Continued from yesterday
The North, the Youth and Precarity
Public Trust in the Nigerian State Project has collapsed and the country’s political settlement which has been based on diverting public resources for the benefit of regional elite coalitions is imploding under the impulsion of debilitating poverty in the North, the youth bulge and the rising agency of the precariat. The result is the massive rise of insecurity and the youth procure and use small arms and light weapons to extract their own share of the famous “national cake”.
Poverty in Nigeria is not evenly spread. The number of people living in poverty in the Northern region has been increasing since 2011 and in 2016, it represented 87 percent of all poor in Nigeria. In contrast, the South is achieving greater progress, with around 12 percent of its population living in poverty in 2016. In general, inequality has increased in recent years, as indicated by the Gini coefficient increase from 0.36 to 0.42 between 2011 and 2016, a situation that fuels instability and conflicts which is our concern in this report.
The most important contemporary problem for Nigeria is the lack of opportunity for the youth. We have developed a huge youth bulge that has been growing rapidly. This is happening at a time in which formal opportunities for employment are declining and having a job has become a minority experience. The North is the most affected region in the country in this regard. The North, especially the North East and North West are the most backward region of Nigeria in all social sectors. It has the highest birth rate in the contemporary world, the lowest level of economic development, the least access to education and the poorest network of health facilities and staff. The population of the North is growing at a higher rate than the rest of the country thereby deepening poverty rates.
Education
The North is also behind in educational attainment across the country. As of 2018, the gross enrolment rate in elementary schools in Nigeria stood at 68.3 percent. The South West recorded the highest enrolment for female with 73% while the North East recorded the least with 59.7% enrolment for male. The result of this process is that there is a very large proportion of Northern youth who are not in school, not in the family house and not in regular paid employment. They live precarious lives in urban centres doing menial daily-paid jobs and are engaged in the informal sector. Living in the cities, these marginalised youth who are often glued to the social media know about the massive wealth being enjoyed by a few and conspicuous consumption of the obscene ruling class. They feel marginalized, are often angry and feel completely abandoned by society. They are a precariat ready for violence and their time has come. The Northern Precariat is today one of the major agencies of social action in the country creating significant levels of insecurity.
Insecurity
The state of insecurity in Nigeria has reached an unprecedented level as bands and gangs of the precariat go on rampage daily. Well-coordinated commando-like operations by gunmen are organised against rural communities where people are kidnapped for ransom, their houses burnt and their property looted. Similar attacks are also conducted against the army and police. These attacks are now occurring in virtually all geopolitical zones in the country. FormerGovernor and current Defence Minister Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State estimated when he was governor that there were no fewer than 30,000 gunmen spread across more than 100 camps in and around the state when he was in power. They have collected N970 million as ransom from the families of their victims in the eight years between 2011 and 2019 and killed 2,619 people and kidnapped 1,190 others. For years now, significant proportion of farmers cannot go to their farms out of fear so food insecurity is on the horizon. Given the seriousness of the situation.
General Abdulsalam Abubakar, Chairman of the National Peace Committee, told Nigeria that there are six million weapons circulating in the hands of non-state actors in Nigeria and they are using them. The death toll, he estimates is 80,000 while about three million people are internally displaced. The country finds itself at a point in our national trajectory where young Nigerians feel sufficiently marginalized from the STATE and SOCIETY to procure arms and engage in self-help which they define variously as banditry, scotched earth attacks on innocent village communities accompanied by mass rape and other forms of sexual violence, in addition to killing security agents, and even declaring an Islamic Caliphate in Nigeria.
Nigeria as an Ungoverned Space
State crisis is symbolised by the fact that rural Nigeria is characterized by the absence of the State and its security agencies and it is therefore not surprising that the blight of armed banditry has spread and impacted negatively on lives and livelihoods. The massive proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the Nigerian hinterland has provided the means for agency in the spread of violence. The phenomenon has dramatized the expansion of ungoverned spaces in the country. Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence of institutional decay at all levels of governance.
Understanding Leadership
One of the most important variables in determining the advancement or retardation of a people is the quality of the leadership they have. Leaders can inspire and mobilise the people towards progress or the opposite. They can promote unity and show the necessary direction of travel to lead to progress or create conditions for the disintegration and decomposition of the Nation. What then is Leadership and what does it mean for someone to lead? Leadership is a process of giving purpose (meaningful direction) to collective effort, and causing willing effort to be expended to achieve collective purpose. Leadership has to do with the ability of the leader to show the right path to the group or people they lead and to be able to make them see the need to go the way they should. Leadership is showing the way and helping or inducing others to pursue it. This entails envisioning a desirable future, promoting a clear purpose or mission, supportive values and intelligent strategies, and empowering and engaging all those concerned. Being a leader is therefore having the disposition and skills to think, plan and act for the larger community. The role of the leader is to see for the people, help and orient them. The leader also has to persuade the people on the best pathway towards and improved future. Leaders therefore need the intellectual sagacity and wisdom to convince people on the best way forward, which will sometimes appear to be the most difficult path.
The general impression amongst Nigerians is that leadership is about enjoyment, ceremonies, pomp and pageantry, living the high life in government house, moving around in comfortable jets and having direct access to monies in the public treasury. The reality however is leadership is hard work. It requires loads of self-discipline and sacrifice to achieve set objectives. The leader gets insults and attacks and their egos get bruised often. It is this lack of understanding of the leadership task that is partly responsible for the way and manner most people struggle for leadership positions across the continent of Africa. What is in their mind is to get very rich or to punish communities or regions they have problems with. In Nigeria, our national predicament is clearly due to poor leadership.
Leadership and the North
The first set of Northern leaders were trained at Katsina College established in 1921. Annual assessments were conducted by their teachers and 75% of marks were awarded on the basis of character. Elements for assessment included punctuality, honesty, leadership responsibility and ability to work with others. The leadership that ran the North and the Federal Government under Ahmadu Bello and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa were trained under these conditions. They had a vision and John Paden’s book on Ahmadu Bello describes in detail how the provincial mentality they came to Katsina College with was transformed into a Northern Nigerian outlook. They were collectively groomed into a vision for the unity and development of Northern Nigeria. It is important to emphasise that none of that first-generation leadership was focused on personal wealth, nor the culture of self-aggrandisement. They were punctual and will not keep people waiting for them for hours as many leaders today are fond of doing. They were very disciplined in how they ran both their personal and professional lives. They did not acquire properties and did not grow rich through corrupt deals. Although they did not go far academically, they had enough general knowledge to understand contending issues in the policy arena and had a very good command of the English language which gave them the confidence to relate with others from the South or from outside the country. Finally, they had imbibed the ethics of personal behaviour and the ethos of good governance and public service.
Today, you have governors in Northern Nigeria who spend over 80% of their time outside their States, living in Abuja and hoping from one foreign country to another. They regularly misappropriate a significant part of their State budgets and have no sense of the leadership responsibility to deliver public service. They feel no commitment to pay the salaries of workers of the entitlements of pensioners. They are very intolerant of criticisms and get the police to harass their critics.
Governing Nigeria is no easy task and the country’s problems are so many and so deep that governance processes have to be pursued with urgency. For eight years, President Buhari acted as if he had all the time in the world and it is precisely because of that that all the problems he met on the ground worsened over period. He simply refused to govern the country.
Criteria for Good Leadership Selection
In his classic lecture on leadership qualities – “Mutumin Kirki: The Concept of the Good Man in Hausa Society”; Anthony Kirk-Green defined the attributes that people seek for in good leaders. They are truthfulness, compassion, integrity, trust and generosity for those in need. Wealth and material success were not considered important attributes in the selection of leaders. Today, those who can provide the biggest bribes for the biggest number emerge as our leaders and this culture must change. We must develop an overwhelming consensus that political leadership cannot remain the only job for which no qualification appears necessary except to have a lot of money, usually, stolen money. The following criteria are proposed to guide citizens as they set out to nominate and elect their political leaders.
A) Integrity
Only people of proven integrity should be considered for leadership. People know who are the persons of good character in their communities and it is necessary that before party primaries, widespread discussions are held to identify people with integrity to be considered for positions. Many of such people may not propose themselves for public office knowing the high level of monetisation of our politics and might therefore rule themselves out for consideration. The benefit of community involvement in the process is that is that resources could be raised collectively to support their candidature. People who have been known, formally or informally, to have been involved in corruption must be ruled out of consideration at the outset.
B) Competence
Leadership requires people with a vision of what they want to achieve for their society. Of course, those who want to present themselves can get good consultants to write up a vision and programme for them. It is therefore important to define competence on the basis of track record of proposed candidates – professional background and accomplishments, community engagement and service, views expressed on political, economic and social issues. There has to be minimum education standards, degree or higher national diploma. Finally, age and good health are key factors. People over seventy years should be encouraged to stay out of politics because they are unlikely to have the energy for the enormous work involved in running a country as large and complex as Nigeria.
C) Democratic or Civic Credentials
Governance success requires respect and knowledge of how democracies work at their best. The good profile for a democratic player includes respect for due process and the rule of law.
Even more important is the disposition to be always ready to promote participation of members – community, political party, assembly etc. In order words, people with an ingrained civic culture. The search for consensus is important as long as it does not involve sacrificing core principles. Thorough and open discussions of policy programmes before their adoption is extremely important. We must move away from politics as brute expression of power or manipulation. We must stand for a civic culture that builds citizenship..
