The way forward for Nigeria
Dec 30th, 2011 by admin
The way forward for Nigeria, Nigeria’s former high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Dr. Christopher Kolade
WHAT IS THE SINGULAR IMPROVEMENT IN NIGERIA SINCE THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES?I think probably the fact that we now have more people who can be described as having gone through an educational experience that makes them better able to relate to their situations that should enable them to take some meaningful initiatives in helping to add some value to situations. We have people who are now better developed, better prepared than before, not just in numbers which is one thing but also in quality of preparation and that is a fact and this is one way Nigeria has improved but then am not saying that we have realized the fruits of that improvement, am just saying that this is a fact of life.
WHAT DO MEAN EXACTLY BY FRUITS?
ALL right when people actually develop, when they grow in their capacity for doing certain things, now that is a plus, it is an advantage but it is an incomplete plus because what you are looking for, is for them to be able to apply the capacity that they have now developed so it is in the application of that capacity, of that potential that you can begin to look at the fruits of the process of development, what am saying is that we have not managed to bring people to a place where they feel that they must apply the capacity they have developed.
WHAT ABOUT AREAS THAT HAVE NOT IMPROVED SINCE THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES?
The most singular area in my view is in the area of acknowledging and expressing corporate identity as a nation. The term Nigeria is the name that is used to describe a geographical location, geographical entity but that gives you only what I call a country. Now if Nigeria is going to improve, if Nigeria is going to do well then we have to move from being a country to being a nation. To be a nation means we have to identify what our shared interests are and agree on the terms on which we will try to pursue those interests for the achievement of the most beneficial results, now that is what I call corporate identity. We have not yet developed a corporate identity that helps us to get the best advantage from our being together.
WHY IS THIS SO?This is so because after the colonial days when we actually now got sovereignty for some reasons the first crop of political leaders because they were the ones that brought us through the fight for independence were able to keep Nigeria, the nation in their focus very soon after that if you remember the military came into governance and unfortunately the military were not prepared for governance, they did not know what being a nation really meant. They believed that the best way to govern was to play to the narrow interest of individuals or small groups and that was the best way to get people to respond to their leadership and you shouldn’t be surprised about that because in the army in any of the armed forces the relationship between leadership and followership is not one that wants to get the followership to band together in one psychological entity rather they want each soldier, each person to respond to authority on the basis of you do this or else. Therefore people in those forces tend to play to their leader on the basis of I know this is good for me if I obey this man.
When you come to the governance of a nation, people who are not under any obligation to obey you when you give an order, people who in fact in expressing their democratic status should be able to challenge you if they think you are making a mistake, should be able develop their own initiatives, add their own value, now you couldn’t bring that about under military governance because they just didn’t not have that system, unfortunately we were under military governance for about three decades and that is a long time so people who were born into that period came into that system and that is why they have found it so difficult to return to the concept of nation where you are prepared to fight for the common good because you know that if our corporate existence is positive then you own individual interest will be protected. Whereas if you pursue your own individual interest alone the corporate one may never happen, that is the situation we are in.
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE TO CHANGE THE MENTALITY?
Right, the thing that can be done is that first of all as a human beings, when you find yourself in a position that is negative and is not yielding the right results, the first thing you do is to stop and ask yourself some questions, where did I go wrong, what am I doing that is not right, and so on, you have to identify why the situation is like this. Today because the constitution that we following now in the nation was handed over to us by the military we are finding it difficult to express nation therefore most people have not identified the problem and you cannot even begin to solve the problem unless you know what the problem is so what can be done I believe we should go back to the educational endeavor of this nation and get our young people to learn what actually makes a country a nation. I will give an example; it is not possible to have a vibrant nation unless each of us is willing to make some personal sacrifice in order to help to realize the corporate objectives. Now, you will find that today most people want to pursue their own interests and they are not prepared to make a sacrifice to get the nation to work well that is why you have ethnic conflicts, religious conflicts, all kinds of conflicts are turning up because people are sitting in the position of defending their own interests, now you need to get young people educated to see how negative and sterile that is for the future, it will not produce any results, that is item 1.
Item 2, is that we need to review the systems we have put in place for bringing people into management of responsibility, again let me illustrate this, look at the companies in the business sector, most of them are doing very well , most of them report to shareholders every year and you can see the results they are achieving why because they have set up systems that put the focus on company results rather than individual results, now if we borrow a leaf from that, we will see that it is important for us to come back to situation in which people understand that if Nigeria is unwell then any individual that appears to be in good health can be deceiving himself so that is why I say go back to the young people and start teaching them and also go back to how we give people responsibility. In this business sector companies that am talking about, if you want to appoint somebody your chief financial officer for instance, you don’t just go and pick someone you like or someone that says Yes sir to you every day, No!, pick somebody who has the right qualifications, who has the right experience, who can demonstrate a track record of success in what they have done before you say to them this responsibility is now yours and you also give yourself the opportunity of monitoring how they perform, if even in one year they do not perform well , you say to them at the end of the year I cannot give you an increment in salary because you have not fulfilled your objectives and indeed you know if you have another year of that performance I may have to send you away altogether, now that is the system that works with human beings but if you now bring somebody into a position of responsibility whether as a member of the national assembly, as a governor , as a president and you do not set up a system that is similar to that, it will not work because people need to know that they will be called to account effectively for what they do especially when they are using the resources that belong to the nation, they will have to account, if you are not sure or if you are sure that nobody is going to call you to account or they call you to account and so what, then you do not have the encouragement to perform well and basically if you came into that position with inadequate preparation then of course anybody who complains when you do badly should ask himself what else should we expect so those are the things I think we ought to do we ought to learn to set up systems that respond to basic human behavior. If somebody is not ready for a position do not let them get there and if they get there and they are performing badly set up a credible system for separating them from that position. We do not have either.
ACCORDING TO THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, TEN MILLION CHILDREN ARE NOT IN SCHOOL, WHY?
First, ask yourself why those ten million children are not in school because it is not an impossible task for us to set up enough schools, train enough teachers that would teach our children and make sure those children go to school so why are we not doing it. You see a minister of education actually says ten million children are not in school and he or she is the minister of education and so you are waiting to hear what he or she has decided to do about it, have we got it No! because the handling of that responsibility is wrong, not only are those children not in school, the ones who are in school are performing badly and if you look at some research information that I have seen where even on the African continent the performance of our children in educational exams were ranked number 22. If you have that situation somebody must take responsibility for getting us out of this mess but do we have people who have sufficient experience and who themselves know how to handle the situation, handling a responsibility is not something that anybody can do, you have to have the right preparation, you even have to have the right level of interest, commitment and passion for what you want to do. This must not be just another job for you; it must be a calling, a commitment so that you say to yourself until I get this situation right I will not rest. Is that what our leaders are like?
WHY DO OUR LEADERS NOT HAVE THAT LEVEL OF COMMITMENT?The manner of entering into leadership does not call for commitment. If you read the constitution, I think section 62 which says if you want to become President of Nigeria, you have to be 35 years old at least, you have to have passed school certificate or its equivalent and you need to find a political party who would sponsor you, no mention of anything you have done, no mention of any experience you have had, no mention of the fact that we want to see what you have managed successfully before we are going to give you this entire nation to manage. How can we get good leaders when those are the provisions we have made and tell me something, if we know that under our political system you do not have to be a person of good character to be successful in politics and I am not guessing am just going by evidence that is available, you do not even have to be a person of good character to succeed in politics so if you as an individual are a person of good character, why would you want to expose yourself to that. Anybody who is looking at Nigerian contemporary history should see that when people of good character have offered themselves for political leadership they have ended up with their noses in the dirt. Who wants to expose himself or herself to that kind of life, so you see we have to set up a system in which we are saying in this school, in this university we will never appoint somebody dean of this school unless they have shown us clear evidence that they could handle the responsibility and that they were the best of the people we had for handling that responsibility. This is not a matter of politics, it is a matter of leadership, it is a matter of responsibility and what we seem to have forgotten in Nigeria is that a position is not just a title and not just the siren or allowances. A position has been created so that certain responsibilities can be managed and if the person that we are looking at for that position has not demonstrated clearly and visibly the requirements for that position why should we put them there. Therefore, what am saying is, let us agree that this is the problem and let us create a system where even political parties will be forced to look at certain things before they would offer us a candidate.
In this country we have this thing called the quota system, federal character, you want people from different parts of the country but we did not state in that policy that if you, from your state or from your zone are going to offer us a candidate for this position, these are the qualifications, these are the requirements, this person must have done the following things, we do not say that, we simply say send us somebody from your zone so who are you going to send? You are going to send somebody who is your political friend, somebody that you feel comfortable with, most people will feel comfortable with somebody who is not as intelligent as themselves.
YOU ONCE SAID THAT AS MANY CHURCHES AND MOSQUES CONTINUE TO SPRING UP IN NIGERIA; CONFUSION WILL CONTINUE TO INCREASE WHY? WITH SO MANY CHURCHES SPRINGING UP IN THE COUNTRY WHY ARE MORALS GOING DOWN? Ok! What really is a church? A church is an association of people who believe in Jesus Christ, a mosque is an association of people who have decided to follow Mohammed but that is where the thinking seems to end. Now, the thinking should go beyond that and say so what does Jesus Christ represent, what does Mohammed represent, why am I following Jesus Christ, why have I decided to follow Mohammed. Therefore if I get it right I do not actually need a church in every other house on my street because Jesus Christ is only one and Jesus Christ’s principles and standards are clear. Of course, now we set up denominations and one denomination will tell you that what the others are doing is not right or inappropriate. I say let us maintain the oneness of the body of Christ, the oneness of the Muslim faith and let us understand the principles and the values that Jesus Christ or Mohammed taught us to begin with. If we were to do that, we would understand that for instance if somebody of another faith disagrees with me or something, I have to approach that disagreement from the point of view of what my leader has taught me and you will not find in either the Bible or the Koran that it says that I should go and kill him or burn down his house. So, you see with churches and mosques springing up all over the place, we have actually diversified to the extent that we now believe that it is all about us but of course, it is not about us. It is about Christ and it is about Mohammed.
The Christian religion is the one to which I belong and Christ actually says when I have a disagreement with my neighbor I should first tell him that he has done something to me that I don’t like and seek ways of resolving this peacefully, nowhere does he tell me that it is right for me to go and attack him physically, treat him with violence and I believe that it is also true for the other faith. So, what are we practicing? springing up of churches, are we creating just human organizations? That is why I said if we focus just on springing up one church here one mosque there and so on and so forth, we are missing the point because we now identify that this is Pastor so and so’s church. It is not about them it is about the body of Christ or the body of the Muslim faith.
IN NIGERIA CAN THE CHURCHES ADDRESS THE CRITICAL ISSUES AT STAKE AND HELP SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS?The same problem we have with political leadership has now infiltrated the churches and mosques. How do people now become Bishops and Archbishops, what system do we have in place for making sure that these people are actually servants of Almighty God. They are not just the leader of some faction or the front man for some movement. The moment the leader of a faith becomes more popular, more visible than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed he has lost it because he is representing those people, he is a representative and a servant of God through the Christian faith, through the Muslim faith. As long as you see yourself as a servant, a steward of God’s resources on earth, then your focus must always be on your principles and say what really does God require of me here, as a human being I will have my faults and weakness but God will help me to put those away so that I Can serve him properly so if our leaders in the different religious movements forget that this is all about Jesus Christ or about Mohammed or about who ever their leader is then of course it does not work, that is why morals are going down because we are not relating our behavior to the real thing. In the Bible Paul warned the people, I think it was Corinth some times, some of you say I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollo’s, he says it is not about us it is about Jesus Christ.
HOW CAN NIGERIANS DRAW THE LINE?That is where you go back to the basics of religion. Fortunately or unfortunately, your faith is a personal thing. It did not start as a mass movement. You are either a believer as yourself or you are not. Therefore, if you are a believer for whatever