It would be uncharitable not to sympathise with the new state governors in at least 18 states. They face a heart-stopping task. When the euphoria of their electoral victory celebrations wears off, they will be confronted with the realities of governance in post-Buhari Nigeria.
Those realities are ugly, horrendous even in most of the states. They are political inheritances from a president who was at his seat but absent from duty for eight years. Problems arose, they were unattended to, and they festered and overwhelmed this once proud nation now reduced to flailing in the inclement weather of economic difficulties, social disarticulation, and insecurity.
Life ought to be fairer than this to this ambitious nation that once held the hope of all black people. In the normal cause of human development, these new men ought to have inherited the continued building of a country that offers its citizens opportunities and the right to dream dreams without the fear of their turning into nightmares.
The new men will face the first difficulty in human management and governance – treasuries that give the offensive sound of emptiness. They will find their nascent administrations burdened with crushing debts – salary arrears of civil servants and pension arrears of pensioners as well as money owed to contractors, some of whom have formed unholy alliances with state governors to loot the treasuries.
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Where will the new men, all of whom I am sure, are anxious to fulfil their election promises to the people, find the money to meet these obligations and clear the way for them to put their policies and programmes into effect? There are no easy answers. They cannot find succour in the national treasury. It is reeling from the heavy burden of 77 trillion Naira. Buhari committed more than 90 per cent of our earnings to debt servicing. This compounds and complicates the problems the state governors face.
Their predecessors who lived regally and reduced their fellow citizens to wretched paupers, are blissfully lapping it up with their loot from their state treasuries. They cannot be called to account for their crimes against their own people because accountability is just another long word in our political lexicon. EFCC will entertain some petitions and follow the routine of charging them in courts to the bells and whistles of publicity – and then nothing. Their crimes against their own people will drag on a bit and then make it into the wastepaper baskets. They have provided for their dream lives for life at the expense of the states they looted.
Security is the number one obligation our constitution imposes on federal, state, and local governments. The Nigerian state under Buhari failed in discharging its primary constitutional responsibility. None of the new men is ignorant of the fact that insecurity holds the nation in its vice grips. The blood of innocent fellow Nigerians flows daily in Benue, Plateau, Sokoto, Borno, Niger, Zamfara, Katsina and other states in the northern parts of the country. Bandits, Boko Haram, and kidnappers have turned these states into killing fields just as IPOB has turned parts of the South-East too into killing fields.
Securing and making each state safe is beyond the capability of the state governors. And that is why in Katsina, Sokoto, Zamfara and Niger states, bandits control swathes of the states. The governors are helpless. Although they are the chief security officers of their various states, they are mere paper commanders with neither troops nor the means to fully play that role. None of them can confront the bandits and the kidnappers. You do not wage a war against armed enemies with bare hands.
I have pointed out some of these problems the new men now face in order to make three important points in respect of the realities of our current national situation and draw their attention to what happens when campaign promises meet these realities. The first is to advise our new men of destiny to moderate their ambitions and their anxiety to be seen as performing governors. The times are tough and rough and require a much more pragmatic approach by our political leaders to the challenges of turning the misfortunes of the country into fortunes. I know that some of them will not resist the temptation to plunge recklessly into what they cannot do at the instigation of public expectations.
The second point is that we can do with less of the same and more of the new infused by new thinking on the needed shift in our development paradigm. We cannot keep on doing the same things and expect different results. This country needs leaders at all levels who have the courage to do things differently and expect results that we can appreciate. We have had enough promises deemed to move mountains but did not move a hill of beans. Let the new men think out of the box and respond intellectually to the changing global trends in economic, social, political, and human resource management.
The third point is that the state governors constitute the single most important political group in the land today. Under the current convention, they are responsible more or less to the constitution of the executive council of the federation, better known as the council of ministers. They wield enormous clout in respect of those who serve on that august body. Their umbrella organisation is the Nigerian Governors Forum. It is an important platform through which the governors can influence important national decisions to favour their states.
But the forum has not been particularly strong in exerting such influence on how we are ruled and how we ought to be ruled. For instance, both the APC committee on restructuring and President Jonathan’s national reform conference recommended two-tier policing system – federal police and state police. Buhari hates state police but allowed the states to constitute their security outfits, such as Amotekun in the south-west and Eastern Security Network in the south-east. His decision to revive the special constabulary went nowhere.
It should be possible for the new men of the moment to get the Nigerian Governors Forum to do much more than allow its members to indulge in the cosmetics of governance. We need the state police to improve security generally in the country and in the state and local government levels in each state in particular. State governors must be the chief security officers of their states in law and in fact. Let us end the current joke of a single federal police system with a two-tier policing system. Permitting state governments to set up their security outfits is no solution to our crippling insecurity. The post-Buhari Nigeria must put an end now to the stifling military federalism and strive for true federalism in law and in practice.
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