Nigeria Content Online

I have spent the
last week reflecting on hill top palaces and misrule in my dear country
Nigeria. I could not help it; my thoughts were imposed by the
surroundings. The last week found me on the six-acre Neemrana Fort
Palace in Rajasthan, India, about 122 Kilometres from Delhi. This
palace of the Maharaja was the site from which the Chauhans dynasty
ruled Rajasthan from the 15th century to 1947. The palace of 55 rooms
is carved into eleven storeys on the hilltop.

Located in a site
of exquisite beauty, it allows occupants on the hilltop to oversee the
vast rolling countryside with tiny looking peasants tilling the land or
coming up the hill to serve the lords of the palace. Following the end
of princely rule in India in 1947, the palace was sold off as a
heritage hotel and yours faithfully could live like a Raj for one week
and participate in a conference on citizenship, democracy and
development.

The conference
signalled the end of a ten-year international partnership of the
Citizenship Development Research Centre of the Institute of Development
Studies of the University of Sussex and scholars in the United Kingdom,
India, Bangladesh, Angola, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and
Jamaica.

Over the period, we
carried out 150 case studies of citizens struggling to improve their
lives, livelihoods and liberties. The conclusion of the studies is
starkly clear. Nobody gives you development; nobody gives you human
rights and democracy. You get what you struggle for. The state is not a
repository of entitlements, it’s an interlocutor you combat, cajole,
contest, infiltrate and subvert to improve your lives and livelihoods.

As we reflected on
the thought provoking results of our studies, the site compelled me to
reflect on what the accoutrements and palaces of rule does to
occupants. By the end of the week, after enjoying sumptuous meals
served by a bevy of well dressed servants in beautifully decorated
halls overlooking spectacular landscape, I began to feel like a Raj and
found it normal that the world should serve me.

I began to
understand why after eight years of misrule, General Ibrahim Babangida
believed he needed a fifty-room palace, carved out of a Minna hill top
where people would have to climb up to continue to pay him homage. Even
our dearly believed General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who ruled for only
eleven months needed to build himself a hilltop palace to keep his
distance from the people.

The latest of the
hilltop palaces is of course that of General Olusegun Obasanjo carved
out of the largest hill of Abeokuta. It is maybe befitting that this
General who has ruled and ruined our country longer than anybody else
should have the largest and most magnificent palace from which he can
continue to plot and scheme on ways and means of ruling and ruining us
forever. Clearly, these palaces fabricate illusions of grandeur that
encourage our rulers to believe that they have a right, and indeed, an
obligation to continue in power.

How else can we
understand General Babangida’s determination to return to power? Was he
not the one who introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP),
which sank Nigeria into the deepest economic crises in her history?
Although during the 1985-86 national debate, Nigerian citizens had
overwhelmingly voted against SAP, was it not the same General Babangida
who said he must implement it because the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) had given him clear instructions to do so.

Nigerian citizens
fought against SAP. Workers and students and ordinary people organised
massive street demonstrations in many towns. However, the Babangida
dictatorship went ahead to implement unpopular policies, which had
negative consequences for the country and its people. SAP in practice
meant the dominant role of market forces in the economy, liberalisation
and deregulation, devaluation of the Naira, retrenchment, privatisation
of public property (that was mainly cornered by the rulers), withdrawal
of subsidies, and government retreat in the area of social provisioning
and welfare services.

The result of the
Babangida policy framework was the intensification of suffering of the
people. Our health system collapsed, rural poverty grew as peasants
could no longer afford to pay for agricultural inputs and the era of
graduate unemployment arrived at the national scene while the middle
class was pauperised.

It was under the Babangida regime that institutions of governance,
and official positions, were used for unbridled primitive accumulation.
In was an era in which governance was transformed into a question of
unlimited power without responsibility. It was above all the regime
that brazenly organised elections and refused to hand over power to the
winner of the elections. The history of General Babangida is a bold
statement that citizens do not matter. The time has come for Nigerian
citizens to make an even more bold response to those who live on
hilltop palaces and say we have memories, which we shall use to
sanction those who have ruled and ruined our dear nation.