“From the opposition parties to many Nigerians, the traumatic experiences of protracted bad governance, in the last decades, demand extreme skepticism about what to expect from the new administration. And no one can beat one’s experience, especially for the past sixty-three years that the Nigerian state has been trying to make sense of Nigeria’s plural experience and underdevelopment. Or even for the last twenty-four years since we began the experiment with democratic governance. The last eight years of the last administration provides a layer of relative fresh failure, especially with the security architecture of the Nigerian state and how the security apparatuses failed to protect Nigerians. And yet, we cannot succumb to hopelessness or cynicism despite the horrors of our underdevelopment and leadership failure. Hopelessness is existential death. It means that there is nothing to still live for. And Tinubu’s call for renewed hope should be seen as a call to stave off such hopelessness and death”.
I think that right from the very first and May 29 inaugural speech, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has set the ball rolling on reflections around what we can call the Tinubu Agenda for transforming the Nigerian state and society. Of course, most Nigerians are struggling with the ripple effects of the announcement, in the same speech, of the end to the fuel subsidy regime—something that the outgone Buhari administration had brokered before leaving. However, I believe the speech does more in outlining a preliminary set of thinking points than the microeconomics of fuel subsidy.
Inaugural speeches are often difficult to write. And this is because the one who is setting out the vision—in this case, the new president of the federal republic of Nigeria—is as yet sufficiently acquainted with the structural and institutional dynamics of the new office or status. And such a person does not really want to set a bad precedent in terms of what is not clearly seen yet. But then, an inaugural speech must be written and the tone must set out specifics that others, the readers and citizens, can take seriously as outlining the intentions of the one giving the speech.
However, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is no stranger to politics, and Nigerian administrative trajectory. He has been a student of Nigerian politics for as long as anyone could remember. He was there at some of the most turbulent periods in Nigerian history, especially the tough and dangerous times when democratic governance was struggling to be born. He was singular in the defining of good governance in Lagos State, and in the consolidation of the state’s infrastructural development and mega-city superstructure that other governors would later build on. Bola Ahmed Tinubu knows Nigeria.
And so, the speech touched on some of the most significant issues that we expect are critical to handling some of the major predicaments that the Nigerian state has been facing since independence. Unemployment and taxation are critical to the infrastructural and economic development of Nigeria, and the transformation of the well-being of Nigerians. And security is key to any progress a country might wish to make since it is within the ambit of law and order that a state could put all the variables of growth and development together. By touching on agriculture, the president hints at the fundamental issue of diversifying the Nigerian economy away from its monocultural dependence on crude oil in a global world that is fast moving away from such dependence.
From the opposition parties to many Nigerians, the traumatic experiences of protracted bad governance, in the last decades, demand extreme skepticism about what to expect from the new administration. And no one can beat one’s experience, especially for the past sixty-three years that the Nigerian state has been trying to make sense of Nigeria’s plural experience and underdevelopment. Or even for the last twenty-four years since we began the experiment with democratic governance. The last eight years of the last administration provides a layer of relative fresh failure, especially with the security architecture of the Nigerian state and how the security apparatuses failed to protect Nigerians.
And yet, we cannot succumb to hopelessness or cynicism despite the horrors of our underdevelopment and leadership failure. Hopelessness is existential death. It means that there is nothing to still live for. And Tinubu’s call for renewed hope should be seen as a call to stave off such hopelessness and death. Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, provides a profound statement: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope does not mean you have to stop questioning the realities of your existence. But it definitely means that you have to focus your belief on something that makes sense. By calling for renewed hope, President Tinubu is asking that Nigerians focus on Nigeria as a phenomenon that makes sense; something worth hoping in; something worth fighting for.
And that is what democracy preaches—insistent hope that something good can still come out of the Nigerian state under a leadership that knows the right things to do and how to do them right. Every new administration speaks to the possibility of hope; the possibility of renewing hope around Nigeria and her greatness that has remained latent for sixty-three years. President Tinubu, in that inaugural speech, however, goes beyond just selling hope to Nigerians. He sells us also an ideal around which we can hang our collective hope; the ideal around which the Tinubu Agenda can be framed. He sells to us what he calls the “Nigerian Ideal.” This is a bold offering; almost like wanting to close the chapter on our pains and suffering—or even the governance failure of the past eight years, while opening up before us the circumference of a new vista of freshness, and what makes sense. An ideal always makes sense, something for us to believe in and yearn for and work to achieve.
“The human soul, says Victor Hugo, the French Romantic writer and politicians, “has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.” The distinction between existing and living is crucial to existentialism. Existing is just being there—like a stone or a tree; passively allowing several things to happen without participating in the happening. It would seem that our postcolonial experiences as Nigerians have put us in a place of merely existing and bearing the burden of our collective existence outside of any vision of a good life, like Aristotle outlined for all governments. Living, on the other hand, is doing more than just allowing the traumatic realities to happen to us. Living implies allowing the imagination to propose a framework of goodness, or the good life or good governance that we can vigorously work towards.
So, what is this “Nigerian Ideal”? It is a vision of what we want this Nigeria of multiple ethnicities and religions to be in a collective framework of national unity. The Nigerian Ideal is what we want, through political will and national zeal, to deploy Nigeria’s ethnic capital to achieving in terms of translating the diversity into a development performance. It is the vision of one Nigeria that is not reducible to the five principles highlighted by President Tinubu—rule of law, stability, economic growth, youth and women development, and anti-corruption—but is impossible without them. The Nigerian Ideal translates into the conscious efforts by the political class and Nigerians to recognize the ethnic differences that characterize us, and to harness these differences into a diversity management framework for moving Nigeria forward. This is why, even in linguistic terms, President Tinubu speaks more within the context of the collective “we” than in the solitariness of the “I”.
In sociological terms, rebuilding the broken walls of the Nigerian society is a joint and collective efforts that transcends the negotiability of the Nigerian nation. And the first step in that regard is the willingness of the political class, represented by the President himself, to gamble on the development and nationhood of the Nigerian state. National integration, that is, the political realization of the Nigerian Ideal, comes at a cost: the cost is the elite suicide of the political class. Committing elite suicide simply translates into the political class deliberately refraining from playing bad politics with Nigeria’s future. Put graphically, the Nigerian Ideal emerges when we deliberately and systematically undermine the Nigerian Factor. The latter is our own ways of destroying our nation-building visions and strategies through corrupt living, impunity, bureau-pathologies, and many of the ways we live and transacts in the Nigerian socioeconomic and sociopolitical spaces. Within the context of the Nigerian factor, our predicament is the result of a leadership and followership problem.
The irrefutable condition for achieving the Nigerian Ideal—and the President grounds it poetically—is living and working together in the trenches of our collective destiny. According to him, despite the trauma of what had happened to us in the past, “…we have shouldered the heavy burden to arrive at this sublime moment where the prospect of a better future merges with our improved capacity to create that future…. For me, political coloration has faded away. All I see are Nigerians.” And yet, the Nigerian Ideal, like the rise of civilizations and the progress of nations are driven by a few—those who can translate national visions into strategic governance that locks the citizens into a collective resolve to live and toil together under a national banner. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, calls them the “creative minorities”—those who drive the engine of growth in ways that prevent stagnation and inspire the citizens to follow their lead and their policy innovation. This is the very core of the leadership challenge that many scholars, philosophers and political scientists in Nigeria have spoken about.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has outlined what we all consciously hope for. May the coming years see him give institutional and developmental teeth to the ideal by which we need to live and transform our lives.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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