I woke up this morning to a report in the media that Chief Audu Ogbeh is holding former dictator, Ibrahim Babangida and SAP, responsible for the current poor state of the economy. Babangida introduced SAP and led Nigeria to an over-reliance on oil and that is why we are where we are today. There is nothing wrong with historical illumination. There is everything wrong when it becomes a tired cliché constantly mobilized as alibi when you don’t appear to have the answers to setting a new course. That is the trouble with President Buhari’s ministers. When a few months ago, Lai Mohammed blamed President Jonathan, I urged Nigerians to be glad that he did not blame it on Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The rate at which President Buhari’s Ministers are scrambling irresponsibly to blame the past instead of doing their work and facing the future – and let the anti-corruption efforts proceed on other fronts – is alarming. If President Buhari does not rein them in, they will blame Lord Lugard. I am compelled to reproduce an apt excerpt from “Building Rome in One Day”, the inauguration lecture I delivered in Kaduna for Nasir El Rufai on May 28, 2015. Read on:
“The sky is falling! Nigerians, please bear me witness: my predecessor has emptied the treasury o. My predecessor has shackled me with debts o. He has borrowed money that we must pay for the next sixty years o. Things are so bad. There is nothing to work with. I will probe him; I will not probe him; yes, I will probe him.” As true as these statements are in terms of the actualities they describe, it is also true that they are cliché, repeated ad nauseam by every in-coming administration. Nigerians heard it from Chief Obasanjo and all the governors in the 1999 set; they heard this rhetoric again in 2003; heard it in 2007; heard it in 2011. To hear it in 2015 would be the very definition of continuity because there is nothing in that rhetoric that the people have not heard before.
It is because they are tired of this rhetoric of continuity that they voted massively for people they believe can perform miracles and deliver on miracles. And this is why I do not envy our Governor-elect and also General Buhari at the centre. This is why I have only bad news for them. All the realities which led to a rhetorical culture of blaming outgoing administrations are still here with us and have even worsened beyond our wildest imagination under the outgoing administration. Make no mistake about it, President Jonathan and the outgoing ministers and governors have exercised no prerogative of mercy on Nigeria. They have wrecked and destroyed this country. In South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, or China, they would have been tied to the stakes and executed as economic saboteurs. Yet, I must signal solemnly to Mallam Nasir El Rufai and President-elect Buhari that we are at a moment in our national history when the corruption and brigandage of an outgoing administration can no longer be mobilised as legitimate points of departure by an in-coming administration.
The outgoing administration repeatedly told us to be patient; that transformation and the dividends of democracy could not be delivered with a magic wand; they said that Rome was not built in a day. Then they went ahead to unleash all the goats in Rome on all the yams in Rome and the city of Rome was set on fire in the ensuing commotion. Those who said that Rome was not built in a day then fiddled and danced azonto, even as the city of Rome burned. This is why Mallam Nasir El Rufai does not have the luxury of saying that Rome was not built in a day. I have already heard that rhetoric from our President-elect and I hope that Mallam Nasir will pass the message on to him that we, his supporters, ask him to desist from using that language forthwith. At the national level and here in Kaduna state, we have elected leaders who we believe can do precisely that: abandon the rhetoric of the old leadership and build Rome in a day. And because there is currently no money anywhere – the outgoing government having looted everything – the new leadership must build Rome in a day with only one kobo. This is what the people expect and it is not up for discussion or negotiation by the new leadership.
For the people, therefore, change begins when the leadership in which they have invested such an overwhelming mandate makes a radical departure from that rhetoric and its associated mental universe and invents a rhetoric bordering on the possibility of miracle. The new leadership must not say that they are not miracle workers because that is precisely what the people voted for: miracle workers. The new leadership must tell the people: “I knew that things were bad, very bad, really bad, before I offered myself for service. Hands-on, proactive approach to delivery will now replace the rhetoric of excuses. No action of the outgoing government, no matter how horrible, will be valid enough an excuse for me not to deliver. We shall punish their corruption. Those who looted shall face the full prosecutorial force of the laws of the land. But we shall not use their crimes as justification of inertia on our part.”
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