Not a ‘clean-sweep Ignatius’

The speed and intensity with which it captured state after state in most of the North, and a sizeable chunk of the South-West, can best be described as a clean-sweep of its political opponents. But it wasn’t entirely surprising considering how well the APC did at the presidential election a fortnight earlier.
Some of the earliest callers to General Muhammadu Buhari’s residence, since his victory at the polls, have advised him to re-introduce the War Against Indiscipline campaign of his military administration.
Their argument was that this country needs another serious dose of societal re-orientation. And I agree with them. The only thing I would humbly add is that this re-orientation should start with elected and appointed officials of the incoming administration before it is launched to the general public.
You see, since the days of the Second Republic, the notion has been that people are appointed into government positions for their own good. The late Chief Sunday Afolabi put it aptly when he said that his appointment into Obasanjo’s cabinet, as internal affairs minister, was an invitation to ‘come and eat.’ This poor perception of a call to national service must be addressed before anything else will change.
Appointees and elected officials of the new administration must be made to understand that their new job is an invitation to ‘come and serve’. Personal aggrandizement and comfort must therefore be sacrificed at the altar of public service. They must therefore be ready to accept that their emoluments will never be the largesse successive PDP administrations have made the norm, no, they have to be ready to earn less, much less than their outgoing colleagues who served the last government.
President ‘Yar’adua pledged a servant-leadership on May 29th, 2007. In between his recurrent illness and eventual death, three years later, he wasn’t able to do much of that. The new government can walk this talk without necessarily adopting the slogan. Already, President-elect Muhammadu Buhari has promised to govern, not rule, and also run a listening government. This resolve by the General must be made to sink into the consciousness of his elected and appointed lieutenants.
Unless they are fully attuned to this new philosophy of public service, our leaders will end up the public masters they have always been under previous administrations.
In fairness to most of those who made it to elected offices under the APC today, they are products of the parties they came from. The notion of public office as a means to enrichment, corruptly or otherwise, was common, especially in the ruling party. They must therefore be particularly orientated to abandon their past. This is not an attempt to say that the APC is a den of saints, no, it is to say that since it promised Nigerians a ‘change’ for the better, it has to live up to it and do things differently.
The out-going administration witnessed a great wastage of funds on the most frivolous pursuits while important sectors of the country were groaning under the weight of neglect. Doctors, lecturers, teachers and other important public servants kept going on strike but little was being done to address their woes, because those who could solve their problems always have the option of going abroad to escape the impact of the strike. This must change, the new cabinet must be made up of people who can respect our professionals and prioritise the need to keep them happy and motivated.
A situation where part of the country will be in mourning due to tragic loss of lives and limbs to the insurgency, and the leadership will be seen singing and dancing in political gatherings, is something we must never be made to see again in this country. And this insensitivity can be avoided if the right mind-set is created among the people who will govern us. They said Sir Ahmadu Bello’s favorite phrase was ‘catch up’ after he made a tour of the South-West and South-East regions of Nigeria and saw how they were ahead of the North in terms of Western-type education and infrastructure. With that determination he build western-type schools, hospitals, marketing boards, military institutions, a regional development company, a bank, a university, several research institutes and located these in different parts of the North. Then he sent numerous young people for training abroad in order to man these institutions.
Our new ‘catch up’ strategy should be to regain our lost glory in education, in healthcare, in agriculture and other key sectors of our nation by harnessing the necessary resources needed to revive them.
When they struck in 1984, one of the reasons the military gave was that public hospitals had become ‘mere consulting clinics.’ Today they are just next-to-mortuary because only people who are very ill and have nowhere to go, go there to die. Privately owned pharmacies are the new consulting clinics. Ordinary folks go there to ‘consult’ and buy drugs, and those who can afford to, fly abroad for better medical care. We must resolve to restore and rehabilitate our government-owned health facilities.
The key step in all this is to get our new leaders to abandon the gravy train (thanks to Bishop Desmond Tutu) that they have grown used to, due to the fact that they are politicians or top public servants, in favour of an austere but patriotic lifestyle. It is particularly important to have them really subscribe to this new philosophy of leadership because that is the only way the new war against indiscipline and corruption can successfully be embraced by the people.
It is also the only way we can avoid a case of ‘Clean-sweep Ignatius’, Jeffrey Archer’s fictional Nigerian minister. In his collection of short stories titled ‘A twist in the tale’ British novelist and latter-day politician, Jeffrey Archer, wrote a story that was based in Nigeria and was set against an anti-corruption crusade by a newly-appointed finance minister. This minister, Ignatius by name, went after corrupt officials and made sure they were brought to justice. That was how he earned the name ‘Clean-sweep Ignatius’ from the media.
But the twist in this tale was when the story ended with Ignatius visiting a Swiss bank where Nigerian looters hid stolen funds and demanding to be given a list of their names. When all threats to the bank manager, including a gun to his head failed to make him disclose who his Nigerian clients were, Ignatius felt satisfied enough to declare his real motive for the exercise. He opened his briefcase full of hard currency and told the manager he wanted to open his own secret account. Obviously Ignatius wasn’t a true subscriber to the crusade he preached back home.
Now, we cannot afford any hypocritical Ignatiuses in this incoming administration. At this critical point in our national life, we must have sincere and honest leaders to steer the affairs of our nation. If they won’t be readily available, they must be orientated to act and think this way.