Let’s get real. Th e answer is “No”. Th ey can’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the dominant political leadership class we have in our country today.
Let’s just spend a little time explaining why they can’t.
And then fi gure out, as citizens, what to do to save Nigeria.
Our focus, I believe, should be on the future we want and how to create that future for ourselves, the young men and women that make up our large youth population, and our children.
Th e past is important mainly for the lessons we should have learnt from it.
As the character Sebastian says to his friend Antonio in Shakespeare’s play Th e Tempest, ‘whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come, in yours and mine discharge’.
As the 2019 elections and another round of democratic leadership selection come into view, let’s keep in mind what the real issues are: 29 million Nigerians are jobless, or 14.
2 percent unemployment as of June 2017 when the National Bureau of Statistics released its latest figures.
Th e unemployment rate has been climbing for nine consecutive quarters.
Ten million Nigerian children of school age are out of school.
Th is is the highest rate in the world. Our health system is one of the worst in the world, and ranks 187 out of 189 nations surveyed by the World Health Organisation.
Since health is our fi rst, primal need in life, those who can aff ord it are frequently “medical tourists” abroad.
Th e millions of Nigerians who can’t but are equally deserving of good healthcare are left twisting in the wind.
Th ose who will take Nigeria into a diff erent future are those who understand how to overcome these problems.
On top of it all, we are a divided, nay fractured, country.
We need to meet the increasing demands across the country for the irreducible minimums of justice and equity.
We have to stabilise an obviously failing state and get it to function best for all its citizens.
Th e painful crisis and accompanying hysteria of the moment notwithstanding, Nigeria is not beyond redemption.
We need to, and can, turn it into a nation.
How? Ethnicity and religion, on which Nigeria’s political framework has been organised for the past 70 years, are powerful, sentimental forces that can easily overwhelm reason if we do not consciously guard against them.
What we need to overcome this kind of small thinking, as I have argued in my book Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s Last Frontier Can Prosper and Matter, is a real worldview of transformation that is globally competitive.
Th is worldview is the fi rst task that faces the next generation of political leadership in our country.
It includes something called “manufacturing consent” among disparate peoples in one space.
Th is is part of the delicate and complex art of nationbuilding.
It requires certain key character, intellectual and attitudinal qualities that rise above the swamp of identity politics in order to overcome it and engineer a RISE as one nation.
Th at worldview must be one that measures the distance between where Nigeria is today and where the rapidly rising countries of Asia are.
How can we turn Northern Nigeria into Dubai or Malaysia, the South-East into Taiwan or South Korea, the South-South into Norway, and the South-West into Germany? A Nigeria of this scenario would be a world power, the new China.
Partisan politics or even what passes for governance in Nigeria is based neither on ideas nor on ideologies.
Nigerian politicians have no core beliefs.
Our politics are a series of transactions aimed merely to “be on the seat” of power, wield authority for its own sake and advance the causes of vested interests of all stripes, and get personally wealthy in the bargain.
Th e purpose is not to transform our states of being as citizens.
We can’t face or build the future by relying on those whose “skill sets” lie in the past.
It’s time for a diff erent game.
We need a paradigm shift in 2019.
Lest we forget: we, the citizens, have been voting for these politicians.
We have done so for various reasons.
Maybe they gave us bags of rice or other inducements or, even worse, bought our voters cards off us.
Perhaps we have been armchair critics, complaining perennially about poor governance but failed to register to vote and actually vote.
Or, we have been swayed because the politicians got the better of our sentiments in one way or another, but turned out not able to govern well.
Perhaps we voted for other candidates but some others rigged the polls and “won”.
Or it could be a combination of all these factors.
With clarity in our minds about what Nigeria needs, we must now subject all those seeking national or state political offi ce to the objective standards of character, capacity, competence, and track record against the backdrop we have set out above.
No one can give you what he or she doesn’t have.
No one can lead you eff ectively if such a compatriot has no real clue about what leadership means.
No one can lead you well who confl ates mere longevity in Nigerian-style, winner take-all, Ghana-must-go-bag-carrying politics, or loitering on the corridors of power, with real leadership.
We must look to a new generation of younger, technocratic minds that can actually solve these problems of nation-building, joblessness, aggravated and widespread poverty, and weak institutions.
Many of such minds have stayed out of politics (which include the formal politics of the partisan sort, as well as the informal one of the civil society) until now.
Because many apolitical Nigerian professionals avoid the public square, wherein is determined the quality of our lives, status quo politicians have been eating our lunch.
Compatriots of the former variety, yours truly not exempted, must now step forward or forever hold their peace.
It is time for the so-called Offi ce of the Citizen to do its patriotic duty.
Apathy will no longer do.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Nelson Mandela, the struggle must now become our lives.
Moghalu, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, is founder and president of the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation
