Tinubu’s New Year Speech

Given the amount of hardship in the country today, it’s only normal that many people will have negative opinion about President Tinubu’s new year speech. For the opposition, nothing less can be expected given what their very mission is.

However, my intention is not to start dissecting the speech, but to show how that presidential communication and the response that has followed it are indirectly indicative of the wrong path we have followed as a nation, a path that leads to nowhere. It is our inability or deliberate refusal to change course that has left us where we’re today.

President Tinubu’s speech dwelt mainly on his socio-economic policies and actions even as he appealed for patience as the “positive” impacts of these measures slowly unfold. Many who criticised the speech dwelt on the quality of the president’s policies and actions and scored him low.

Without going into the merits and demerits of the president’s and his critics’ positions, let me just say that, in my view, both parties failed to dwell on what is our real problem as a people. They were talking about economic policies whereas our most fundamental problem, and for which we have continued to fail, is simply lawlessness.

The nation has failed to work because we have deprived it of the most important element that propels the engine of a modern state – the rule of law. When the law does not rule, lawlessness takes over. The result will be bribery, embezzlement, contract cost inflation, substandard infrastructure, nepotism, favouritism and in fact all manner of corruption and misrule. These, and not shortcomings in economic policies,
are exactly what have primarily kept us where we’re .

A good example will be a recent account by Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State in a television interview. He recalled that while the 2007 CBN Act, the law that regulates the operation of the apex bank, was being drafted, as the CBN governor then, he and his team worked for the inclusion of a provision that limits the loan the bank can give to the federal government to maximum of 5 percent of the previous year’s budget. The provision further requires the federal government to retire such loan by the end of the year, otherwise the bank will be prohibited from advancing any further loan to it.

According to Soludo, the CBN, however, in recent years, chose to jettison this law and was advancing trillions after trillions to the federal government without minding the rules. To keep this fiscal recklessness going, the bank kept printing money to the tune of trillions of naira with no recourse to the economic logic that should guide such exercise. The end result of all this is the deep economic crisis we are in today, according to Soludo.

Laws are made to regulate human conduct so that all will act in a way that advances common interest. When the law is jettisoned, everyone acts as they wish and society becomes a bedlam. This is our experience in Nigeria where a law called Public Procurement Act is meant to regulate how public procurement is made but we choose to flout this law to give contracts to our family and friends and to inflate costs. The result is absence of accountability and delivery of substandard roads and other infrastructure. Similarly, the civil service rules have prescribed the procedure for public service recruitment in order to guarantee quality of workforce, but we have always kept it aside in order to give jobs to our family and friends irrespective of their competence. The consequence is that our public institutions have been populated by many inefficient hands.

Economic policies are crucial for development but experience shows they’re not our major problem. Otherwise why have policies that have worked in other places failed to work in our land? For instance, we abandoned state provision of electricity which has worked well in a country like China to embrace a privatised power sector arrangement which, though has worked well among western countries, is failing to work here. We are now moving away from a state-owned oil company in NNPC to a privatised arrangement whereas a country like Russia has shown that government can profitably and competitively run oil and gas companies. The oil company and gas company, Rosneft and Gazprom, respectively, which are owned by Russian government operate in the upstream, midstream and downstream sectors and are among the biggest and strongest petroleum multinationals in the world. On the contrary, the Nigerian state has failed woefully in running the NNPC which operates only in the midstream and downstream and with zero upstream capabilities. (Instructively, the upstream sector is where the exploration and mining happen involving much more technical complexity than obtains in the other two sectors.)

Therefore, contrary to the picture being painted by our successive governments and some economists, entities like NEPA and the NNPC did not fail to work simply because they were government-owned; they failed because of lawlessness – those that ran them failed to operate within the confines of the laws that regulate the enterprises as well as other relevant laws. For example, Obasanjo noted that one shocking discovery he made about NEPA as president was that contracts were rampantly being awarded to insiders contrary to the law. To use Obasanjo’s words, “everybody [in NEPA] was a contractor.” This has been the bane of public institutions in Nigeria and it’s one act of lawlessness that has continued to suppress quality control and accountability in all sectors and at all levels.

Make no mistake, there is no amount of good policies adopted or number of competent hands employed by the present or any future administration in Nigeria that will succeed in lifting the nation out of the doldrums if public affairs are not run strictly according to the law and regulations. African legendary philosopher and theologian, St. Augustine (354 – 430AD), famously stated “without justice what else is state but a band of robbers.” If we substitute “law” for “justice” it will read “without law what else is state but a band of robbers.” This sums up the fate of the Nigerian nation where a band of robbers operating at all levels of public life – from Aso Rock to the lowest office in the local government civil service – has held the country hostage.

The most fundamental ingredient of good governance is governing according to the law. When the law regulates the conduct of those in charge of state machinery and institutions, they will no longer act according to their individual idiosyncrasies but in accordance with the common good as written into the law.

In his philosophy of law, St. Thomas Aquinas (1224 – 1275), noted that the first principle of the natural law is “good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided.” Drawing from his insight it is easy to see the role law should play in a state i.e. to get everyone to do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing – metaphorically, to whip everyone into the line.

Unfortunately, in the last couple of national elections, we have been discussing economic policies and not governance as rooted in the law. There is an alternative to every policy but there’s no alternative to the law. If we’re embracing neo-liberalism where public corporations are privatised to allow market forces drive them, there is surely a socialist alternative tried with magnificent results in places like China and Russia. Each of the alternative policies is governed by its own kind of laws and to which there are no alternatives. For example, a corporation owned by government (as against privatised entities) are guided by public procurement laws that prohibit, among others, awarding any form of contract to an insider. No alternative exists to this, otherwise the result will be the mess we have in Nigeria today.

Back to President Tinubu’s new year speech, my grouse with it is that it did not address the law, it did not focus on governance. It merely flaunted policies which the president believes are good and will therefore yield good fruits later. But we have seen many wonderful policies before now and what has happened? Right now, the president’s humanitarian affairs minister is being accused of acting contrary to the law by paying money meant for public use into a private account. That’s how whatever good policies adopted by the president in humanitarian matters will begin to fail. That’s how funds meant to support the vulnerable will vanish into thin air. I believe this has sufficiently made my point. The law the minister is being accused of violating is meant to preserve accountability such that public funds are used for the purpose they’re meant. The exact purpose in question will now be determined by the policy of government in power. Governments come and go, policies come and go, only good governance as rooted in the law is a necessary constant variable.

Going forward, as I always argued in this column, it’s time for us to begin to change the narrative. Let political parties, the civil society, the press, the academia and all that have a voice begin to speak to the issue of governance. Let it be the agenda. Let it be the central issue in elections. Let it be the yardstick for measuring who is or can be a good leader over us. That’s the only way to position our dear nation on a path to progress as its current course indeed leads to nowhere.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.