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\nBy Mahmud Jega |
\nI read three times the speech that President Muhammadu Buhari delivered on Sunday last week at the launching of his 2019 campaign program, titled Next Level. For good measure I also read three times Atiku Abubakar\u2019s campaign platform titled Get Nigeria Working Again, which he delivered online nine days ago. They are good programs, both of them, and we thank them for the catchy, if somewhat slippery titles. When one or the other candidate wins the election next year, we may have difficulty putting our finger on what he actually promised.
\nTaking Nigeria to the Next Level is a problematic promise because there is no consensus on where Nigeria is right now, much less where it ought to go. There is room for confusion as to whether the Next Level is for better or for worse. Some Nigerians actually want us to go back to the Last Level, not the Next Level, with respect to such things as value of currency, societal values, internal peace and security, civil service values, youths\u2019 orientation, teachers\u2019 commitment to duty, integrity of judges, selflessness of policemen, truthfulness of husbands, fidelity of wives, spirituality of clerics and honesty of traders.
\nGet Nigeria Working Again is also a problematic promise. There is no consensus on whether Nigeria was working before. Getting Nigeria to work again could be interpreted by some to include a return to free-wheeling on the public till, free reign of insurgents and militants, free reign of subsidy merchants and forex round trippers, serial crashing of the Super Eagles out of major tournaments, as well as pell-mell fleeing of young Nigerians to Europe via the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea. All those represented elements of Nigeria working at different points in time.
\nNext Level and Getting Nigeria Working Again are sweet music in the ears of APC and PDP supporters respectively, but they are less precise than the slogans of Second Republic political parties. NPN\u2019s Food and Shelter, UPN\u2019s Four Cardinal Programs, PRP\u2019s General Program and GNPP\u2019s Politics Without Bitterness were easier to comprehend than these two programs. Never mind that all the Second Republic programs faltered at the level of implementation. For example, GNPP\u2019s politics was quite bitter. The late Alhaji Yusuf Dantsoho once told me a story that when he defected from GNPP to NPN in 1982, Uncle Waziri Ibrahim sent thugs to retrieve a Mercedes car that he gave him in 1978.
\nThere could be a catchier, yet easier to verify campaign slogan. During the 1928 American presidential election campaign, the Republican Party\u2019s slogan was, \u201cA chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.\u201d This slogan was easily verifiable; all that a voter had to do two years into Roosevelt\u2019s rule was to peep in his pot and see whether there was a chicken, then peep in his garage and see whether there was a car. Two years from today when a Buhari voter or an Atiku voter looks out through the window, can he determine whether we have moved to the next level or whether the country is working again?
\nAnyway, fulfilment of promise will come much later but before we get there, there are eight issues that I did not see featuring in either President Buhari\u2019s program or former Vice President Atiku\u2019s. The first one is power supply. Even though Buhari\u2019s program spoke about marching away from mono-economy and Atiku\u2019s program spoke about wealth creation, neither candidate dwelt on power supply, the fulcrum of modern economies. On reflection, I didn\u2019t blame them because power supply is one of the most intractable issues in Nigerian governance. The late President Yar\u2019adua once promised to declare an emergency in the sector but never got around to it, even when Obasanjo spent $16 billion in the sector \u201cwithout commensurate results,\u201d as his successor said. The Federal Government has set more target dates than anyone can count to improve power supply but for many decades we were stuck at 4,000 megawatts. Maybe that is why the two major candidates are reluctant to make promises in the power sector that will most likely come to naught.
\nTen million almajirai [the figure was recently revised upwards to 12 million] are the weakest youthful link in
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\u00a0the Nigerian socio-economic and cultural equation. Yet, they did not receive even a passing mention in either major candidate\u2019s program. Almajirai make the UN\u2019s Sustainable Goals unrealizable. Their presence denies us the optimal use of millions of young brains; they are cannon fodder for communal warriors and insurgents; and it forces us to spend millions on public enlightenment programs on things that going to school would have taken care of.\nEnvironmental protection was another missing issue. Gully erosion in the East, desert encroachment in the North, oil spillage in Niger Delta, deforestation in the West, tidal erosion in coastal areas, air pollution in the cities, and the concomitant disappearance of donkeys, vultures, pigeons, antelopes, doves, bustards and large fish from our grasslands, valleys, forests, skies and rivers all failed to make it into the campaign programs.
\nEven though we are sandwiched between sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile Francophone neighbours; marooned in the world\u2019s poorest continent; stuck in Africa\u2019s sleepy western half; hemmed in by vigorous continental rivals; largely ignored by our Middle Eastern and Asian contemporaries; overtaken by our former Central and South East Asian mates; unable to join the ranks of BRICS and transform them into BRINCS; pulled down by old colonial powers; dribbled around by EU, OPEC and Commonwealth and then kicked around by the world\u2019s lone superpower, foreign relations somehow failed to feature in the platform of either candidate.
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