When Politics Trumps Governance

The tenure of constitutionally elected political office holders in Nigeria is four years. It is the same for the executive and legislature and the legitimate expectation is that full scale governance activities will be carried out in the 48 months.

However, since the return to civil rule in 1999, it appears that this period is usually abridged at all levels of governance in Nigeria. Nigerians recognise the period of the lame duck, especially when an administration is in its last few months, after exhausting the full two-term constitutional tenure in the executive. This discourse seeks to interrogate the issues and challenges arising out of this awkward scenario and how politics always trumps governance in the Nigerian setting.

The first issue that pops out is that the first few months of administration, especially at the federal level, have been wasted. This is more evident in the Muhammadu Buhari administration that took about six months to appoint ministers and constitute the core of governance. As of today, a number of boards of agencies have not been constituted, some months to the next election. The implication of this is that the structures for effective governance were lacking and there is evidence to show that this tardiness contributed to the lack of direction in the economy which made worse a bad situation and eventually plunged the country into a recession. Nigeria is still suffering from the pangs of this negligence of duty till this day. Stories at the federal and state levels of meeting an empty treasury or underestimating the level of the problems left by the previous administrations are too pedestrian and run of the mill to be taken seriously. Such excuses only show the elected officials as lacking the capacity to govern effectively.

A second issue has been the fact that all the presidents, from Olusegun Obasanjo to the incumbent, had little or no ideas about a progressive people-centred governance before they mounted the saddle. Before becoming presidents, they were not associated with any economic, political, social, etc. philosophical, jurisprudential or developmental movement or theory of governance domesticated to our historical experience on how to develop the country. They all came unprepared, hoping to learn on the job and probably as their spirits directed them. It was about turns to rule and inordinate positioning to take control of the levers of power without a concrete idea of how power will be exercised for the benefit of the people, who are the ultimate sovereigns. But the fate of close to 200 million Nigerians should not be subject to an unprepared leader for a trial and error exercise. The disturbing part of it has been the fact that the leadership recruitment process has fought and discouraged any contender with a nuanced position of political leadership and governance. It is a system that discourages debate and robust interrogation of issues; rather, it discusses the mundane which has no links to the qualities and demands of the office the contestants want to occupy. Some presidential candidates had avoided well-organised presidential debates and still won the race.

The third issue is about the unfair and unjustifiable scenario where taxpayers and the public purse pay elected officials who render little or no services to the people. They were elected and paid for a purpose and once they are unable, refuse or neglect to render that service, either arising from infirmity of mind or body or deliberate mischief based on calculations for political gain, the basis for the remuneration is severed and the natural expectation and applicable principle is “no work no pay”. Government, most often, seeks to apply this principle to organised labour when they are on strike and there is no reason why the same should not be extended to political leaders.

A fourth issue is that in the last year of the tenure, before elections, politics comes out in full to trump governance. All the media discourse is about permutations on who will be the next president, governor or legislators that will return to their seats. The contenders become grossly distracted and every decision will now pander to the political climate. We have entered that season at the federal level. The National Assembly has proceeded on its mid-year legislative break and will be back in September. Between now and then, political parties will be in the thick of conventions, congresses and primaries and the executive and legislative officials will be working for their re-election. Thereafter, the campaigns will set in until the elections in February 2019. With the relationship between the executive and legislature, it will be difficult for the two to agree for any bills passed to get assent or for the legislature to re-work the bills and get back to the President. The 2019 federal budget will also be likely delayed because it may likely get to the National Assembly late. Even if it gets early to the legislature, they will be too distracted to work on it, except as a rubber stamping process.

In this period of focus on politics as against governance, impunity becomes the norm and the rule of law takes a back seat. The current scenario where the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, is accused of certificate forgery to the knowledge of the President who abhors corruption and the minister has refused to say a word to defend herself or resign while the President and the anti-corruption agencies see and hear no evil, on no account can this be termed a scenario of governance. Rather, politics is in the air and it is so thick that it beclouds the sense of reason of all who should have acted to stop the charade. In this administration, it seems the political hangover of 2015 has been so thick that the concept of treating like cases alike contextualised in the case of Babachir Lawal, the dismissed Secretary to the Government of the Federation, has been discarded. State administrative resources including coercive resources seem to be focused on one agenda, which is the return of the incumbent to power. The deployment of the security agencies to the residences of the Senate President and his deputy last week bears this out.

To avoid this kind of scenario where politics perpetually trumps governance, Nigerians need to elect leaders with a trajectory of known developmental thoughts aptly captured in a manifesto that has been subjected to robust debates and interrogation. The leader must be ready to lead with an intellectual capacity beyond the mundane. Building strong institutions, rather than the extant attempt at building a cult of personality is also imperative for the society to continue in the desired direction even if the political leaders are distracted or seek to subvert the system. Finally, Nigerians need to put the feet of elected officials to the fire from the first day after swearing in, to the day before they hand over. The honeymoon period for elected officials in Nigeria seems rather too long and this allows the elected officials to lay the wrong foundations which they eventually use in the later periods of their administration.