the president to the National Assembly also
included its own deficit: equivalent to 3.6 per cent of GDP. So, it is
not just the fact of a deficit that flaws the National Assembly’s
spending argument.

Admittedly, the one
deficit is larger than the other, but at what point is a deficit
expansionary, or capable of driving inflation pressures? At 3.0 per
cent, 3.6 per cent or 4.3 per cent of GDP?

Evidently, in
cavilling at the budget numbers that have come out of the National
Assembly, government’s number crunchers are splitting hairs.

More so, this is a
government whose budget figures for last year represented a 50 per
cent-plus increase on the 2009 appropriations, notwithstanding the fact
that the deficit for last year was anywhere between 5 per cent and 6
per cent of GDP.

It is obvious that
we must look for more sophisticated reasons to object to the National
Assembly’s version of the appropriation bill.

Nobody could accuse
them of not giving prior warning. Close to a week before the
presidential and vice presidential debate organised by the Nigerian
Electoral Debate Group was to take place, the presidential candidates
of three political parties: the Action Congress of Nigeria; All Nigeria
Peoples Party and the Congress for Progressive Change had warned that
they would not participate in the debate with Goodluck Jonathan.

The three
gentlemen, Nuhu Ribadu, Muhammadu Buhari and Ibrahim Shekarau,
predicated their decision on the president’s absence at an earlier
debate organised by cable television station, NN24. Leaving the
president to stand on the podium by himself, the men must have decided,
is sweet revenge for their own perceived slight.

This argument is
alluring in its simplicity. Reduce the importance of the NEDG debate,
focus the energy of the candidates on other things (possibly) and put
President Jonathan in an uncomfortable position of being seen as aloof
and having to explain why this is so.

When the debate
took off Wednesday evening, there was only Mr Jonathan on the podium to
take questions from a panel drawn from the Nigerian Guild of editors,
Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria and the Nigerian Bar Association.

It is hard to see
how Messrs Buhari, Ribadu and Shekarau could see themselves coming out
as winners from the incident. Being alone on the stage did not diminish
Mr Jonathan’s carriage. He cut the image of relaxed assuredness, even
cracking jokes with the panellists. What is more, being alone allowed
him to put his views on the NN24 absence across to his audience –
unchallenged because his opponents decided to stay away.

It is possible
that, as a tactic, staying away probably served its purpose. There are
even insinuations that some of the candidates stayed away because they
did not quite perform well in the NN24 debate moderated by NEXT’s
Kadaria Ahmed. According to this rendering, the campaign managers of
these candidates would not then rather have them exposed to another
public grilling. This is probably tosh. But then, how do we know, when
the candidates did not show up to speak for themselves?

I, therefore, think
that the boycott is both wrongheaded and a strategic mistake. Even if
the candidates were aggrieved, participating in the Wednesday event
could only be a gain-gain situation for them. They would have, for one,
reached another set of Nigerians whom they couldn’t reach in the first
debate. They could have confronted Mr Jonathan on air directly and seek
to discomfit him. They would have appeared as statesmen who will not be
dissuaded by a little thing as having to debate without one of their
opponents.

Instead, they
appeared petty and petulant. And they handed the initiative to their
key opponent. I mean, who will readily pass over the opportunity to
address millions of Nigerians who listened to the debate on radio and
television – both terrestrial and cable. A candidate like Mr Shekarau,
who did rather well at the last debate, would have consolidated on
this. But he was nowhere to be found.

The debate caught me on the road, so I started off listening to it
on the radio. Reason why I even knew it started was because I and some
friends saw clusters of people around television sets on a street in
Ikeja, Lagos. A glimpse at one of the sets revealed the president in a
world of his own – taking questions and answering same in full glare of
Nigerians. Maybe he performed well, maybe he didn’t. His listeners will
have to decide that for themselves. But his lone appearance couldn’t
have hurt his campaign any.

Recent upheavals in
the Arab world may have turned the world’s attention away from Cote d’
Ivoire. In the period of our own elections, Nigerians may view Abidjan
as a remote Schleswig-Holstein; a quarrel in a far-away country between
people of whom we know nothing. In truth, if Ivory Coast implodes, it
would be a setback for ECOWAS and indeed for our entire continent.

The trigger for the
current crisis is the dispute over the results of the December
electoral re-run, in which both Gbagbo of the FPI and Ouattara of the
RDR are claiming victory. The UN and the “international community” are
adamant that Ouattara is the winner and have threatened Gbagbo with
dire consequences if he does not surrender power immediately. Gbagbo,
on his part, insists that it is not up to the UN or, indeed, “the
international community”, to decide who has won elections in a
sovereign country. He is claiming victory based on the pronouncements
of the Constitutional Council which declared him the winner – a council
that his opponents murmur is controlled by the government.

It is a murky
business. Even the AU has acknowledged in a secret memo that there have
been widespread irregularities in the rebel-controlled north. The UN
has never pretended to be a neutral arbiter on this matter. And some
would not fail to take judicial notice that the Head of UN
Peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy, happens to be French.

Gbagbo has wept on
more than one occasion while addressing his people, describing his
country as an orphan being attacked by a consortium led by France and
other powerful international interests. Strangely enough, both sides of
the narrative are right. And both are wrong. I take my own stand with
the defenceless Ivoirien people who are suffering the brunt of this
quixotic melodrama being enacted by crooks and knaves on both sides of
the equation.

Laurent Gbagbo
started life as a youth activist who openly challenged the venerable
Old Fox of Yamoussoukro before it was fashionable to do so. He and his
wife Simone Ehivet Gbagbo, both of them university academics, were
often in and out of prison. Gbagbo’s credentials in democratic struggle
are unassailable. However, having been in power since 2000, he has
outlived his relevance. He has disappointed his followers by preserving
France’s monopolistic privileges over such public utilities as water,
electricity, telecoms, roads and oil. His record in economic management
has been, quite frankly, weak.

As for Ouattara, a
large section of Ivoirien youth view him as the candidate of the
French, Burkinabes, Malians and Senegalese; and of the World Bank and
IMF, where he once served in the exalted position of Deputy Managing
Director.

He is no doubt a
competent technocrat. His problem is his backers; comprising a ragtag
of mercenaries that make up the ‘forces nouvelles’ and shadowy
reptilian types from places as wide apart as Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran.
Ivoiriens will not forget in a hurry that it is these people that
unleashed a civil war on their country.

At the root of this
tragedy is the economic divide between the north and the south. There
is also the brooding figure of Blaise Compaore across the border. Over
2 million Burkinabe migrant workers have provided the labour in the
cocoa and coffee plantations which have sustained the Ivoirien economy.
He could not be expected to ignore their fate. Félix Houphouët-Boigny
failed to bequeath a legacy on which an orderly constitutional order
could be established.

There is also the
stranglehold of France-Afrique which has made nonsense of Ivoirien
sovereignty for all these years. Some 85 per cent of the cash flow of
the country goes through the BCEAO, the regional central bank of the
French-backed West African Economic Community, to the French Treasury
which has veto powers over how the Francophone countries can spend
their own money. The French have arrogated to themselves the right of
first refusal for public works contracts and the most lucrative raw
materials concessions.

If Ouattara manages
to actuate his internationally acquired prize, he would still have to
address these realties, including the nitty-gritty of governing his own
people. Ahead is not the bliss of summer, but a night of icy darkness
and toil, to echo Max Weber.

Since God Himself
speaks French, I could never consider myself to be anti-French. I went
to school in Vichy and Paris. And my intellectual life, you could say,
is a permanent dialogue with Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Sartre, Camus and
St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

But France makes me
sad. In Cote d’Ivoire and elsewhere, France remains the obstacle to the
final liberation of our continent. If this great country descends into
murderous chaos, France must be held ultimately responsible.

With the world’s
attention on the uprisings in the Middle East, repressive regimes
elsewhere are taking the opportunity to tighten their grip on power. In
China, human rights activists have been disappearing since a call went
out last month for a Tunisian-style “Jasmine Revolution.” I know what
their families are going through. Almost a year ago, the Chinese
government seized my husband and since then, we have had no news of
him. I don’t know where he is, or even if he is alive.

In 2001, the
Ministry of Justice listed my husband, Gao Zhisheng, as one of the top
10 lawyers in China. But when he began representing members of
religious groups persecuted by the government, he became a target
himself. His law license was revoked, and our family placed under
constant surveillance. In 2006, he was convicted of inciting subversion
based on a confession he made after his interrogators threatened our
two children. He received a suspended sentence, but was briefly
detained again a year later for writing an open letter to the U.S.
Congress documenting human rights abuses in China.

Zhisheng wouldn’t
give up his work, and yet he was frightened for me and our children, so
I fled with them to asylum in the United States. Soon after we left, in
February 2009, he was seized by security officials, and that time held
without charges for more than a year. International pressure persuaded
the government to release him. But two weeks later, as soon as the
world’s attention moved elsewhere, he was abducted again. That was last
April. No one has heard from him since.

We have good cause
to fear that he is suffering. My husband has been tortured many times.
In 2007, officials subjected him to electric shocks, held lighted
cigarettes up to his eyes and pierced his genitals with toothpicks. In
2009, the police beat him with handguns for two days. He has been tied
up and forced to sit motionless for hours, threatened with death and
told that our children were having nervous breakdowns.

Though his
treatment has been especially harsh, my husband is only one of many
political prisoners in China. Among them are Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, who is serving an 11-year sentence for
subversion, and his wife, Liu Xia, who is under house arrest. A human
rights group reports that more than a hundred bloggers and rights
advocates have been interrogated or detained in connection to the
“Jasmine Revolution.” And especially ominous have been the
disappearances of other prominent human rights lawyers, like Jiang
Tianyong, Teng Biao and Tang Jitian.

In Barack Obama’s
speech to the United Nations last year, he said “freedom, justice and
peace for the world must begin with freedom, justice and peace in the
lives of individual human beings.” The Chinese government must not be
allowed to claim that China is a nation operating under the rule of law
while persecuting those who try to ensure that it respects the law. And
when the government silences dissent, the international community must
speak up. Indeed, I am excited to have just learned that the United
Nations has demanded that my husband be released, and hopeful that it
will take a stand for the other prisoners as well. I appeal to Obama –
a father, lawyer and leader of the country that has become my family’s
new home – to make sure it does so. At the very least, he should ask
President Hu Jintao to let Zhisheng contact us.

If he has been killed, we should be allowed the dignity of laying him to rest.

Geng He is the wife of a human rights lawyer missing in China. This essay was translated from the Chinese New York Times