Dear General Buhari,
Congratulations on your well earned election victory. You were dogged and stayed the course over the last sixteen years from the ballot box to the court room and back to the ballot box. As our incoming President, who I believe will like to be in touch with the citizens, please allow me to share a citizen’s perspective of the challenges ahead.
First, it is
important to recognize that while it has been tough to win the elections, it might
be actually tougher to govern. Winning the elections might be a far, more
easier task than governing and fulfilling the expectations of the people. Your
victory has been near euphoric, at least for a broad section of the population.
Some have even said that it feels like a new Nigeria Independence. Expectations
of the dividends of democracy are high yet you are taking the rein of
governance of the country at a very difficult time, where the treasury is
nearly empty, the reserve have fallen below USD30b, an all- time low that can
barely cover few months of imports. Oil prices remain down, excess crude
account is nearly depleted; states and even the federal government occasionally
are unable to pay salaries. Unemployment,
underemployment and social inequalities are at an all time high. Our young
people want jobs, they seek a country that will truly liberate their great
potential with good education and skills training and a buoyant industrial
sector that will employ them. The infrastructure
deficit of power and transportation to support small and big business and aid a
good healthy living of the people are very huge. Essentially, the resources of
the state at this time may be fall far short of what is required to fulfill the
expectation of the people.
The first task of
governance may therefore be to manage the expectation of the people, to present
the reality of government revenues to them with honesty and integrity, ensuring
that government expenditure profile places the people above the self-interest
of narrow elites who I am sure are gathering quickly around you as the new
locus of power and resources. You may
need to ask the people to make sacrifice and trade-offs. Your government will
however succeed in doing so only if it can maintain the high moral credibility
with which you are coming into office.
If you must ask the people to sacrifice, the people will need to see
that you have applied the same rule to yourself, to the members of your
government including using your presidential leverage to stretch this sacrifice
to the legislature. A prudent government
under the current situation is critical. You will need to resist the tendency
to blow up the size of government. Rather, you will need to rein-in the diverse
ethnic, political and business interests that are gathering around you to
ensure a small and prudent government.
We do not need forty ministers and hundreds of special advisers and
assistants. If you run a prudent executive, you will have the moral credibility
to publicly ask the legislature to act responsibly by cutting its unjustified
over-bloated allowances. As the President and leader of the majority party, you
should also ask your state governors to follow your example of a prudent and
small government at the centre and cut down their commissioners and hundreds of
special assistants. Whatever is saved
from government prudence can then be ploughed into social services that will
improve the health and well being of our people.
A small and prudent
government does not imply a state that abandons its social obligations to the
people. It is rather a state with an efficient government that encourages and
incentivizes the private provision of social services to cover its resource
gaps but provide a safety net for the poor and socially vulnerable in public
provision. It ensures that no citizen is
left out of social and economic progress. To this extent, the privatization program in
sectors like power must be continued but it must be made far more transparent,
ensuring that we do not replace public monopolies with private monopolies, and
that the people get real market value for the sale of public assets. Policies that subsidize the economic cost of
few hundred oligarchs in the privatization program at the expense of the state
and the people need to be reviewed. Putting a break on the privatization
program will imply a return to a big and non-prudent government which we cannot
afford.
Some of our Niger
Delta brothers may feel a sense of emotional loss of state control with your
coming to power. It is important to specially address them and assure them that
more of them rather than a few narrow Niger Delta elites with access to Abuja, will
prosper under your national leadership. Dear General Buhari, you cannot be
uninterested in the governorship elections coming in the next few days in the
Niger Delta. With the relative huge
resources including derivation, of the states of the South-South, the quality
of life of our Niger Delta people could be much better. We need governors in
the South-South who will recognize that good governance is not about building
Las Vegas type stadia and swimming pools that have little impact on the lives
of the people. We need governors in the
South-South who will invest massively in the people, in world-class education
and vocational skills program that will make thousands of our South-South
youths employable or start their own business in construction and the oil
industry value chain. Without truly
responsible and accountable governments in the South-South, where corruption is
massively tamed, even special Federal schemes like the Amnesty program will
make little enduring difference in improving quality of life of our Niger Delta
brothers.
You said it so
brilliantly in your acceptance speech on corruption, that when huge funds meant
for public use finds its way into
private hands through corruption, it creates an illegitimate group of super-wealthy
who undermine our democracy because they
think they can buy government or buy the elections. You assured that this corruption will no
longer stand as a respected monument in the nation. As you will not fight corruption alone, law
enforcement and anti-corruption institution building will be very critical. You
will need to be on guard against the self interest of narrow elites who will
seek to capture institutions meant to fight corruption through the appointment
of their lackeys. No-one should be above
the law irrespective of their status or relationship to power. Impunity must be
tackled to the ground permanently. There must be real consequences for those
who break the law through strong institutional enforcement of the law and
sanctions against crime, to act as detriments to others. Where wealth has been acquired illegally by
corruption, the state should not shy away from recovering it to communicate to
society that sooner than later, the law will catch up with those who commit
crime. Finally, dear General, you will need to lead the nation to set new value
standard of ethics and morality which has been debased by corruption. Just as
debased words like “settlement” crept into our national lingo from the top,
let’s have new ethical words like character, integrity and selflessness creep
back and ossify firmly into our national value standard. You have an historic
opportunity to make this happen and lead the nation back to more pervasive
prosperity. Best wishes.
Olu Akanmu publishes a blog on
Strategy and Public Policy on http://olusfile.blogspot.com 
