Pius Adesanmi
These are not the best of times to be an ordinary Nigerian citizen.
Hardly a week passes these days without some half-witted douchebag in
the rulership upbraiding us for expressing dissatisfaction with the way
they are running and ruining our lives. We can ignore the habitual
heehawing of ribalds like Doyin Okupe, Labaran Maku, and Reuben Abati
and concentrate on some of the more interesting characters in the
circles of rulership. There is the archi-corrupt Diezani Allison
Madueke, who asked us to shove it with regard to our complaints about
fuel subsidy before promptly jetting off to London on a medical safari
at our expense. Then came the tragedy of Okoroba and insufferable
presidential aides began to crawl out of the woodworks to upbraid
Nigerians for asking questions. After tears, after mourning, after
regrets, Nigerians began to ask those hard questions required of them by
the civic imperative. Nigeria would be truly hopeless if no dissenting
and dissentient voices were heard after a brazen, irresponsible
privatization of the resources of the Nigerian state by a presidential
aide led to the loss of the precious lives of a naval pilot, aides, and
two members of the ruling class.
Okoroba has now morphed into its own afterlife of arrogant
recrimination of Nigerians by woolly-headed Presidential aides and
hangers-on, mostly truculent sidekicks of Oronto Douglas, the principal
jamboreelizer and misuser of state resources and the current metaphor of
everything that is wrong with the Nigerian presidency. Because of the
continuous wetness of the geography behind his ears, Reno Omokri, the
President’s Special Assistant for Facebook and Twitter, was the first to
rush to town, sending his tongue on careless errands of recrimination.
This young fellow, who lived in America and was exposed to the best
traditions of civic questioning, has naturally forgotten that
experience.
After reprimanding Nigerians for asking questions too soon, he was
quick to remind us that the cavalcade of helicopters and other expensive
modes of transportation to Okoroba were funded by the mourner and his
family. If, down the road, Omokri ever manages to achieve the feat of
getting dry behind the ears, he will have sufficient time to rue the
silliness of inviting questions that are even more pertinent. With his
$400,000 annual salary, President Obama is not in the league of those
who could visit Nigeria and charter too many helicopters for his local
commute. Nigeria is too damn expensive, way beyond Obama’s level. If he
visits Nigeria and charters a harem of helicopters for a private
jamboree (funeral, wedding, etc), he will face the dire prospect of
returning to America to beg Senator Boehner and other obdurate Senate
Republicans to approve an emergency salary increase for him. So, how
much is Oronto Douglas’s annual salary that he is able to afford the
orisirisi chartered air transportation scenario proposed by Omokri in
his irresponsible social media outburst? Not to be outdone, one listserv
twat, who claims to run “The Jonathan Project”, one of the numerous
food-for-the-boys stunts of the Jonathan Presidency, is amok on Nigerian
internet listservs, hounding patriotic citizens like Mr. Ibukunolu Alao
Babajide and Dr. Valentine Ojo, while justifying the jejune and
rationalizing the risible.
I do not mind the lies of these arrogant presidential aides. I mind
the fact that outraged Nigerians in our community of conscience have
plugged so deeply into their distraction that we are fast losing another
occasion to reflect on the broader dimensions of Okoroba in terms of
the tragedy’s implication for the struggle for meaning that is the
Nigerian Presidency. The disgrace of Okoroba is the Jonathan Presidency –
no, make that the Nigerian Presidency – writ large. Precisely because
the Nigerian Presidency defines us all, we cannot abandon her meaning,
the content of her character, and the stuff she’s made of to the latest
group of buccaneers to hold her hostage under the chairmanship of Dr.
Goodluck Jonathan. I emphasize the latest crop of buccaneers to
underscore the fact that the current crop of irresponsible characters
emptying the Nigerian Presidency of philosophical content in Aso Rock
are merely the latest arrivistes in town. They are no originators of a
culture of Presidential irresponsibility that has calcified throughout
our postcolonial existence into the singular identity of the Nigerian
Presidency.
I am saying in essence that irresponsibility is not just about the
habitual demission of individual Presidency actors from the common good
and the consequent privatization and diversion of the state and her
resources to service their bacchanalian proclivities in any given
presidential term in the life of the Nigerian state. I am saying that
this has been the only building block of the Nigerian Presidency since
her inception. I am saying that what every President and his team do is
to strengthen the foundation before adding their own block to the
edifice of Presidential irresponsibility. I am saying that
irresponsibility is the singular framework from which the quotidian
practices of the Nigerian state devolve. To the extent that the
Presidency is the apex body of that state, irresponsibility is
statecraft in the context of Nigeria’s political agency.
Notice that I called the Presidency the apex “body” of our state. If I
were talking about other responsible presidencies, say in America,
France, South Africa or Ghana, I would have used the word “institution”.
The culture of irresponsibility has never allowed the Nigerian
presidency to develop into an institution in the real sense of that
word. When, for instance, we speak of the Kennedy White House, the
Carter White House, the Bush White House, the Clinton White House, the
Obama White House, we know that beyond party affiliation and deep-seated
political differences, all of these ‘White Houses’ are connected by
their subscription to certain transcendental attributes of American
self-fashioning, reducible to the philosophical core of buzzwords like
“freedom”, “promise”, “values”, “enterprise”, “can-do”, and the
sacrosanct “American dream”. In over two hundred years of existence, the
American Presidency has evolved as the first institution of state which
immediately embodies these immutable attributes of the American being.
The state evolves and behaves in such a way as to project and protect
these transcendental values of American-ness. And the American
Presidency is an institution because these values are greater and
grander than any incumbent President and his team – cabinet and aides.
Contrary to these normative attributes of responsible presidencies,
the Nigerian Presidency is a transient, ephemeral embodiment of the
egomaniacal idiosyncrasies of the incumbent, his cabinet, his aides, and
the political jobbers and hangers-on who constitute the President’s
bubble. No philosophical core, no transcendental attribute of Nigerian
self-fashioning links the Obasanjo Aso Rock, the Yar’Adua Aso Rock, and
the Jonathan Aso Rock in the sense in which I have sketched out what
connects successive American White Houses. In the absence of an enduring
deontology of responsibility, every Nigerian President and his team
approaches Aso Rock not from the perspective of being custodians of the
sacred, great, and grand values of the Nigerian people but as guarantors
of the immediate prebendal moment of their ilk and political
benefactors – even if such benefactors are convicted criminals.
Once they invest the Presidency with this narrow vision, this baser
instinct, the President and his aides become greater and grander than
the collective will, vision, and aspirations of the Nigerian people.
From here, it is open sesame to irresponsibility as statecraft and to
crass personalization of the state and her resources. From here, it’s
only a matter of time before we get to Okoroba. This is not just pure
theoretical talk. When a Presidency is a genuine institution, she
recognizes the power and value of symbolism. Presidential symbolism
devolves mainly from the personal example of the incumbent. His style,
his preferments, his priorities, when collectively adopted and projected
by his team, become symbolic expressions of the character of the state.
What sort of symbolism have President Jonathan and his team been
sending out to the Nigerian people?
The answer is simple. It is the symbolism of galling
irresponsibility. You wonder in whose brain the idea of a new
Presidential banquet hall – with the attendant metaphors or gorging and
bacchanals amidst and impoverished populace – germinated and how a
President could have approved such an irresponsible project at this
material time; you wonder in whose brain the idea of a brand new N16
billion mansion for the Vice President germinated and how a President
could have approved such an irresponsible project at this material time;
you wonder how a president comfortably lives with the idea of his
weekly Federal Executive Council meetings being a “contract bazaar”
(apologies to Sonala Olumhense) where mind-boggling contracts are
irresponsibly parceled out to cronies week after week; you wonder what
message, what symbolism the Vice President imagines he is putting out
there when he marries off two daughters and allows flat screen
television sets and laptops to be distributed as souvenirs to wedding
guests.
Only yesterday, jamboree weddings of President Yar’Adua’s daughters
were the talk of the town. Where are they today? Vanity of vanities,
saith the preacher. Is Vice President Namadi Sambo aware of the
transience of these things? Is he aware of the message of crass and
repugnant materialism he is sending to our youth? Does he know that his
wedding guests are the same people who were all groveling before Turai
Yar’Adua at her daughters’ weddings but will not even greet the same
Turai today? Does he know that these same wedding guests will consign
those TV sets and laptops to the dustbin whenever they rush to the
embrace of the next President and his Vice President? Does he remember
that Ojo Maduekwe, an avowed Yar’Adua loyalist who, one could have
sworn, would plead to be buried with his principal as the king’s
horseman, was screaming and describing himself as a “little Jonathan”
even before Yar’Adua’s bones had cooled down sufficiently in the grave?
Does Vice President Sambo understand these things? Does he think?
This is what you get when the Presidency is no institution. It
becomes a hollow bubble of baser instincts, effete materialism, and
outsized egos elevated above the common good. Think of it this way: when
was the last time you heard the name of any of President Obama’s
immediate White House staff in the public domain? Hardly anything in
French politics and culture escapes my radar. Yet, I don’t believe that I
know the names of President Hollande’s immediate Elysée staff. I am not
sure that any of my friends currently living in France - Yommi Oni,
Tunde Biade, Dominic Okutue – can name President Holland’s immediate
aides at the Elysée. At the White House, at the Elysée, the President’s
aides are just regular, self-effacing civil servants toiling quietly
for the people of America and France at the behest of the President. It
is highly unlikely that any of them would organize a wedding or a
funeral for which the American state or the French state would stand
still. It is not imaginable that any of them would organize a personal
jamboree that would have State Governors, Ministers, Parliamentarians,
etc, abandon their duty posts for the roll call at the venue of the
jamboree. And it is absolutely impossible that the resources of the
American or French military would be irresponsibly diverted for private
purposes because a civilian, a mere aide in the Presidency, is throwing a
party. Above all, it is not imaginable that presidential aides in
France and America can become overnight billionaires dragooning the
state into their private affairs.
Why has this happened in Nigeria? Our presidency not being an
institution is only half of the explanation. The other half of the
explanation is that once the private bubble of egos is consolidated
around the president, the incumbent and those within that bubble become
the most powerful custodians of the prebendal system we operate. In this
sort of system, even an aide in the presidency becomes the custodian
and guarantor of access to the ultimate spoils of office, to be courted
like a demi-god by political office holders way beyond his level. This
crazy system explains why Governors, Senators, and Ministers abandoned
the Nigerian state and outpaced Usain Bolt to Okoroba at the behest of a
mere aide of the president. It was never about the funeral of the
faithful departed. It was all about nurturing their continuous access to
the Presidency-as-guarantor of prebends. Before Oronto Douglas, there
were Yar’Adua’s Tanimu Yakubu and Obasanjo’s Andy Uba.
So long as we, the people, fail to sustain the struggle for a
redefinition of the Presidency and a constitutional redesigning of her
role – she is currently too powerful, so absurdly powerful – Aso Rock
will continue to throw up irresponsible presidential houseboys with whom
Governors, Ministers, and Senators will have to play footsie in order
to guarantee strategic access to the cookie jar. But for the fact that
it would amount to asking him to entertain Abu with Abu’s money, I would
have joined the calls for Oronto Douglas to be made to cough out the
cost of replacing the naval helicopter that we lost before being
summarily dismissed from office. But we know that he cannot afford this
from his honest salary. It will only provide him with another
opportunity to send his hands on an errand into the cookie jar.
All stakeholders in Nigeria’s community of conscience have an urgent
struggle at hand. I hope Pastor Tunde Bakare and the Odumakins are
listening to the need to place this struggle at the forefront of the
preoccupations of the SNG; I hope CACOL, Campaign for Democracy and
other genuine civil society groups are listening; I hope the collective
children of anger are listening and are prepared to sustain the struggle
to redefine the Nigerian presidency in their social media spheres; I
hope Nigeria’s progressive columnists are listening; I hope Sahara
Reporters, Premium Times, the Nigerian Village Square, and Punch are all
listening. They must all listen and act because this phenomenon of
irresponsibility as statecraft gives us a jamboree state which
profoundly insults all of us in our sovereign Nigerian-ness. The time is
now to make it clear to these misbehaving boys and girls in the
political class that we are no longer going to tolerate the jamboree
instinct which collectively holds them hostage like cocaine addiction
insofar as they privatize the Nigerian state to service that instinct.
It’s just that they have no capacity for critical thought. Otherwise,
they would be able to see the holistic picture of the Nigerian state
which emerges from the following scenarios. When they travel abroad – as
is always the case with President Jonathan – it’s a jamboree. When one
of them returns from a medical safari abroad as was the case with David
Mark, they all abandon their duty posts and troop to the airport for a
reception jamboree. One week, they are in Uyo for Akpabio’s 50th
birthday jamboree. The following week, they mass-migrated to Kaduna for
Namadi Sambo’s TV and laptop wedding jamboree. One week later, they are
all in Okoroba for Oronto Douglas’s jamboree. Next week, one of them
could wake up and decide to “turn the back” of his great grandfather who
died just after the second World War and the same set of characters
will use the resources of state to charter helicopters and private jets,
abandon the work of the Nigerian people, and head out to Ibadan or
Abeokuta for yet another jamboree. It is time for us to make it clear
that we’ve had enough of the jamboree state that is Abuja.
Saharareporters
