Clash of the governors

BY Huzaifa Jega

If you are like me, or like the vast majority of us who have been reduced to spectators of an actual game of thrones playing out, you will perhaps see that you will only be compelled to leave the comfort of your bed on Election Day to avoid the civic scarlet letter.

In 2023, an epic clash will take place between governors from the far sides of the country – representing an idea or ideology. When you think of anything that has the word, “clash” in it, you think of high-speed car chases and bullets flying. Maybe we will be treated to lots of that, but what I imagine much more when I think of 2023, is a dramedy, hopefully, one with an emotional journey that will change the course of this nation.  

It says a lot about the political structure of our country to note that our governors seem to have completely monopolised power. The states are where you find a full complement of ethnic congregations living on ancestral lands and the states are where governors come from. The states are where a given section of our multicultural national society can have their cakes and eat them too unchallenged and without sparing a thought for the other guys. They are the only places where a power base can be established, the only source of political viability. What does that tell you?

We are who we are and we can blame that on political corruption or something else. So let’s take corruption for instance. The cancer of political corruption persists not because our institutions are weak – yes, if they weren’t weak, we would definitely not have it this bad, but we can all make it easier for everyone by cutting out the middleman and acknowledging that the underlying reason why they are weak is the reason for why our lot is so bad. Corruption is so intractable in Nigeria because the institutions of culture(s) don’t only condone but abet the grounds upon which corruption, political or otherwise, prosper and fester.

We are not corrupt because the EFCC, ICPC, CCB, NPF and the rest of the Nigerian three and four letters given the mandate to clean up the entire governance structures of state are abject failures. They may be just that, but the rot is not only systemic, it is social in actual fact. We are just so used to doing as we please, at the expense of others. And we are ever willing to suffer others to so behave, even at our own expense – as long as the effect is not so direct. We prefer to live in the short-term, not in the long run.

Now, I am a son of this land. I am a product of these cultures too and I am everything my kinsmen are. As we say where I come from, mutum tara yake, figuratively meaning that man is always only half-full.  What I am saying is that we are who we are – but that does not preclude a path to any type of glory for us. We want to be what we see in South Korea or Sweden, we want to be what we see in Xanadu and in Utopia – and we can. We have as much a good shot as anyone else, it only means that our own shot must be engineered according to the realities of our social systems.

Unless you are caught with a married woman or a stolen goat, there is no such thing as public disgrace in Nigeria. Not only probable cause, but an actual smoking gun could be established against someone suspected of stealing from the people, and you would see them at the neighbourhood mosque after maghrib, laughing and hobnobbing with the community as if nothing happened, as if it was just Tuesday.

It is entirely acceptable to reward plutocrats with praise songs, with seats in the council of ancestral elders and with an additional feather in their hats. Maybe we are not yet at the space and time we can shed this colour of anthropological evolution and that is just as well. That is not a death sentence. Far from it. There is an Achilles Heel to every foot. The difference is in what you do to compensate.  

Clearly, it takes a governor to do anything worth anyone’s while in our political culture – which is an extension of our social culture. This is perhaps the greatest political race in our current national consciousness… it will indeed be a clash like none I personally can recall. It is going to be the clash of the governors.

On either aisle, there are governors, and there are governors who have become the governors of governors. The two men flying the flags of the two-horse race in 2023 are each indeed governors of governors. The outcome of this clash will very well cement and give a permanent and hopefully constructive form to the Nigerian political space. Hopefully, that will be an actual watershed in the evolution of our political institutions, taking a cue from our social cultures.

They come with them the true form of who we are as a species from this corner of the world. Perhaps, then we will have the full house to drain the swamp, and that does not necessarily mean flushing out any supposed undesirable persons, but flushing out undesirables among the bolts and nuts of our political engine to reflect who we are both on the inside and outside.