Whenever we complain that the country is failing, we are actually objectively evaluating the nefarious roles that the so-called elite have played over the years. Currently we are debating the merit and demerit of the Tax Reform Bills now navigating their ways through the National Assembly, a debate seemingly pitting the nation’s circumstantial “parasites” against the “parasited” but with no mention being made about how to first generate the wealth that we are fighting so bitterly to share.
Whether we like it or not, Nigeria is still a very poor country, irrespective of her abundant resources because the key element of quality leadership in national development is lacking: a fool and his money or wealth are easily parted. The US dollar equivalent of what all the tiers of government of the federation and the entire private sector budget every year is less than what some private corporations in the developed world spend on their Research and Development within the same timeframe. Any serious discussion about the economic wellbeing of Nigeria, whether official or private, should therefore be focused on how to improve our overall productivity, create more wealth and incrementally improve the economic worth of our people.
An economy in which a single public officer illicitly and corruptly acquires an estate with 753 duplexes as reported in Abuja while the rest of the population groan in abject poverty is one heading for perdition. The greater horror in this horrendous looting by a member of the elite class is the lack of official decency to even disclose the name of the mysterious culprit all in the spirit of elitist solidarity.
EXPOSED!! POPULAR ABUJA DOCTOR REVEALED HIDDEN SECRET ON HOW MEN CAN NATURALLY AND PERMANENTLY CURE POOR ERECTION,QUICK EJACULATION, SMALL AND SHAMEFUL MANHOOD WITHOUT SIDE EFFECTS. EVEN IF YOU ARE HYPERTENSIVE OR DIABETIC ..STOP THE USE OF HARD DRUG FOR SEX!! IT KILLS!
If that was a case involving a poor and unconnected petty thief, his name and family history would have been splashed across the nation’s newspapers and TV stations “as a deterrence to others” but when it is one of them, the matter is conveniently shrouded in secrecy, casually explained as being “sub judice” until it eventually fizzles out of public memory and finally “case closed.” This is simply the case of the elite colluding amongst themselves to hoodwink the citizens of this country – class solidarity.
We have previously argued here severally that “all through human history, the factor of leadership has always been a major determinant in the success or failure of the society. A well-led nation will always prosper while a poorly-led one will surely fail and that was exactly what Chinua Achebe meant with respect to the Nigerian situation, when he concluded that the problem of Nigeria is simply ‘that of leadership.’”
In the Aristotelian sense, the decisive entry requirement for the elite club is that members must have so distinctively distinguished themselves in their various callings that the rest of society would intuitively trust their judgments on matters about leadership to be always altruistic, legitimate and patriotic. In all progressive societies, every effort is made to ensure that those who are elected into leadership positions are respectable and patriotic persons. Even in the animal world we also find that leadership is always entrusted to the most capable member of the pride.
Unfortunately, this model of leadership recruitment started losing its primary logic under poorly administered democracies and other forms of deficient governments in which it became possible for incompetent and morally depraved individuals to corruptly manipulate themselves into political positions through seriously corrupted electoral processes that are often not based on rational premises but largely on greed and bigotry motivated by sentiments and other debased considerations.
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These low-grade sentiments and primordial loyalty probably explain why at about the same time that Singapore was recruiting Lee Kaun Yew, a Cambridge graduate as its leader, Nigeria conveniently settled for Ahmadu Bello, a decent man but who was not formally educated beyond the Teachers Grade 11 certificate. There was no way both leaders could have the same quality of vision, because you cannot give what you do not have. Even today, the constitutionally prescribed qualification for national leadership is just “education up to school certificate level” which practically means you really do not have to be well-educated, skilled or specially endowed to be enlisted into national leadership.
That speedily devalued the quality of recruitments into the nation’s governing class. It marked the beginning of the rapid fall of genuine elitism in Nigeria and also serves as a perfect reminder of Lord Acton’s famous axiom that: “There is no greater heresy than the saying that the office sanctifies the holder….” The fact that a nonentity is nepotically appointed into a high political office does not automatically transform him into an elite in the Aristotelian sense. It is this same logic that has promoted criminal enterprises like armed robbery, 419 and kidnapping as direct entry qualification and a short-cut into the elite class typically assessed materially.
The resulting sharp collapse in governing standards naturally extended to all facets of the society. In fact, hard-work became a veritable limitation as people quickly learnt to cut corners into affluence, stardom and political power. That is why today not all of our professionals can genuinely claim that they possess the requisite expertise in their supposed fields of study. It is not surprising that scammers and counterfeits, who flaunt fake titles of “doctor,” “chief” and even “professor” without expecting societal scrutiny, have taken over leadership.
Because our post-colonial politicians and the military interventionists were fundamentally ill-prepared for the roles which they improperly assumed, the quality of leadership rapidly degenerated into some form of glorified banditry and, like vandals, they proceeded to destroy all that was good in governance which resulted in the steady deterioration of our national institutions and values. Ascendance to leadership status is no longer based on personal achievements but on how much the individual has accumulated and where he hails from and which religious faith he professes. Merit was displaced by mediocrity, garbage in, garbage out, they say!
I was pondering over this national dilemma last week at the Central Park, NY, a forested area of Manhattan that was wisely set aside by the city elite more than a century and a half ago. Just imagine for a second that such a quality real estate was located anywhere in Nigeria. The so-called ruling class would have since greedily allocated it to themselves, leaving nothing for the City and her future. Anyone familiar with FESTAC will readily get the point that I am making here. Because our so-called elite are comprised of social vandals, they proceeded to recklessly allocate all the playgrounds, recreational parks and even the buffer zones that were originally set aside for the enjoyment of the residents of the estates to themselves, their cronies and girlfriends with reckless abandon.
Today, FESTAC is nothing but a perverted version of the original Master Plan. It was the same vandalistic mentality that led the Obasanjo government to sell off critical national monuments like the Apo Legislative Quarters, Abuja, and many other public assets to themselves and their cronies for peanuts as if after their reign there would be no more Nigeria. Anyone who could inflict such a hideous anti-people and vandalistic policies on the nation has forfeited any claim to patriotism.
Whereas the elite class elsewhere work hard to build their societies and preserve their values, our dysfunctional elite, on the contrary, are on a vandalistic and looting “state capturing” mission, a development which has left the nation’s political economy in tatters and seemingly irreversible; an oil producing nation suffering from perennial fuel scarcity; a nation endowed with abundantly fertile land, facing famine and starvation has to be an “extractive” and “degenerative” one, a pitiable phenomenon which we discussed last week when we explained “Why Nations Fail.” It is utterly pitiable and shameful.
