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The old man was
amusing us with stories of early 70s Lagos, the Volkswagen factory
where he worked, and the radiance of the Army officers who visited.

“You know that
engine oil that the Germans make? The one that drips in such clear
tones that you almost wish you could drink it?” he asked. Someone said
we sure did. “Well, that was how Babangida’s skin shone back then,” he
said.

He looked around
him, pausing, like a good storyteller, to gauge the reaction of his
audience. A woman sighed and said, “Na wa o.” The man had our
attention, all right. He continued. “The hairs on his hand were so
fine, and the skin so light, that you could see the veins,” he said.

More passengers
bent their ears towards the man. You wouldn’t think to look at his
spare frame, thick skin, and forsaken shoes. But he was someone
important once. He said while Volkswagen Nigeria existed, he was the
fellow you saw when the German manager was away. Or was too busy at the
Bar Beach. “The white man trusted me. He would say, ‘Tunde, take care
of everything, I am going to relax.’ And he would be off for the whole
day.”

I liked the way he
told his story, the lack of drama, in a gentlemanly sort of way. “The
day Babangida came, I was the most senior man around. I met him at the
gate and apologised for the absence of our manager, but IBB just smiled
and waved it away. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, real nice chap.” “What was he
at the time?” asked a banker who had just taken a call from his pastor
and couldn’t stop talking about the man of God. I tried to get the name
of this wonderful Christian but it was impossible without asking
directly. Besides, the story of how Volkswagen worked, the staff morale
and German efficiency, was riveting.

“Babangida was
commander of the armoured corps,” said our storyteller. “He was a
dashing young colonel. They were all so dashing then: Babangida,
Buhari, Yar’Adua. They all lived in Dodan Barracks. It was such a great
time to be in Lagos.” The banker nodded in admiration. “These people
have been enjoying for a long time,” he said. And then the talk shifted
to how the country had been ruled by the same group for too long; how
charmed their lives have been compared to our drudgery.

The conductor was
the only person who was not impressed. He had just parted with N50,
which the police insisted on collecting for no reason, so talk of
authority was hardly endearing to him.

“Dem be thief, all of them,” he said, looking directly at the storyteller, daring him to contradict his assertion.

The old man was
thrown out of his stride. Before now, the conversation had been light,
peppered with anecdotes. But the conductor’s tone had been hard, like
his stony face. Some of those who had listened to the anecdotes in rapt
attention suddenly withdrew, as if they had been caught doing something
shameful.

“I am not defending
anybody’s actions,” offered the man. “This talk is not about that.” But
the conductor was not interested in subtleties. He was like a dog who
had got hold of a good bone and was not about to let go. On the other
hand, the old man seemed to want to avoid any crudities; any talk with
someone so obviously disgruntled could not stick to the niceties of
polite conversation.

“Oga, you wey dey
talk about how another person skin dey shine like oil,” began the
conductor, spoiling for a quarrel, “You for follow thief money now make
your own skin too shine.” The banker fellow must have felt the old
man’s embarrassment. “No be everybody be thief,” he said to the
conductor. “We are even talking of the 70s when you had not even been
born.” The conductor sneered, “How you know when dem born me?” he
challenged.

At this point, the
old man rallied. “You know, the time I was talking about,” he said,
taking time to address his words to the young banker, “Babangida was
just a colonel. He had not become president then,” he said and the
banker fellow nodded in understanding.

He turned to the
conductor and said, lightly, “You see, no be your money make the man
skin dey shine,” he said, “Na nature.” The conductor had lost interest.
‘’Thief na thief,’’ he said.

Now that we have
chosen our president for the next four years, we will do well to think
through what we can expect to feature on his to-do list, every day,
until this stage is reached again at the start of the next election
cycle. Ordinarily, it would help to start with the different planks on
the party platform of our preferred candidate. Trouble is, even when
these were bruited about on the campaign trail, they did not amount to
much. Even as sound bites, these policy platforms always sounded
hollow. Apparently, all the candidates were sure that no section of the
electorate was going to interrogate their manifestoes (and the numbers
behind them) too seriously.

Still, there are
reasons why any election pledge in this country should be taken with a
liberal dollop of salt. Across sectors, the economy’s need is so
substantial and so fundamental. Especially with infrastructure, where
promises to remedy the dearth must contend with the 48 months lag
between the contract award ceremonies and when the projects come on
stream. In the absence of low-intensity, high-impact solutions, it thus
means that any genuine investment today, will only begin to yield
fruits after the first four-year term. This is one of the more perverse
incentives of representative democracy: it forces executive focus on
near-term upside gains with medium-term downside consequences.

This does not,
however, obviate the need for such investment, or the equally important
need for the incoming government to deliver on a few low-hanging
fruits. The Petroleum Industry and Nigerian Sovereign Investment
Authority bills are two versions of the latter type of investment.
Because of the unconscionable delay in passing the former bill,
investment in the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry has
tailed off considerably. Desirable though it might be to cap the oil
wells as part of a radical response to the failure of our fiscal
federalism, we cannot run away from the size of hydrocarbon export
revenues’ contribution to the national budget.

Prompt passage of
the bill is also consistent with acknowledging what the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) describes in its latest comments on the global
economy, as “long implementation lags for discovery, exploration, and
capital investment in minerals industries”. In addition, there are
significant gains to be had in the current environment. The signals
from current elevated market prices for crude oil would seem to
indicate that, along with the pressures from new demand from newly
industrialising economies in Asia, there have been significant
“downshifts in trend (crude oil) supply growth”.

Moreover,
macroeconomic policy has fallen behind the curve over the last two
years. Despite strong terms-of-trade gains, as commodity prices firmed,
we have not accumulated reserves as rapidly as would have been
expected. Instead, the central bank has run down these inflows in
support of an inflexible exchange rate regime. Has this moderation of
domestic exchange rate movement been beneficial to strengthening
domestic demand? Another question touched by the domestic demand worry
is, “What is holding back private investment in this economy?” Soft
final domestic demand is one answer. But there’s another argument. If
our policy is to support the growth of private investment, shouldn’t it
aim to boost net capital formation within the economy, while reducing
the domestic cost of doing business?

The needed
structural reforms go further than this though. The central bank’s
quasi-fiscal interventions in the economy in the last two years have
been anomalous. Returning the funds on to the public balance sheet is
essential for fiscal transparency and in order to clean up the balance
sheet of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The trouble with this
course of action is that the public debt profile is rising. Adding
debits from the CBN’s balance sheet would further reduce government’s
room for fiscal manoeuvre. Nonetheless, fiscal consolidation is key to
the economy’s medium-term fiscal outlook. Rising inflation is one (but
scarcely the only) reason. Fiscal support was necessary to keep the
banks from going under and to a lesser extent to keep domestic demand
ticking away despite second-round pressures from the global financial
and economic crisis.

But the banks have begun to post healthy results. And it is doubtful
(because of the infrastructure constraints) that domestic demand did
indeed respond to the fiscal stimulus. Thus, it is important for a
positive medium-term fiscal outlook to return immediately to the oil
price-based fiscal policy rule!

After the heady
wine of post-election euphoria, we will have to come down to the real
business of governing. The German economist and sociologist, Max Weber,
in his famous essay, “Politics as a Vocation”, remarked that a
statesman worth his calling must be able to reconcile ultimate ends
with an ethic of responsibility. From Aristotle to our day, politics
has always been about how to promote the good life for all citizens –
how to expand the possibility frontiers of happiness and collective
welfare.

Our failure to live
up to the promise of greatness has been the nightmare of our
generation. Despite our stupendous oil wealth, some 50 per cent of
Nigerians live below the poverty line. We rank 142nd out of 169
countries on the Global Human Development Index. Millions of the youth
being churned out annually from our ramshackle education industry have
no hope of securing gainful employment. Many will take to the highway
and the seedy streets to make ends meet. Meanwhile, our roads continue
to consume thousands of our people, even as money meant for the
railways ends up in foreign bank accounts. And we are the last to know
that electricity is the first condition of civilisation in our 21st
century digital age.

There are, of
course, no magic solutions. It takes a whole village to raise a child,
our people say. The greatest challenge for leadership in our era is how
to broker a national consensus on the Nigerian Project. We need to heal
the bitter wounds that have drawn us apart, particularly in the north,
where there has been a great deal of disenchantment; where I have seen
heartbreaking poverty in places such as Ingawa, Jibiya, Potiskum,
Darazo and Azare. There is also the abiding challenge of the Niger
Delta, with its structural violence and ecological catastrophes.

I cannot but
mention the role of our parliament in all this. The National Assembly
appears to be the weakest link in our democracy at present. It is an
irony that our elected representatives, who ought to be the fountain
and spring of the law, have sometimes behaved with such wanton
profligacy. They have not been immune from what I would term
“parliamentary dictatorship”, having on more than one occasion upped
the budget by the order of magnitude of 25 per cent. They presumably do
not care where government goes to borrow to finance the deficit.

Of recent, the high
judicature, whom we all respect, is becoming joke. The public
disputation between Aloysius Katsina-Alu, Chief Justice of the
Federation; and Umaru Abdullahi, Court of Appeal President; has become
an embarrassment to the judiciary as a whole. Through the dark times of
our history, the likes of Adetokunbo Ademola, Teslim Elias, Fatai
Williams, Udo Udoma and Muhammad Bello acquitted themselves as
righteous and fearless judges. The very public quarrel between the two
giants of the law – with undercurrents of political intrigue – cannot
augur well for the image of the judicature.

It was Nelson
Mandela who famously noted that anyone in a public office must see
himself or herself as a servant of the people, not their master. There
must therefore be a change of mindsets and attitudes. To make Nigeria
work, the elites across all the sections and corners of our country
must come together and agree on certain irreducible minimums for the
practice of politics and the conduct of public life. If our country is
to survive and flourish, we must reincarnate our national ideals in a
fundamental grundnorm founded on liberty, justice, truth, religious
tolerance and the indivisibility of our federation. We must also
redefine our collective purpose and destiny.

Whatever anyone
thinks, Nigeria is the heart of Africa. We are the guardians of the
African Standard of Civilisation. We therefore have a world-historic
vocation to build a country worthy of the grandeur of our continent and
the dignity of the Black Race.

The
President-elect, whoever it turns out to be, has an enormous task
ahead. Top of the agenda are the following: security and the rule of
law; infrastructures and power; food security; employment; and human
development, including education and health. Leadership and public
policy are the keys to successful governance. Nigerians expect a team
of technocrats who can work together to implement a carefully designed
programme of structural transformation anchored on agriculture-led
industrialisation.

Whereas our
constitution requires that every state in our federation must be
represented in the cabinet, it does not say expressly that such
individuals can only be nominated by the executive governors of their
states. The practice whereby ministers are nominated by governors is a
convention that produces pernicious results. A friend of mine from one
of the western states confided to me that he once complained to his
governor that the minister nominated by him was performing very poorly.
The man laughed and said it was precisely why he sent him to Abuja! It
is therefore vital that the new president chooses his cabinet carefully
and that each minister has a set of measurable targets that can be
evaluated on an annual basis. Those who do not perform must be
resolutely shown the door. Former US Secretary of State, Henry
Kissinger once lamented that political office taxes intellectual
capital. People simply cannot give what they don’t have. Caution and
wisdom, therefore, are the watchwords.

It is hardly a new
thing to hear of men who assault their wives. After years of advocacy
and encouraging women who have been domestically abused to speak out,
their plight is hardly unknown to the world. But an interesting
phenomenon is emerging. The tables appear to be getting turned. We are
now hearing more about women who beat up their husbands.

We seem to be
oblivious to this fact because the shame and ego-bashing attached to
the idea of a wife (woman) beating her husband (man) will not allow or
encourage some men to report such abuse. The notion that men are
victims of domestic violence can be unimaginable to the extent that
some men would rather not report.

The impact of
domestic abuse is less apparent when it is men who are at the receiving
end than women. For instance, when a married man is seen with bruises
or burns or any sort of injury, it is always assumed that he got it in
a bar fight or domestic accident. No one ever thinks his wife might
have given him that black eye as is the case of women with bruises.

There was a report
on 234next.com website about a 75-year-old man, Fatai Bakare, who
appealed to an Ikeja High Court to save his life from his wife. He
wanted his 18-year-old marriage dissolved on grounds of domestic
violence and “wickedness”.

Mr. Bakare alleged
that his 55-year-old wife was very violent and would beat him up at the
slightest excuse. He said he was scared for his life since he was an
old man.

When one reads or
listens to stories like that, the image of a giant woman pounding a
small man comes to mind. “Just how huge must this woman be to
successfully beat up her husband?” many of us would wonder.

On March 1, 1999,
The Oprah Winfrey Show aired a show on wives who beat their husbands.
On that episode, it was ascertained that while men beat their wives to
shut them up, women beat their husbands to make them listen. Some
abused men who spoke at the show said the reason they did not speak up
was because they felt they were supposed to take it like a man. So like
women who have been physically abused by their husbands, they usually
cover up for their wives when people ask them about a bruise or injury.

Gone are the days
when women were referred to as the weaker sex. Most women now want to
take up the mantle of leadership in every sphere of their lives,
including their homes. Some do that in the most derogatory ways as they
abuse their husbands both physically and verbally. In a way, what women
do not consider domestic abuse almost always comes across to their
husbands as abuse.

Domestic violence
to both men and women involves physical acts like beating, shoving,
hitting, kicking but domestic violence can also be emotional or mental.
Unkind and cruel words hurt and linger longer in different ways for
different people. According to an expert, men hurt more from emotional
abuse than physical abuse.

Many women no
longer find sitting at home to bear children and tending the home
comfortable. Most have taken charge to the sad point of flexing muscles
with their husbands. They have forcefully pulled the pants from their
husband’s waists, replaced them with wrappers and amended the pants to
their own size.

Where women lack
physical strength, they make up with verbal power. Sometimes, you are
left aghast at the words some women use on their husbands.

How much more
abused do you expect a man whose wife calls a coward, impotent or lazy,
to be? Domestic violence in any form is bad and even more cringe-worthy
is the fact that more women seem to resolve to the act.

It is an evil that
needs to be flushed out because it ends up having an adverse effect on
the seeds of a marriage. The children grow up believing that a normal
home is one defined by a feisty and fire-spitting mother.

There is a dire need for domestic violence to be discouraged,
regardless of who is giving or receiving it, in order to breed saner
generations of men and women.

One of the biggest
pet peeves that I have with responses to requests or questions in the
Nigerian context, as is the case in many developing countries, are the
phrases – “By God’s grace,” or “If God wills.” For example: “By God’s
grace, good leaders will be elected during our elections,” or “If God
wills, the dress will be ready on Wednesday,” or “By God’s grace, the
university will reopen in June,” or “If God wills, the flight will
depart on schedule.” I could go on and on.

I am a big believer
in the grace and power of God and I have seen it manifest in my life
time and time again. I also recognise the myriad challenges and risks of
operating in our country, where every day is an adventure and there are
no guarantees about what one can experience when they step out of their
house on a daily basis. However, I also recognise that God has given us
the grace to achieve results, and that His will for us is that we
deliver on the commitments that we have made to people. Too often, we
hide behind these phrases to excuse us from taking responsibility for
our own actions or from getting angry enough when others use them to
make excuses for their inability to deliver.

Somehow, by using
these phrases, we basically shift the responsibilities and
accountability of our actions or inactions to God, who has given us more
than enough to work with. For example, as humans, we have the ability
to plan events, manage our time effectively, and to understand how to
prioritise tasks. We also have the ability to plan for uncertainties and
to develop ‘Plan B’ strategies or hedge our risks, in order to minimise
the cost of uncertainties. Clearly, because of our ability to transfer
most of the responsibility to God, we get a little lazy about fulfilling
our end of the bargain.

In an effort to
institute systems and structures within AACE Foods, our start-up
agribusiness, I introduced penalties for late deliveries on projects.
For example, we hired a carpenter to build lockers for the staff. During
the negotiations process, we asked him to indicate when he would be
able to deliver the lockers. He picked a date two weeks after the
start-date, and used the same phrase – “By God’s grace, I will deliver
the lockers by January 8.” We explained the penalty system to him – that
he would be charged 5 per cent of the balance on the payment for every
late day. We asked him, once again, if January 8 was still reasonable or
whether he would like to change the date to the 10th or even the 14th.
He repeatedly stated that the 8th was more than enough time and
proceeded to sign the contract stating that he understood the terms and
would deliver.

You can guess the
outcome of the story. On January 5, we called the carpenter and he said
that the wood for the lockers was still drying, but that “if God wills”,
he would still deliver the lockers on the 8th. On the 8th, we called
again, and he told us that he was on his way. We waited, and waited. He
eventually delivered the lockers on the 15th and was extremely upset
that we chose to penalise him for the late delivery.

While one might
argue that we were unfair to the carpenter who could have faced some
uncertainties which compelled him to miss the deadline, the reality is
that he needed to take full responsibility for his actions, and deliver
on his commitments or face the consequences.

Too often, we make
excuses for ourselves and others – “there must have been some serious
traffic, the downpour was unexpected, an okada hit the car, they took
the light and there is no diesel”, etc, etc. In our context, sometimes
these excuses sound as silly as “the dog ate my homework”. The reality
is that as unpredictable as many of these occurrences appear to be, they
are more of our everyday realities and we have to plan for them. Even
more important is the fact that one missed deadline or an inability to
deliver in one area affects a range of other activities, which will
invariably escalate the challenges that we all face.

And if for some
‘real’ reason, we cannot deliver, at least call to explain, instead of
waiting for the customer, client or friend to be the one to call to find
out why the lapse occurred.

God has truly
blessed Nigeria, and Nigerians. It is time we stop passing or sharing
the responsibilities of our actions or inactions with Him – and start
doing our part.

Nuhu Ribadu, the
presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), was
reported last week by NEXT to have said: “They have damaged my
candidacy”. He was, among other things, speaking from the pit of his
despair as he imagined that, given his handling of the coalition talks,
some of his followers could have started feeling that he was not the
messiah they had been expecting. Mr Ribadu’s candidacy and indeed his
political career have been dented. But does Mr Ribadu’s expression of
despair suggest that he is looking for repair through a helpful
discourse strategy?

In his rhetoric of
blame, Mr Ribadu does things with pronouns, holding others responsible
for the perceived damage, probably hoping that he could, in the process,
begin to repair the perceived damage. His use of the third person
pronoun “they” in his statement quoted by NEXT suggests avoiding being
specific on those responsible for this damage. Does that translate to
being very clever and cautious? At first consideration, yes, but that
manner of blaming could also backfire.

The pronoun “they”
is exophoric and vague in Ribadu’s assertion cited above: it points
outside the text of his proclamation, unlike its endophoric use which
points to a specific antecedent in the same or preceding statement.
Grammarians tell us that pronouns are deictic elements (and deixis are
those linguistic elements that point to aspects of situation – entities,
time setting, and space – in a discourse). Discourse analysts also take
the significance of pronouns further and draw our attention to the fact
that people use these elements in their encoding of power, negotiations
of solidarity, as well as practices of exclusion and assimilation. The
bad news is that segments of the public that are addressed may not be
aware of the politics that political public speakers sometimes play with
pronouns. Who says that the linguistic side of political education is
not what a politician could be uncomfortable with, given the fact that
it exposes rather than conceals?

The plural third
person pronoun ‘they’ not only suggests that the destroyers of Ribadu’s
candidacy are legion, but also implies a Them-versus-Us imagination
associated with Homo hostilis, the enemy-making mammal. The Homo
hostilis does not take blame or responsibility for the consequences of
its actions. No; it is the bad guys (who are on the other side) that are
responsible for the misfortune. The Homo hostilis is a saint and, in
Ribadu’s travails, has no hand in the damaging of his own political
ambition. So, we are invited to sympathise with this victim who is a
good guy. If we don’t, we become bad guys automatically, and join in the
damaging job.

Of course, in some
cultural contexts in Nigeria, individuals could sometimes reinvent the
pronoun ‘they’ as a device for suggesting politeness in discourse when
the referent is a singular individual that possesses a higher social
status, something similar to the French use of “vous” in encoding
respect for a singular addressee. The pronoun thus might be used as a
way of avoiding being specific in making reference. In other words, one
simply attributes the action or experience to a vague ‘they’ when one is
afraid or cannot defend an attribution to a specific agency.

I am inclined to
look beyond Ribadu’s rhetoric of blame, which the proclamation “They
have damaged my candidacy” entails, to identify him as the one to be
blamed for allowing himself to be outsmarted by lobbyists of the
coalition arrangement. Someone like him who wishes to rule Nigeria
should know that he is entering into an arena where motives do not have
to be placed like cards on the negotiation table. It would be an
exhibition of naivety for Ribadu to be in the midst of political wolves
and be talking of “selflessness” and “truth”. Those words, even if they
are still in the dictionary of modern politics, are only used in this
“new” context in which Ribadu is featuring in totally different senses.
Our presidential candidate needs to know that when his fellow Nigerian
politicians say “come”, he should prepare to take to his heels! If he is
telling us that “they” have damaged his political ambition, then he is
confessing that he is simply immature and needs to take some lessons
from veterans. Ribadu needs to put idealism aside and become a better
fox if he wants to rule Nigeria.

Indeed, by putting the blame on others, he continues the damage to
both his ethos (character) and to his ability to manage how he cognises
and speaks about relationships in political transactions. Nigeria’s
journey to genuine democracy is implicitly a school where Nigerian
politicians can learn how to speak and act in the presence of others,
and about others. It invites them to grow in and with the process.