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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.

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!

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.