With the Right Leadership, Nigeria Will Rise Again

Being a message by Professor Pat Okedinachi Utomi, Chairman of the NCFront, on the occasion of the 61^st anniversary of Nigeria’s independence.

Today we mark 61 years of independent national life. On behalf of the NCFront I bring you felicitations of independence tidings. My hope and prayer is that the spirit of this anniversary and initiatives we shall give live with our words today will rekindle hope in the promise of Nigeria and the aspirations of our compatriots. Nigeria will rise up again.

I am aware, like most of you, that our country has never been as divided as it is today. Not even the Civil War which I experienced from both sides, saw our country polarized as it is today. I would like to charge all of us to commit to bridging these divides. Our world, not just Nigeria, is being torn apart by politics of emotions dividing up people into an us versus them emotion excess, often eschewing reason and rational public conversation which the contemporary German Philosopher, the philosopher of the public sphere, Jurgen Habermas notes is key to Democracy and modernity.

I want to encourage us to draw lessons from these debilitating divisions and the dysfunctions they breed, as seen in the work at the centre for moral cognition at Harvard. Its director, Joshua Greene has put on our agenda the challenges the Emotion versus Reason crisis generates, just as the troubles of how we deal with people we do not know which Malcolm Gladwell so diligently engages in his exploration of talking with strangers, does.

In my view many of the things that seem to divide us should actually be the things that bind us. Unfortunately, most of us do not know how to talk to strangers and do not embrace the mantra of rational public conversations. So, we allow emotions to make small misunderstandings a source of conflict.

My view is that these divisions flow largely from a failure of leadership. Our charge to leadership in the future we seek to unveil today, must be that job 1 is making all feel at home in the Nigeria tent and live the words of our Independence National Anthem that ‘though tribe and tongue may differ, in brotherhood we stand’.

The motivation for today’s gathering of we the people may be the future, the great possibilities of tomorrow; but the impetus for it is today.

The big trouble of today is not hard to find. No sane Nigerian can, in good conscience, be pleased with where our country is today: Our spectacular failure on all the SDG goals: The Brookings Institution’s study which showed we have the biggest number of the absolutely poor in one country on the planet, which earned us the poverty capital of the world ranking, and the state of insecurity which has made farmers stop farming and many abandon road travel. Yet, our less used roads are in such a state of disrepair that road haulage Drivers are this week proceeding on strike and picketing to protest the state of the roads.

In the American Journey, Patrick Henry is remembered for his cry “Give me Liberty or give me death”.  We have arrived at a Patrick Henry moment in Nigerian history. It is time to shout out In truth, we are dying anyway. We are being killed by Bandits, Armed robbers, Herdsmen, Terrorists, Disease, and Hunger.

Deeply, sadly, all of these are happening in the face of a deep pool of talent, male and female; resources, solid and liquid; and a culture of enterprise

Our weak underbelly has been the absence of political imagination, and goal displacement in which power often trumps purpose. The time is now to say enough is enough and for us to begin again. To start afresh, so that Nigeria will rise up again, we have all to set forth with passion, with the zeal of a Patrick Henry. The time to sit on the fence is over. We must awake our complicit middle, empower our youth badly wounded a year ago in the EndSARS protests, and cause our elders to weep loudly at the savaging of the dreams of their years of fertile imagination. Concerned Professionals and citizens all must rally today to socially engineer Nigeria out of the collapse of culture that has terribly degraded the prospects of our beloved country.

WHY WE PERFORM SO BADLY

There is near universal acceptance that Nigeria performs badly and is punching below its weight. Why is this so, and how can our mission for today alter this sad course of travel.

There are many reasons why Nations Fail, countries are poor, and strategic relevance gets diminished.

Notorious among these reasons are weak institutions, challenged leadership, collapse of culture and failure to invest in human capital as well as not inspiring a habit of entrepreneurship and creative problem-solving. Sadly, for us, Nigeria suffers from all these infections. We cannot engage these problems in a Democracy if we do not have Political Parties with certain values, world view, and ways of recruiting, socializing, and deploying talented citizens.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Unfortunately, for our nation-building experience, our political parties have not evolved in the way that helps citizens pursue the dreams of happiness and material progress.

There is consensus that our dominant political parties lack a distinct sense of a world they want to move us to and modus operandi for getting us to where we deserve and desire. These parties are perceived as special purpose vehicles of individual owners for acquiring power for personal gain through machine politics. Impunity is rife in their conduct, and internal democracy is clearly non-existent as those who own the SPV contend for who is utmost in the flexing of instruments of outrage. This phenomenon is currently writ large in the parties. As all can see from recent reporting of ward elections in preparation for party congresses there was hardly any honour among thieves as power was tested by the ability to write results and submit with no consideration for voting or even a little bit of the interest of the other gladiators. The zero sum mindset is clearly antithetical to Nation building. It is no surprise the policy is so fractured and threats of secession and creeping anarchy, define our now.

As citizens united to make Democracy work for the advance of the Common Good, our many webinars and committee meetings and social media conversations on the NCF platform propel us to seek to mobilize Nigerians to participate in reforming the terms of engagement in a collective leadership approach that is different from the despotic mode that defines political parties today.

It is to project these desires that the committee of NCFront for political parties is proposing the merger of three of the leading political parties outside of PDP and APC.  with a plan to absorb other parties and ‘’Righteous wings’’ of APC and PDP. We have hope that the R-PDP and R-APC and the others will blend well under the entrepreneurial peoples’ capitalism ideas of a center-left ideological platform of that emerging franchise which will be rooted in the good of common man without a dirigiste disposition.

This business friendly worker dignifying political party focused on using perspective planning and limited industrial policy around select factor endowments on which it can dominate certain global value chains of those factor endowments, to make Nigeria the next great factory of the world. In the vision of the new Party, production banishes poverty faster than the experience of China and Brazil in recent narratives of national journeys to prosperity. The evolving party planks show a commitment to overcoming the recursive economy tradition of two steps forward and three steps backward that is majorly a problem of weak institutions when effort for policy reform is made.

The purpose of social organization here will be to empower the people through policies anchored on the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity so they can produce their way out of poverty and infuse culture with values of the Common Good and the dignity of the human person.

Plans for financing this new platform flows from a desire to set an example and break the stranglehold of party owners and build parties that are democratic. Citizen commitment is key here and we call on all who desire to save Nigeria to rise up here and stand to be counted.

We would like to open ownership of this new political party to all its members and the Nigerian people in general. We want to encourage membership dues and crowdfunding.

We are therefore calling on patriots everywhere to contribute through crowdfunding. I am therefore inviting the people of Nigeria to support this party building process. The accounts which will be controlled by a council of elders accountable to a board of trustees with quarterly published reports will enable a new tradition in having peoples parties. The accounts and methods for contributing will be announced on Tuesday.

ON ELECTORAL PROCESS REFORMS

The fading legitimacy of the Nigerian state derives from the fact that that most Nigerians perceive, rightly or wrongly, that those in elected positions are usurpers who foisted themselves on the people through the abuse of the electoral process and outright rigging. This has diminished the legitimating attributes of elections, the critical pillar of constitutional democracy.

The NCF will therefore wage a pitched battle on electronic transmission of results and other electoral process reforms until we can reinvest legitimacy into the ballot box and bridge the trust deficit which currently severely hampers policy implementation.

Like the Roman General Fabius Quintus Maximus did against the obviously stronger Army of Hannibal of Carthage it will be from all fronts against those who desire to use the instruments of state capture to usurp the suffrage rights of Nigerians through abuse of the elections process. Thankfully many more Nigerians are seeing this light as evidenced by the remarks this week by former President Goodluck Jonathan when he spoke at the war college.

LEADERSHIP SELECTION

I want to acknowledge here the importance of leadership selection and how the failure of that process is significantly responsible for why Nigeria currently lies prostrate, the work of Dr Usman Bugaje and the Rescue Nigeria Project on that subject. The report of their work will be incorporated into a pathway for the new party (parties) and the reform campaign to all political parties. We must set standards for people to attain before they are entrusted with managing the prospects of the lives of others. We draw some inspiration here from speeches made in 1978 by Deng Xiao Ping which set the tone for China’s ascendancy in making knowledge key to the prospects of the party. As we know the culture of the current dominant political parties is anti intellectual and very corrupt.

As Dr Myles Munroe often said everything begins, rises and falls with leadership. We cannot afford to toil with leadership recruitment and development systems. The party (parties) that will crystallize from our efforts will have strict criteria for public life prospects, and rigorous training programmes for their growth, character commitment, courage and development. 

NIGERIA WILL RISE UP AGAIN

My personal theme song for a good 20years has been the chorus ‘Nigeria will rise up again’. I am persuaded that with the ongoing initiatives outlined in the foregoing Nigeria cannot but rise again.  Once we place Nigeria in the safe hands of competent, capable and committed people of character that have a culture focused on the Common Good and dignified humanity of all, the future will be so bright that Sun glasses will run out of stock from people seeking to protect their eyes. But our new production orientation would make sure the factories of Nigeria can do the needful. We feel no shame in borrowing the MPH model of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. The mantra of merit, pragmatism and honesty. All these are lacking in the Nigeria of today and Nigeria must be engineered away from the extant wilderness state. That duty belongs to all Nigerians.

I will like to close these remarks on October 1 by acknowledging our leaders past.  May God bless our Fatherland.