Democracy?

Bauchi State Governor Isa Yuguda has banned the placement or display of campaign posters and banners in the state capital and the 20 local government headquarters.

Only one campaign is exempt from the ban -- the presidential campaign of President Goodluck Jonathan. The PDP presidential candidate is the only person allowed, per Yuguda's order, to place or display campaign posters, banners and paraphernalia in the City of Bauchi and in any of the 20 LGA-HQs.

“Any interested politicians who wants his posters, banners and billboards to be placed, should do so 20 km away from the state capital and local government headquarters. Politicians are allowed to paste posters or place posters, banners and billboard in their houses or shops but not outside.

“The ban includes all posters, banners and bill boards of all contestants except that of Mr President and Vice President.”

“Anyone who violated the order would be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with the thuggery law, passed by the State House of Assembly.”

Now, ordinary people such as you and I might think this is an undemocratic, should-be-illegal exercise of the power of the governor's office to give an undemocratic, should-be-illegal advantage to the Presidential candidate of his political party.

But Isa Yuguda and his advisors are not ordinary people like you and me. They have apparently concluded that allowing political parties equal access to the public eye would (in their words) "pose security problems" for the state.

Security problems for the state?

Don't they mean electoral problems for Isa Yuguda and Goodluck Jonathan?

To devalue or not to devalue ... that is the question.

I am NOT a fan of the International Monetary Fund. If I began to explain to you why I feel this way, it would not only distract from the issue I want to address in this post, but will also take a few years of your life from start to finish.

The IMF recently concluded its most recent Article IV "consultation" with Nigeria. Daily Trust reported the IMF asked Nigeria to devalue the Naira, while the excellent Business Day had a typically more detailed take on the IMF's "advice".

Much has been said and written about this in the Nigerian news media, and on blogs and online fora. For starters, I just want to reiterate a post I wrote not too long ago about our dysfunctional economy that does not benefit from currency devaluations. It is weird. Lots of countries in the world pray for their currency to be weaker than others; some go beyond mere prayer to artificially distort the currency market so their currency is unnaturally weak relative to their trading partners. As I said in the prior post on this subject, one of the effects of living with our dysfunctional economy so long is we Nigerians do not seem to be aware that we suffer from Big Power currency manipulation more than the Big Power's do; the United States and China go back and forth arguing about currency manipulation, but if you were serious about restructuring and "normalizing" the Nigerian economy, you would soon discover that much of what should be your competitive advantage has been erased by market manipulation by Big Powers -- including China's cheap currency as well as the much more frequently complained-about Euro-American agricultural and industrial subsidies. We do not realize how badly we are affected because we are not trying to normalize our dysfunctional economy; essentially, if the Big Powers stopped distorting the markets this instant, we would still be entirely unable to take advantage of it, so while it is theoretically important, the existence or non-existence of these distortions does not practically affect any Nigerian's life prospects in a way that would cause him to be presently angry about it.

Whatever it says in the textbooks, and whatever the IMF is pretending to be their motives and intentions, devaluing the Naira will probably not produce whatever it is they think it will produce. Policy-making in the Federal Republic is a process of loudly declaring the importance of saving $1 billion, then spending far more than $1 billion to save $1 billion while pretending you are spending nothing, immediately followed by the initiation of a new "innovative" move that you promise will revolutionize Nigeria, loudly telling everyone the new move will cost only $3 billion, though the cheapest possible cost for it is $9 billion, and the padding of corruption will mean that $15 billion will be spent .... after which point we will discover the new "innovative" move doesn't work as well as promised. And the whole thing, everything I just wrote, would all be premised on the initial declaration that we have to save $1 billion.

Nevertheless ....

Nigerians have generally been opposed to any talk of devaluation. The conversation has been predicated on the assumption that the IMF wants deliberately, and of its own volition, inflict a lower-valued Naira on Nigeria. The Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has also weighed in, disagreeing with the IMF and saying he did not think the Naira was overvalued.

The thing is, the Central Bank of Nigeria has expended around US$30 billion of our foreign reserves in the last two or three years to defend the Naira's exchange rate. It started under Charles Soludo, and continued under Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. I do not know if this policy is continuing; Sanusi very recently said the depletion of the reserves had stopped, though he appeared to say the Central Bank had been defending the Naira against "speculative attack" (as opposed to saying the CBN was sustaining the Naira at a value higher than its market value; interestingly, while the official exchange rate still hovers around =N=150/$ like the CBN wants it, on the parallel market the Naira trades at up to =N=157/$).

But my thing is, if you have spent $30 billion defending the value of the Naira, essentially spending half of your accumulated reserves to do so, would it be wrong of me to say that the Naira had already been devalued by the markets and that we have in effect spent a fortune we cannot afford to hide the reality from ourselves.

Think about what we could have done with $30 billion, both as a raw number, and as seed money to leverage even larger amounts of investment. Depending on what type of technology you use, $30 billion could have raised our electricity generation by at least 30,000 MW, which added to the 10,000 MW of theoretically-existing installed production capacity, it would take us up to 40,000 MW, which is about what South Africa generates (and is 66% of the existing capacity of Sub-Saharan Africa). Of course, our supposed existing 10,000 MW doesn't actually exist....

.... and nobody would be foolish enough to spend all of the $30 billion on one thing, even if that thing is as valuable as electricity. But what I am getting at is there are a lot of productive things you could do with $30 billion, things that would stimulate the deeper, broader and faster GDP growth our Federal Republic so desperately needs.

Instead we spent it all to achieve nothing beyond fixing the exchange rate of our Naira at a particular place .... which doesn't really do anything other than allow us to continue importing things that we should have been exporting in the first place. The absence of economic support infrastructure (like effective and efficient railways, electricity, water, etc, things $30 billion could have helped) makes us so dependent on imports of even the most basic manufactures that we have become a nation that will willingly waste $30 billion to keep imports comparatively cheap because if we allowed the Naira to devalue we wold find our existing industrial base would be in no position to truly take advantage of it. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing circle of waste and dysfunction.

Indeed, had we allowed the Naira to depreciate, any plan to invest that $30 billion in leveraging much more to fix our infrastructure would have instantly come up against dramatically higher prices for importing capital equipment and other input, since no such thing is produced in Nigeria or anywhere nearby in equally dysfunctional Africa. All of such imports will be in dollars (not Shillings or Rand or CFA) which would diminish the efficacy of the $30 billion. So we opted to spend it all producing nothing other than a Naira at a politically-fixed rate.

Sanusi says our foreign reserves are starting to recover, albeit at a glacially-slow pace. Events in West Asia and North Africa have driven up the barrel-price of crude oil, which is to our fiscal benefit. This is a good thing, I suppose, though it is another reminder of how important pumping out raw, unprocessed crude really is, and how comparatively unimportant are all of the sectors that in theory are supposed to benefit from currency devaluation, and that would in theory have benefited from a leveraged two or three times that $30 billion in investment in infrastructure improvement. Unproductive stuff is so much more important to our economic well-being than important stuff; it is both a cause and a consequence of dysfunction.

Politicians and Violence in the Delta

The so-called "militants" in the Niger-Delta have spent the last 12 years alternating between working as violent enforcers for politicians, and stealing crude oil from our sprawling system of pipelines.

Now that we are in an election year, it seems they have gone back to working for politicians. The offices of the Labour Party in Yenegoa, capital of President Jonathan's home state Bayelsa, were blown up by persons unknown. It is not the only incident of violence related to the upcoming elections (there have been outbreaks all over the Federal Republic), but this one has all the markings of a "militant" attack. Heaven knows how much explosives the "militants" have stockpiled for blowing up pipelines and creating vast environmental damage via oil spills as a corollary to to their stealing.

Elsewhere in the Niger-Delta, the slavish mentality of the security services resulted in the avoidable deaths of 16 citizens (and in injuries to dozens more) at a campaign rally for President Goodluck Jonathan's in Port Harcourt.

For some reason our public security agencies have always acted as though they were the personal political servants of whoever occupied the position of maximal leadership. It has been this way since 1960. It was this way during the colonial era. It was the same in the pre-colonial era too.

Reform isn't just a thing we do on the outside to institutions, systems and structures. It is also something we must all do on the inside, in our hearts and souls. We must change the way we think. Those tasked with providing security to the public need to start acting like they understand their job description. They are supposed to protect we the people against illegal leadership and unconstitutional behaviour, yet they have always done the opposite, all the way to pre-colonial times, helping bad leaders impose themselves on us and compelling us to suffer for the vanity of these leaders.

In a way I don't blame the security men. If they hadn't acted the way they had, they would have been subject to disciplinary action (ironic, isn't that?), and we the people would not have stood up to protect them for the unjust treatment. But that is our collective faults. We are supposed to be working together, civilians and soldiers alike, so we can all live without having to distort our behaviour in negative ways just to survive in a system that rewards negative behaviour and punishes positive behaviour. But instead of working together ....

Divided and easily conquered

A member of an online forum read this Sun News interview of Senator Walid Jibrin and immediately launched on the usual xenophobic bile about cattle herders, Northern oligarchy, Northern ruling elite, Northerners this and Northerners that. Reading through the ethnophobic (i.e. tribalis) rubbish this forum commentator wrote, I felt the usual depression I get when I begin to think of how far we as Nigerians have to go before we reach the metaphoric Promised Land.

Walid Jibrin's comments are symptomatic of an uncomfortable large majority of the ENTIRE Nigerian ruling elite, not just the ruling elite of a particular region. In different ways, on different subjects, an in different settings, the utterances of the titans that rule our polity, economy and society are more frightening than any horror film ever made. Oddly enough, the fact that their words provide rhetorical ammunition for communal violence is not the thing that scares me most. What scares me most is the things they say are so .... stupid that you despair of the fact that these are the decision-makers whose pervasive and direct influence on our country's past, present and future is, was, and will be unmoderated by anything so trivial as democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism, accountability, checks-and-balances, free market competition, economic regulation, or anything else.

Back in 2003, during the (rigged) elections, and years before the current imbroglio in Nigeria's banking industry, I read a very long, in-depth interview with the CEO of one of the big banks ... and the things he said were so daft that I could not believe he was the "decider" at such a large bank. Bear in mind that in our system of doing things, the "oga" or boss is all-powerful; any hint of initiative from his underlings is treated by the boss as a direct attack on the boss, an act of insubordination, a threat to the oga's position, an indicator that you wish to usurp oga's role.

It was neither the first nor last time I have been shocked by the silliness uttered by so-called experts. One that stands in my mind is a respected economist and university professors who has severally sat on advisory councils and panels for a number of Nigerian presidents. When a journalist sat down to talk to this man about the economy, policy issues and development, he said things that would academically embarrass a 100-level Economics student.

People keep thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong with Nigeria, some Nigerian Factor that explains why things are never normal in our Federal Republic, why our own dey always get k-leg.

There is nothing mysterious about it. The fact is the people charged with making the most important decisions do not have even the foggiest conception of what it is they are supposed to be doing. They know they should be doing something, so they do something. Ask them, and they will defend the something they chose to do vociferously, even if it is quite visibly taking us on the wrong path to the wrong destination. Because, and this is the second part of the problem, it is we the people who suffer the consequences of being on the wrong road; from the decision-makers' perspective, whatever road we are on, good or bad, they have political, economic and social power, and that is what really motivates us as human beings. Money, power, status, influence, and all that these things can bring you.

The bank CEO loves being a CEO; it doesn't matter that his bank is an empty shell heading towards collapse. The economist I mentioned above is respected across the country, is consulted by presidents, sits on important policy-making committees and is treated like a wise, experienced elder; it doesn't matter to him that his brand of "advice" is likely part of the reason our economy is dysfunctional (heck, he probably thinks the mythical Nigerian Factor is what ruined the implementation of his excellent advice).

Nor is Walid Jibrin the first Nigerian VIP to gladly say things that promote ethnic and religious fear, distrust, dislike, hate and at times violence. Some of them know what they are doing, and do it deliberately, using the old tactic of divide-and-conquer, divide-and-rule to protect the system from challenge by the masses. But others, and I bet Walid Jibrin is in the group, do not think what they are saying is dangerous; they honestly and truly believe that are analyzing the situation appropriately and correctly.

Hearing a Nigerian Big Man talk like that is .... perturbing, but what is truly scary is the number of regular, everyday Nigerian citizens who express the same sort of thoughts. In the case of we the people, there is little to gain from divide-and-rule, so when any of our number talk in such a fashion, it is usually backed up by belief.

Which brings me back to this forum commenter who took Walid Jibrin's words as his inspiration to go of on an ethnophobic rant about Northern Nigerians. If you told this man that his words are just as terrible and dangerous as those of Jibrin, he would probably look at you as though he thought you were mad. Indeed, if you pointed to the words of a politician from the commenter's region or state, expressing similar ethnophobic beliefs about Nigerians from the North, he would probably defend that person's statements, hail that person for telling it like it is -- which is exactly what Walid Jibrin and his supporters would say.

You see, the political/economic/social elite are not the only people who make the mistake of choosing the wrong path in the belief that it is the right path. We the people, we the masses of the Federal Republic, do the same thing everyday. The Big Men are able to stay in power, to stay in control, because we the people echo their missteps and mistakes.

It is why we are divided. It is why we are easily conquered.

It is why revolution, reform, restructuring and transformation remain unlikely.

And so we get to listen to our leaders say things that are either dangerous or silly. We watch them say these things with gravity and solemnity, as though they were sharing knowledge and guidance. Much of the time, they know neither the import nor impact of what they say, but they say it anyway because "protocol" requires them to say something at that point even if they have nothing to offer.

And we the people don't care. One citizen bluntly expresses a widespread attitude to the alleged "democracy" of the Fourth Republic:

“In the last two months, I have decamped to more than seven political parties because it comes with a price: a motorcycle, cloths or money. This is our period of harvest even though at the end of the day, I am going to choose credible candidates, irrespective of their political leanings,” Yunusa Abdulmumini, an Okada rider said. It is now very common to hear a story that party A, B or C had harvested “thousands of decampees” during its rally either in Maiduguri, Cibok, Gwoza, Monguno or any other place.

Funny, he seems to think "at the end of the day" his vote will actually count. If you do not bother to create a functioning democracy, you will not have a functioning democracy. Your vote will be meaningless, the announced "result" will not reflect your vote, and you have no business complaining about it because the time you should have spent fighting the politicians to create democracy you spent instead collecting motorcycle, cloths or money to jump from party to party making a little money as a rent-a-crowd to make each decamping Big Man appear to be bringing "his people" (as though they are his private property) into the new party he has joined.

You might say that other countries have similar problems. Politicians, generals, bureaucrats, technocrats and intellectuals the world over like to create the outward impression that they have a better-than-average understanding of their countries' major and minor crises, but the evidence of history indicates their much-vaunted expertise is more myth than real. Mostly, they muddle through. Mostly, they get lucky. Mostly, when luck runs out, they are unable to stop it happening, ameliorate it or shorten its duration.

So yes, this is a problem all over the world.

But when the chips are down or there is an opportunity for resource gains, the political, economic and social leaders elsewhere in the world will do whatever is necessary to seize (by economic, military, political or social force if necessary) a more advantageous position that our leaders have given ours. The never-ending global "war" for wealth and resources is almost never fought along moral, ethical, just, fair or righteous lines.

If the use of slaves will drive wealth-creation for some, they will go and get slaves. If forcefully taking the land and resources of other populations will give an advantage to some, they go and drive people off their land. If distorting global markets (or supposedly "multilateral" agencies) so they function in a manner advantageous to some will give advantage to some, then the potential benefiting parties go all out to first distort and then defend the distortion to the limits of their capability to do so. If they can get away with beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilism, enjoying access to other people's markets while denying access to their own market, they will do whatever they have to do to create the mercantile opportunity (even if the opportunity is given in exchange for committing their soldiers to potential death in a war that otherwise doesn't concern their countries).

Whatever needs to be done, they do, regardless of moral import.

Don't misunderstand me. You probably think I am making nasty comments about the rest of the world. You are wrong.

Our ancestors were confronted with iron ships, Maxim guns, superior military technology and tactics .... and we were all cheaply and easily (oh so easily) conquered and turned into colonies of Europe. Just like that. Their political/economic/social/intellectual leaders over time had made a sequence of decisions (many of them horrendous) over a long period of time (centuries really) motivated by a vast array of historical stimuli, emergencies as well as by the usual avarice of humanity and human societies.

Now, contrary to those who claim Nigeria is a "young" country, "only 50 years old", as an explanation for why we shouldn't expect any better than what we have got, the reality is our ancestry as human beings is as old as anyone else's. We are all humans, and we have all lived on this planet the same number of millennia. We the people of Nigeria and Africa ended up in a situation where we were technologically behind the conquering colonialists of Europe because our political/economic/social/intellectual leaders made a sequence of decisions across several centuries that resulted in our being behind on these indicators as of the era of colonial conquest.

Frankly, our "leaders" are so much more likely to devote their energies to governing us in a manner that satisfies the strategic interests of everyone else on Earth, while failing to even contemplate or understand, much less effectuate our own strategic interests.

And far from holding them to account, we are too busy dividing ourselves against ourselves, and fighting ourselves in the achievement of nothing of value to ourselves.

EDIT 01-03-11: Daily Trust ran a report on a statement issued by the Peoples Democratic Party asking opposition parties to leave Bode George alone.

The first response under the article starts out complaining that Bode George served only 2 years for a massive crime, while other people sit in prison 10 years for "mere allegations". My initial instinct was to agree with the commenter, because I thought he was talking about the tens of thousands of citizens who have sat in jail for years "awaiting trial" (or in some cases awaiting basic arraignment, or awaiting a family member to bribe the arresting officers), citizens who had never been convicted of anything but who had nevertheless served YEARS of hard time in our less-than-healthy prisons.

That is what I thought the commenter meant .... until I read further and realized the commenter's only gripe was that Sani Abacha's henchman Major Hamza Al-Mustapha had spent a decade in prison while Bode George had only spent two.

So he doesn't really care about our broken system of justice. All he is asking for is that we make sure the pervasive injustice is balanced along ethnic/regional/religious lines; if a Southwestern criminal is given a light sentence and a hero's welcome, then a Northwestern criminal should also be given a light sentence and a hero's welcome.

You see what I mean? It is such a self-defeating ideology, and it is shared by an unfortunately large number of our fellow citizens.

Bode George forgives you

Are you one of those people who thinks thieves are bad and criminals should be punished? Bode George forgives you.

The criminal forgave those he stole from at a Thanksgiving held at the Cathedral Church in Lagos Island to commemorate his release from Kiri-Kiri prison following the end of a ridiculously light 2-year de facto sentence.

The ex-con retains a certain degree of popularity, his release prompting celebration among his supporters, aides, clients, patrons and allies.

Bode George, thank you for forgiving me. You are an ole, a barawo, an onyeoshi. It is rude of me to call you a thief in the Federal Republic's three biggest languages, but I know you forgive me.

Fool me twice

There is no place in the world that is totally free from insecurity and violence, but the levels in Nigeria are abnormal. What is really frightening is we have lived with these abnormal amounts of violence and insecurity for so long that we have acclimatized to them. In other words, abnormality has become normal, and we no longer notice or realize just how abnormal the situation truly is. In fact, I daresay if we had a single year of real normality, we might take more than a while to adjust to it, because we are not used to such things; we would probably keep our mental and practical defences on alert, assuming as we do that the period of quiet was just an interlude, an interruption, before the noise restarts.

We have an urgent need to reform the Nigerian Police Force, but that is only one point on a very long list of things we need to do to improve security for the average citizen. Constitutional reforms, political reforms, societal reforms, economic reforms, each of these is just a heading under which there are an even longer list of necessary reforms that have direct and indirect effects on insecurity, violence and crime.

Yet here we are in what is supposedly an election year, and all I hear is people talking about names, personalities and ethno-regional geopolitics.

No one is analytically discussing what any of these empty names will do about police reform or any other security-related reforms.

Note I said "analytically discuss", not "mention". I bet if you asked the leading candidates or their supporters, they would all say the same bland, meaningless things about how they will "tackle" the problem. I am not an old man, but I am not a young man either, and I have heard every one of these standard promises hundreds of times over every decade of my life. I don't know if they attend a class where they are taught a list of useless promises to continue making.

I have never heard a [u]believable[/u] strategy. And even if one is produced (which it won't be), there is the even greater question whether the person making the promise will actually carry out the promise thus made.

None of them has done anything in their careers that would give a rational man confidence that they would keep their word to reform law enforcement and improve public security. Most of them are beneficiaries of the current state of affairs, and would be subject to arrest and prosecution the instant our judicial and law enforcement systems became properly functional; to believe these sorts of people when they promise reform, you would have to believe they were suicidal.

The rest of them are perfectly willing to be the servants and errand-boys of the mega-corrupt, so long as they get to wield a modicum of political authority and get to keep a few crumbs that drop off their masters' table. Do you have any idea the political upheaval that would occur if any Nigerian government or leader truly and seriously fought corruption, and/or reformed the police and law enforcement? Based on their record, none of the candidates have the balls (pardon my language) for that kind of fight. They don't. It is why they seek the easy path of serving a corrupt power-broker over the difficult path of rallying ordinary citizens into a movement that would forcefully press for real change.

And yes, I include in this criticism that leading candidate who is the most experienced of the group. He has been around since the middle of the 1960s, and served as a minister in the very corrupt regimes of the 1970s. More to the point, after 45 years as a presence in Nigerian politics, he has had no effect at all on the status quo and has not advanced the cause of reform. Yet he has supporters who will insist that he will do this and do that, even though he has not done any of those things in 45 years....

.... and the same applies to the rest of the major and minor candidates. If we gave all of them 45 years, none of them will do any of the things their supporters say they will do. Hearing them talk about what they will do in office is like hearing lions and leopards promise to be vegetarians if given political office.

Why do we believe them?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Use the same ridiculous ruse to fool me thousands of times in a row, and I must be one of the supporters of any Nigerian politician.

No Alliance

There will be no alliance between the CPC and the ACN, and no alliance between the ANPP and the ACN.

The ACN blames the CPC, but the truth is I never believed any such alliance had a snowball's chance in the Sahara.

If the parties (and individuals) in question were similarly disposed to any specific ideological, philosophical, political or policy orientation,they might been inspired to unite their forces to achieve their common aims.

It is not that their "ideology" was different.

It is that neither of them have much of an ideology to begin with.

You have two entities that formed for no other reason that to acquire power for their owners, same as PDP or any other Nigerian party. And that is the crux of the problem.

Tinubu created the ACN to place power in the hands of Tinubu.

Buhari created CPC to place power in the hands of Buhari.

Tinubu is intelligent enough to know Buhari wants all the power and doesn't want to share it.

Buhari is intelligent enough to know that Tinubu wants all the power and doesn't want to share it.

They both know that a fundamental tactic of competition for power in Nigeria and all over the Africa is convincing a rival to get his ethnic/regional/religious/factional supporters to support you in a fight for power. Once you get that power, you then use the security services to crush your erstwhile collaborator.

There is nothing that exists on this planet that would make Tinubu or Buhari trust that the other man would not turn around and dump him as soon as power was acquired. Our constitution is just a piece of paper that all governments ignore, our laws are fantastic but are never applied, our contracts are difficult to judicially enforce, and even a gentleman's agreement (like the PDP presidential rotation) can and will be broken as soon as power is tasted.

Yes, there was Olu Falae and Umaru Shinkafi in 1999, but add in Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, and you are talking about four fingers of the same hand, operating under an Army-run election designed to produce a government that would ignore the crimes of the Babangida and Abacha regimes and allow the civilian and military beneficiaries of those regimes to enjoy their loot in peace.

With the likes of Tinubu and Buhari, you are talking about entirely counterpoised, power-hungry political giants, with electoral machines to match. In a Fourth Republic dominated by the big tent, Big Man consensus that is the PDP, men like Tinubu and Buhari are so driven by their own private, personal ambitions that they stand apart and still survive despite clashing repeatedly with the mass of Big Men called PDP.

The idea that one of them would bow down for the other? It was never gonna happen.

Nigerian optimism .... could it be?

Journalists, academics, "intellectuals" and commentators in North America and Western Europe have often discussed the disparity in taxation and government-funded social benefits between the United States on the one hand, and Canada (to a lesser extent) and Western Europe (to a greater extent) on the other.

For the record, there is no free lunch and "government" per se doesn't fund anything. Citizens are on the hook to pay for all of it, through taxation and ever-increasing amounts of public debt.

But that is not what this blog is about.

One of the things the commentators mention frequently is what they perceive to be the optimism of the average American. The hypothesis is that poor and middle-class Americans oppose taxing the rich because they believe they may one day ascend the class ladder and become rich themselves, so they want to make sure they don't have to give away their future riches in the name of taxation.

I don't know whether the hypothesis is true or not. Even after living there for quite a few years, I quite frankly will never pretend to understand the people, the country, or their political culture. Then again, I could (and do) say the same for Western Europe and Canada.

The thing is, that hypothesis comes close to something I have always suspected is at play in Nigeria. Our economic, political and sociocultural systems are broken, yet there is no consensus for reform, restructuring and transformation.

I fear too many citizens aspire to join the elite who profitably milk the various deficiencies in our systems. And even those, particularly the poor, struggling majority, who have no chance of joining the milking crew, nevertheless hope that someone from their village, their clan, their local government area rises to join the ranks of those who treat our country as though it were their private dairy.

It is not that people don't want reform, it is that they want reform to wait until after they have got their share of the loot. I think a lot of people are actually scared that reform may happen before they get a chance to self-enrich at the expense of the greater good. No one wants to be the last soldier who dies just before the war ends; in Nigeria, no one wants to be the man who was just one step away from acquiring his own "share" when the deficiencies are fixed and it is no longer possible to become illicitly rich. Ironically, those people who are even further away from that final step are actually more adamant that nothing be reformed until they can get closer to the udders.

Is this a form of self-defeating Nigerian optimism? Do too many Nigerians harbour wholly unrealistic dreams of one day becoming masters of the lootocratic dairy?

The funny thing is we continue to live with the effects of our refusal to reform.

We lament our insecurity, but no one will ever reform the police, because if the police actually become good at investigating crimes, much of what passes for "government" and "business" in the country would either have to cease or our prisons would overflow with convicts.

The same is true of everything we lament about. There are people who make fortunes because of our electricity problems. Others who have become billionaires thanks to the comatose refineries and the fuel price subsidy. I could go on.

Alas, we the people seem to aspire to join them, rather than reform the system. Our optimism about the likelihood of it happening may just be the single most important impediment to reform, restructuring and transformation.

Irony

The UK Guardian has a story about mooted Chinese "investment" in Zimbabwe. It seems this "investment" will be loans (to be repaid with interest) and lines of credit.

This paragraph....

But such an investment would be likely to heighten concerns about president Robert Mugabe's increasingly warm relationship with China, which has been accused of turning a blind eye to human rights violations across Africa.

....and this paragraph ....

Last year the Chinese embassy in Harare threw an 86th birthday party for Mugabe. Such gestures have fuelled speculation that China is content to prop up Mugabe and could even bankroll his next election campaign. It has refused to join America, Britain and the EU in imposing sanctions against the president and his allies.

.... caught my attention.

You know, I had the same thoughts about vast amounts of North American and European investment propping up vicious dictators like Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema (not to mention ex-dictator of Tunisia Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and current dictator of Egypt Hosni Mubarak).

Mugabe is bad, no doubt, but between them, Uncle Macias and Nephew Teodoro of the Nguema Dynasty have killed or driven to exile a proportion of the Equatorial Guinean population roughly equivalent to the propotion of the Cambodian population killed or exiled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Macias Nguema was the country's first president; as is the case with such regimes, he only trusted his family, and he made his nephew Teodoro his principal enforcer (which implicates Teodoro in his uncle's crimes as well as his own). Teodoro's position was eventually strong enough that he ousted and assassinated his uncle, before going on to create a country that might as well be North Korea if North Korea discovered crude oil.

Yet, is is seemingly okay for the United States to massively invest in Equatorial guinea and to politically prop up the Nguema dynasty (US Presidents actually smile and take pictures with Teodoro), since there are mineral resources to be had. Everyone knows it is better to have a dictator that guarantees the resources go to you than to have an unpredictable democracy that might actually try to develop the resources in a manner beneficial to the broader economy and not just foreign corporations and a narrow local elite. Everyone knows it. China knows it. Which is why is also okay to express "heightened concern" at China doing exactly the same thing the Americans and Europeans do.

Funny.

It is like the Cold War isn't it? Everybody backing dictators that serve their interests while hypocritically criticizing their rivals for doing the same.

Actually it is not funny.

Why do we Africans just sit by the wayside, as our economic policies, resource exploitation, political structures and governments are decided and imposed (with no democratic input from us) by internal Big Men that work hand-in-hand with external Big Powers? It has been this way for a long time, and it has not worked out particularly well for us, yet we allow it to persist. Heck, even before we fell under the sway of the external Big Powers, we spent centuries as no more than serfs to pre-colonial Big Men.

They talk to themselves and argue with themselves as to which of them should get which chunk of us, and we wait for them to decide, and once they do we let them take the chunks they have apportioned to themselves.

We just watch them.

I don't get it.

There are even people, so-called intellectuals, academics and commentators, who waste a lot of breath appealing to "the West" to come and install democracy in Africa.

Are they kidding me? Why do people keep feeding the people of Nigeria (and Africa) the false line that they are not supposed to rise up and free themselves? Telling them they are supposed to wait for a "Great Nigerian Leader" or a "Benevolent Big Power" to come and save them?

If the Tunisians and Egyptians had waited for Big Powers to come and save them, Ben Ali would still be president.

Of course, the jury is still out on whether or not the changes in Tunisia (and eventually Egypt) will be real and substantive or merely cosmetic and deceptive. There are likely a lot of internal Big Men and external Big Powers working hard to ensure that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The thing about revolutions, all revolutions, is they always remove the sitting Czar .... and replace him with another Czar, except the new Czar makes sure no one ever calls him Czar, lest people start to wonder what the point of the whole exercise was.