Dr Usman Bugaje recently gave what amounted to a ringing indictment of the performance of the political class in the last 25 years of holding the fort. His anger spewed out at the political class’s inability to stem the raging insecurity and other ills pervading the nation. He said this, as much, as when he was the Guest Speaker at the SBS/ABU Alumni Annual Dinner held at Ladi Kwali Hall of the Continental Hotel, Abuja, early last month.
The SBS/ABU Alumni dinner has now become an annual ritual where the old students of that two decades of experiment meet to renew their friendships and also ruminate over issues affecting the nation’s health.
ABU’s School of Basic Studies, readers might recall, was the first of its kind in the country established in 1970 by the university to prepare students within 18 months, residing on the campus, for entry into degree programmes. By the mid-1970s the SBS had become so successful that all other universities in the country followed suit. A large proportion of ABU intake in those years came through the SBS. However, as IJMB arrived in the later part of the 1980s, the SBS became superfluous and was discontinued. Dr Bugaje was not part of the SBS experiment but was contemporary to the first set that was matriculated into ABU degree courses in September 1971.
It is his national standing as a noted public analyst that informed his selection as the guest speaker. His first degree was in pharmacy and the second and third were in history. He is therefore the kind of intellectual who is both at home in the sciences and arts. On top of that, he is also well-grounded in oriental studies and fluent in Arabic having lived in Sudan for many years, for that purpose. He is also a political activist belonging to that iconic G-34 formed in 1998 to challenge the Abacha regime that later became the bedrock on which the PDP was formed to win power in the centre and many other states of the federation. He was the Special Adviser (Political) to the Vice-President during President Obasanjo’s first term.
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In 2003, he was elected to represent the Kaita/Jibiya Federal Constituency at the Federal House of Representatives, where he chaired the House Committee on Foreign Affairs until 2007. He moved to the ACN, becoming its National Secretary and was in the thick of the founding of the APC in 2013.
The paper Dr Bugaje presented was titled: Changing the Political Paradigm in the Nation, – A New Paradigm, A New Trajectory, A New Narrative, A New Future and A New Hope. The paper spoke to the issues of the moment. An eventful year was coming to an end. And as a nation, we were approaching a milestone of 25 years in the 4th Republic.
Dr Bugaje took his time to extensively reflect on the journey so far and also looked into the future. In his view, there is nothing to celebrate in our situation. As an opener, he said: ‘Today, no one can doubt the fact that the last 25 years of democracy in Nigeria have, sadly, been tragic.’ He said that poverty had doubled especially in the North which now accounts for 87 per cent of the poverty burden of the nation. He quoted the 2022 UNESCO report putting the number of out-of-school-children in Nigeria at a whopping 20 million.
He lamented the spread of insecurity which is nation-wide and which he gauged must have increased tenfold in the last 25 years. This covered Boko Haram, rural banditry, farmer-herders clashes, religious-ethnic clashes and other urban violent attacks. To worsen matters, he added, political institutions have been ran aground due to corruption and sheer incompetence. He bewailed that an increasing number of civil servants, politicians and their teeming accomplices in the private sector are looting mind-boggling sums without any consequences. He said the country is going down the drain, inevitably and irredeemably unless and until the dangerous trajectory is reversed.
What to do? Dr Bugaje suggests a better leadership recruitment mechanism that gives the same emphasis to eligibility as well as suitability so as to fix the broken leadership deficit, and attract the more knowledgeable the more competent and the more conscientious. Other countries like China, Singapore and other Nordic countries have gone that way with high degree of success.
How do we do it? He opined that this is only possible by changing the narrative with the national elites coming together to have a national consensus on what to do. Rwanda had done it and had shown clearly that no matter the challenge, once there is elite consensus and commensurate leadership recovery can be soonest. We need a new paradigm to get us away from this political culture of money and violence without regard for knowledge or character. Maybe we should expand our horizon to learn from other parts of the world.
I leave you with a soundbite from the lecture: ‘Our political scientists should go back to the drawing board. In the last two decades they have been asking us to deepen our democracy and all I see is that we are deepening our troubles while the politicians are deepening their pockets. We have to be more creative and design a system that works for us.’
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