Nigerians, not ethnicity, religion are the problems of Nigeria?

This week, President Muhammadu Buhari took a sober look at the current problems plaguing the Nigerian state, which are mostly and wrongly interpreted through the prisms of religion and ethnicity, and concludes that both should not be blamed.

Instead, the President said, Nigerians should blame themselves for bringing the country to where it now is, a pitiable state that is characterised by many forms of injustices.

The President said this while receiving members of the Muhammadu Buhari/Osinbajo (MBO) Dynamic Support Group, who visited the State House in Abuja, to present to the president a compendium of the five years achievements of his administration.

The President went into the trajectory of his struggles to get justice at the courts, after disputed results of presidential elections in 2003, 2007, and 2011, submitting that people who ruled against him were of his ethnic stock and religious persuasion, while those who stood up for him were of other faith and ethnicity.

The President spoke thus: “Our problem is not ethnicity or religion, it is ourselves. After my third appearance in the Supreme Court, I came out to speak to those who were present then. I told them that from 2003, I’d spent 30 months in court.

“The President of the Court of Appeal, the first port of call for representation by presidential candidates then, was my classmate in secondary school in Katsina. We spent six years in the same class, Justice Umaru Abdullahi. My legal head was Chief Mike Ahamba, a Roman Catholic and an Igbo man.

When the President of the court decided that we should present our case, my first witness was in the box. Ahamba insisted that a letter should be sent to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to present the register of constituencies in some of the States, to prove that what they announced was falsehood. It was documented.

“When they gave judgment, another Igbo man, the late Justice Nsofor, asked for the reaction from INEC to the letter sent to them. They just dismissed it.

He then decided to write a minority judgment. That was after 27 months in court. We went to the Supreme Court. Who was the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN)? A Hausa-Fulani like me, from Zaria. The members of the panel went in for about 30 minutes, came back to say they were proceeding on break. They went for three months. When they came back, it didn’t take them 15 minutes, they dismissed us.

“In 2007, who was the CJN? Kutigi. Again, a Muslim from the North. After eight months or so, he dismissed the case. Again in 2011, because I was so persistent, Musdafa, a Fulani man like me, from Jigawa, neighbour to my state, was CJN. He dismissed my case. I’ve taken you round this to prove that our problem is not ethnicity or religion. It is ourselves.”

And, truly, the problem of Nigeria is engendered, supported and sustained by Nigerians, especially those who are in positions of authority.

Mismanagement of national resources and misrule by leaders since independence have impoverished and denied opportunities to the majority of Nigerians and gave rise to the quest by notable political leaders in the country for ethnic and religious solutions to the nation’s problems.

Unfortunately, the masses have been hoodwinked and manipulated by those who benefit from the status quo and who will stop at nothing to collide heads of Nigerians and entrench feelings of enmity among the common people.

Thus, at the root of the country’s problem is the manipulation of the masses by the elite. Long ago, Bala Usman defines manipulation as “essentially controlling the action of a person or group without that person or group knowing the goals, purpose and method of that control and without even being aware that a form of control is being exercised on them at all.”

Thus, Usman links the manipulation of religion and ethnicity in Nigeria to the ever-deteriorating material living conditions of millions of Nigerians and the few ruling class elements who benefit from the unjust status quo. According to him, “Within Nigeria, millions of Nigerians are increasingly realising that the present economic and social system in this country has nothing for them except landlessness, indebtedness, unemployment, destitution, disease, illiteracy and chronic and pervasive insecurity”.

Therefore, he sees the perpetrators of this exploitative and iniquitous system as the prime perpetrators of manipulation, architects of ethnic and religious agitations who cover themselves with religious and ethnic disguises to further entrench division among the common people of Nigeria.

Hence, now that the President, like the late Bala Usman, has truly understood that the problem of Nigeria is not ethnicity and or religion, but manipulation of the two by the elites, his government will do well to shed all ambiguities and hesitation and declare and reaffirm that the Nigerian state is secular and belongs to all ethnic groups and one of its most fundamental responsibilities is to protect the right of every citizen and resident to practice the religion of their choice.

The government should identify and punish, according to the law, all the rich and powerful individuals who are known to be behind the campaign of violent ethnic and religious politics aimed at destroying the country.

On Nigeria’s approach to international trade, contract negotiations…

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said, this week, that the country must continue to engage knowledgeable teams for all its international trade and contract negotiations.

Osinbajo said this at a one-day capacity building workshop for negotiators of international economic agreements jointly organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Inter-Agency Committee on Stopping Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) from Nigeria.

He said Nigeria should engage experts in its areas of international trade and negotiations to avoid the serious economic consequences that arise from badly negotiated or poorly crafted international economic agreements.

And, if truth be told, there are many cases, negotiated by Nigerians in Nigeria and abroad, selfishly or otherwise, and or knowledgeably or otherwise, that have turned out, in the course of their implementation, to be against the interests of the country and its people.

Citing the examples of agreements that have gone bad, Osinbajo listed the Simandou Iron Ore contract in Guinea, the Bilateral Investment Treaty in Pakistan, and the Strategic Alliance Contract in Nigeria, among others and pointed out that “poorly negotiated contracts or framework agreements can lead to serious financial losses for countries.”

According to him, one of the most significant sources of economic loss for a country is the consequence of poorly negotiated agreements.

Thus, the Vice President advised that, henceforth, those who will negotiate on behalf of Nigeria should put the nation’s interests and economic prospects on the table every time they negotiate while, depending on the size and nature of contracts at hand and their implications, foreigners who are experts on the subject matter should be involved at all stages of negotiations.

Osinbajo could not have expressed his sincere thoughts better than he did. We live in a knowledge economy and a globe in which each country allows its interests and those of its citizens to take precedence in things they do or will do. We live in a world that is powered by innovation, technology, all of which is funded by expert knowledge.

Thus, Nigeria is supposed to be led by knowledge and experts in its dealings with foreign entities. After all, if you don’t know the nature of the agreement, you can’t control, and innovate in it. You can’t control its dynamics. You can’t have scientific development. You can’t have any of the things you need to power a modern world. In short, negotiation and agreements, anywhere, need knowledge to maximise the gains from them.

This condition is even more desirable in a democracy such as ours. Democracy is different from other forms of states because, in a democracy, the people govern themselves and the people can’t govern themselves unless they know the options.

The people can’t govern themselves unless they understand the choices and alternatives being presented to them. And the only way they can evaluate those choices or alternatives is to have the basic knowledge to see which choice leads to which consequences. So, a people governing themselves without knowledge is blind.

Therefore, Nigeria must not be among the blind, at least, not anymore. It must, as Osinbajo suggests, build a corps of knowledgeable, crack negotiators and subject matter experts in international economic agreements and develop what should emerge as a national style of negotiations.