NIGERIA’S SHINING EXAMPLES

NIGERIA’S SHINING EXAMPLES

I recently read two good books, Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs “From Third World to First” and Peter Enahoro’s book “Then Spoke the Thunder”; the former for the umpteenth time and the latter for a second time and I was struck anew with the way Nigeria was wasted. Lee Kuan Yew wrote about his first Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Lagos in 1966 and his judgement of events and Nigeria at the time, especially the demeanour and carriage of the then Finance Minister, Chief Okotie Eboh fills one with a sense that our first republic leaders were steeped in an unexplainable state of insouciance.

He went on to Ghana and the story was not much different as the Government of that great pan Africanist, Osagyefo kwame Nkrumah was fast developing into a farce papered over by hero worship. Peter Enahoro in one of the best books on a Nigerian life, indeed his own life; though he denied the book is an autobiography or memoir gave an uncanny insight into Nigerian history before, since independence and much after up until the new Century. Reading his book, one gets a fresh and often times eyewitness perspective into momentous events that shaped a distorted Nigeria and not a few African countries.

The picture of Nigeria he painted was to say the least agonizing and it grieves the heart that many leaders at every critical juncture in Nigeria’s history took the wrong turn. Many knowingly and what US Lieutenant Colonel, Frank Slade wrote is especially true of many of Nigeria’s leaders “now I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew, but I never took it. You know why? It was too damned hard” and even today some of those leaders of yore still echo the sentiments of our inglorious and ignominious past.

Enahoro’s chapter dedicated to Liberia’s Samuel Kenyon Doe and another one poignantly titled “a parade of the lions” on selected African leaders and the destructive path they charted for themselves and their countries is one of the most illumining and close quarter view of African leaders from the Niger to the Nile you will get anywhere and without exception, to the last man, these leaders failed to build their nations. Those who tried were ultimately defeated by flaws in their own character even though their countries may have done well by them if they had but a measure of temperance.

A review of Nigeria’s history paints a picture of everything a nation should not be and twelve years of democratic rule has done little to lift the gloom and show a pathway to building a proper and great nation. The stench of corruption is yet putrefying, presidential election results sired resentments in ordinary folks up North and violence erupted claiming the lives of many. The most shameful aspect of the carnage was the senseless killing of defenseless University graduates on National Assignment. Nigeria is a country where it is hard to escape the grueling suffocation of faith and dashed hopes in the nation’s future. But it is not all gloom and doom. In the midst of all these seemingly intractable and insurmountable troubles I have read in the last few days from shores afar of two Nigerians, who are products of this environment and whose lives are shining examples that Nigeria can be remade.

The New York Times, one of the most influential publications around the World wrote in a feature on Nigeria on Thursday, April 21, 2011 “one Nigerian politician is charting a new direction. Before Babatunde Fashola became its governor in 2007, Lagos-Nigeria’s business capital and Africa’s premier megacity-was known as the world’s first failed city state. The place had seen almost no new infrastructure for four decades, despite its population soaring from 5 million in 1976 to 18 million. Traffic was gridlocked day and night. Slums expanded, on stilts, into the lagoons that gave the city its name. Crime was rife, pollution choking, brown-outs constant. It was, says Fashola, a city of “very evident despair.”

The Times continued, Fashola, 47, was perhaps the only person in Lagos who saw that as an opportunity. “You are going to need more water, more roads, more jetties, schools, hospitals, space for housing,” he says. “That all means jobs.” Fashola set about rehabilitating and expanding a maze of overpasses, part of a new transport network that will connect cars and buses with trains, trams, airports, and water taxis. He unveiled plans for a new 17,000-hectare industrial zone and a gleaming new 900-hectare city center on land reclaimed from the sea that will be home to 250,000 residents and contain offices for another 150,000 commuters. All that building has indeed created hundreds of thousands of jobs. Efforts to clean the streets had the multiple effect of tidying, employing and cutting crime.

To Fashola, the new Lagos is a “statement … that things could be changed no matter how bad they were”. It’s also an example of how a new Nigeria might emerge from the old. The development of Lagos’ nonoil economy means 70% of the city’s revenue is now raised locally. Citizens not only are willing to pay tax: more to the point, by doing so they and their government reconnect, reversing decades when state and citizens lived in separate worlds.

The Times fittingly concluded “there are lessons for the whole country here. No Nigerian politician has missed that Fashola is the country’s most admired leader. Though internal ACN rivalries block any presidential bid (and Fashola in any case insists he prefers state politics to national) the governor is proving that results are possible within Nigerian politics. But while change is inevitable, it is unlikely to come fast or smoothly, because the bad old generation of Nigerian leaders will not go quietly. A western diplomat described Nigeria as having it “all to lose, rather than poised for victory.”

In a rare burst of good fortune for Nigeria in the Western press, the same Times in its reputable Annual Time 100 of Monday, April 25, 2011 which wrote of the 2011 edition; “meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution” found space for a distinguished Nigerian. Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor, scion of the Kano emirate, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was named in the exalted company of 100 shaping and shaking the World – his a force for good in society.

The influential magazine wrote “the story of Nigeria's first half-century of Independence is a tale of wasted potential: sub-Saharan Africa's most populous country, home to its biggest oil riches, impoverished by thieving autocrats. A key reason a new Nigeria no longer seems fanciful is Central Bank governor Lamido Sanusi.

A veteran of an often corrupt banking industry, Sanusi, 50, took up his position at the height of the financial crisis in June 2009 and immediately turned on his former peers. He took over nine banks, sacked the chief executives of eight of them, ordered a series of mergers and named their biggest debtors. He was, he said, cleaning up not just banking but all Nigeria. Sanusi's will be a long fight and a dangerous one: death threats have obliged him to employ armed guards. But it is also essential for Africa's sleeping giant to finally awaken”.
The two New York Times publications within four days of each other confirm what some of us already know. There is a glimmer of hope in the country’s future even though it is but a flicker. We need a Million Fashola’s and Sanusi’s but if we do not find them – not to despair, a few might still suffice – history has shown that only a few sold to a committed purpose change a nation.

All therefore hail Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) and Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (OFR), the men who will change Nigeria…

Stephen o. Obajaja Esq. is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.