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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.