Restructure or unravel - 1 - The Nation Nigeria

By Adegbola Akinola

This country belongs to all of us. It is therefore imperative that we must not indolently standby while the country dangerously totter into a failing state: where no sense of urgency in governance and infrastructure is rickety; no enduring core industries to induce job creation and promote key infrastructure, no sustainable manufacturing base to respond to national emergency and mitigate poverty; education, health and other municipal services that combine to define welfare provisions in a nation are in tatters; no level playing field for our educated/trained youths to compete in a decent manner for jobs, rather they are compelled to vote with their feet to go become second class citizens in foreign lands; where it is different folks different strokes, and law enforcers cannot be trusted to maintain equity thereby propagating perfidy. We cannot just afford to wait until “Boko Haram” is duplicated in every part of the country, only to result to running helter-skelter.

Nigeria as we know, is a country whose citizens constitute one of every five in the continent of Africa; and, by implication, on whose shoulder is reposed the hope of salvaging the dignity of the black race. After the promising developmental strides of the 1950’s to early 1960’s, one is tempted to chuckle and ask, what has befallen the country particularly in the last three decades? Is it that we have gone back into the default state, which obtained when the white-slave-catchers (Portugal, Britain and Spain) invaded and plundered Africa, circa 1444-1833? Then, the dominant class of Africans were after all devoted collaborators in that heinous and ignominious act. Is it not the same slave-hounding mentality that is now afflicting our rulers and holding us down from development? Is it that our subjective mind (or tabular rasa – the nurturable component of the conscious mind) must remain perpetually untrained, underdeveloped, un-nurtured? Otherwise, why would a set of people, in the appellation of rulers, prefer primitive accumulation to the welfare, security, development and human dignity of their race? Is enough not enough for liberation, now?!

Defective as it is, the basis of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (CFRN), 1999 (as altered), is welfarism. This is so by virtue of section 14(2)(a-c), taken together with sections 17(1-3) and 18(1-3), regardless of lack of justiciability in law or otherwise of the later subsections (see section 6(6)(c) ). By dint of the main thrust of the constitution being welfarism, it is incumbent on the government to provide infrastructure and industries to ensure that manufacturing thrives, so as to enable provision of jobs for citizens both in the formal and informal sectors, to a sufficient and sustainable extent. But this is not so. It is thus astonishing, indeed surreal that the government has been so bogged down!

Really, prior to the events of June 10, 2015 to date in Nigeria, one had always wallowed in the illusion that the prime problem ailing the country was corruption. But now, one knows better. The core problem why Nigeria refuses to develop and grow is dishonesty. Dishonesty, which as may be more appropriate, can manifest in any of the synonym-spectrum: greed, nepotism, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy, corruption, dubiousness, duplicity etc.

In fact, one now knows that nepotism can be more ramifying than corruption. How else do we interrogate the current fashion whereby an appointment into posts or jobs is by slots? This, Jide Oluwajuyitan of The Nation qualified as Elite conspiracy against the youth! What of when appointment into key government positions is skewed in favour of a particular ethnic group in power? Probably, someone would christen that as government conspiracy against ethnic groups! Is this the change that (progressives, patriots, civil rights movements, etc.) all yearned for, and expended energy and resources to herald in 2015? The paradox of helplessness on the herdsmen’s menace is inexplicable. How do we contextualize the pre-covid19 declaration of President Buhari in favour of the jumbo pay for legislators (and by implication for the executive as well), whereas many states barely pay even the previous minimum wage of N18,000 not to talk of the new N30,000? What of the issue of nepotism staring us in the face, all over?

So, how in the aforementioned circumstance can patriotism be preached to citizens, and ethos of public good and nationhood maintained? How do we maintain discipline, diligence, sensibility or any such positive attributes? How do we build enduring infrastructure, create an industrial base that ushers in manufacturing – a sine qua non for meaningful job creation? We are now a monocultural economy (safe the weak informal sector), leaning on rent-seeking and rent-collection from foreign oil companies to whom we have contracted our oil fields and wells. Atop of this, we have no correct record of the quantity of crude exploited and lifted at any time. Whereas, this is in total contrast to what obtains in other well-governed countries say, Saudi Arabia where every pint of oil is electronically monitored from well to pipe, to jetty and up to lifting into the ship and on the sea. Can Nigeria continue this way? Definitely, NO!

Howbeit, one gives credit to President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) for his enormous political will in implementing the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and the Bank Verification Number (BVN) regimes, which have shrunk the sphere of primitive looting and fraud. This has definitely reduced some form of (institutional) corruption. Also to be noted was the golden era of “body language”, when for instance, electricity supply was stable without any increase in power generation (June – October, 2015); and the swift recovery of swathes of territories (many Local Governments Areas) earlier seized by Boko Haram, in the northeastern corner of the country. But recent events, marked by virtual descent into a state of atrophy, have almost overshadowed all those achievements. They have pointedly brought to the fore, the question of nationhood. Beckoning on us in this governance conundrum is the crucial question: what happens in post-PMB? Or, what becomes of Nigeria after PMB?

From the background so elaborately illuminated and elucidated above, it becomes imperative for any altruistic and attentive player/observer of Nigeria today to know that restructuring of the polity is the peaceful and decent way out of the present chaotic system.

The justification and philosophy underpinning this restructuring is scientifically rooted in the principle of concentrated force or energy (alternatively referred to as, principle of distributed force or energy). In applied mathematics or engineering designs this concept is referred to as Saint Venant’s Principle. It is encapsulated in a layman’s language thus:

To mitigate premature failure of a structure, avoid loading it with a large force concentrated at a point. Rather, replace that intended large force with a set of smaller forces whose sum is equivalent in magnitude but distributed over appropriate surface area of the body/structure.

Or, to prevent a premature failure in a body/structure, replace any intended large force to be concentrated at a point with equivalent smaller ones, distributed over a region about that point.

In a nutshell, Concentrated Force initiates premature failure in a system. This is so the more in the case of a pre-stressed body/structure. This principle guides the design, construction and loading in structures such as buildings, bridges, railway lines, etc. It is not fortuitous that sharp edges and corners (often, connoting some concentrated force) are avoided in structures, devices and designs – it is a key assessment criterion in declaring a product as of good finishing or not.

Even nature abhors concentration of force. Hence, the phenomena: flooding, volcano, earth quake, tsunami (underwater quake due to a burst of sheer force concentration between tectonic plates), etc. In fact, it is known that a pointed straw flying at a very high speed will defeat a sandbag while a huge but blunt metallic bar (or stamp-rod) will not compromise the integrity of the sandbag.