The English dictionary defines anomie as “ a state or condition of individuals or society, characterised by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people “. It could also be a state of over regulation of the society which leads to dysfunctional behaviour, as a reaction, from the citizens.
Since the advent of the administration of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in October 2015, the character of the Nigerian state has come under the attack of a dictatorial mindset that threatens to derail the gains of the democracy, watered by the blood of dissidents who fought the discredited military regimes that brought the country to its knees between 1984-1999. These military regimes may have cost the country the potentially uplifting gains of participation in the evolution of the New World Order of deregulation, privatisation, Information Technology, The Internet and Mobile Telephony. This New Order had transformed China, India,South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the former Soviet States into confident players in the global political and economic system.
While we were under the spell of the evil genius and his Maradonic dribbles, which made him overreach himself and to eventually crash out of the field of play to the derision of the spectators, referee and players, the rest of the world was coalescing into a democratic environment that unleashed the innate potentials of their hitherto inhibited peoples. In that period, while the Chinese were able to lift 300 million people out of poverty, the largest such progress in human history, the carpetbaggers that ruled Nigeria managed to reverse all the gains of Independence and an oil-fuelled economic boom, and threw 50 million Nigerians, mostly from the Middle Class, into abject and unrelenting poverty.
The return to democracy in 1999, though imperfect, because it was done under a constitution engineered by the discredited military regimes, and was led by a member of the discredited military, now wearing flowing traditional robes instead of military fatigues,promised a new dawn for the serially abused Nigerian people. There was hope that after the handover of power to the civilian regime of the first university graduate to have ever ruled Nigeria(an incredible statistic, considering the surfeit of intellectual capacity in the political and business topography of Nigeria) Umaru Yardua, Nigeria was headed to a new vista of intellectual politics.
The sickly Umaru, though rustic in outlook, perhaps due to his perennial confinement to the politics of his feudal region of Nigeria, managed to immediately quell the militancy in the restive Niger delta, without firing a shot in anger. This was a soothing and intellectually enlightening departure from the militaristic mindset of previous leaders that produced the Great Genocidal War of “ Nigerian Unity” in 1966-1970, the disastrous military interregnum of 1984-1999, June 12, Odi, Zaki-Biam, Umuechem etc.
The unfortunate demise of Umaru Yardua ushered in the first Southern minority President in Nigerian history, the equivalent of Barack Obama’s Presidency in the United States. President Jonathan’s Government was, warts and all, in retrospect, the best regime Nigeria has ever had. This conclusion is with respect to the application of democracy, rule of law , deregulation, privatisation and economic expansion and the free-for-all environment and its shortcomings that drives the democratic environment and delivers it’s dividends. For a few dizzying years, it appeared that we had finally broken free from the clutches of the discredited military regimes that, for all intents and purposes, had ruined the future of our children. Like newly freed slaves , Nigerians embarked on the the ill-disciplined revelry that accompanies freedom from slavery( and political Independence). This revelry has historically ensured that the gains of this freedom are not fully exploited, and could even be lost in the din of celebration.
A purely reasonable and intelligent effort to consolidate the economic gains of democracy by removing the scam of subsidy of petroleum products imports, in the sixth largest exporter of crude oil with three refineries, turned a rapacious political tendency with great interest and investment in the scam and the compromised media, against the Presidency and Government in January 2012.
From then onwards it was always going to be a downhill journey. Forced to fight the subsidy scammers and a contrived , but dangerous insurgency in the politically hostile North, who wanted their own man to complete the tenure of the late Yaradua, President Jonathan had to resort to friends of all dubious hues to save his Presidency and even his own life. The very saddening stories of humongous corruption that have emerged after his fall from power , showed how helpless and desperate he was to save his office and himself from the incendiary combination of a rapacious and greedy Southern political tendency and the Born-to- Rule political tendency of the starkly self-impoverished Moslem North. This political union latched on to the mindless Boko Haram insurgency as a powerful tool to undermine his Presidency and ensure that he did not seek a second term, which he did anyway, perhaps as a two-finger up gesture to the North and their Southern allies.
He lost a gallant battle, and the recent revelations about his party , the People’s Democratic Party(PDP) showed that he was fighting a war he could not win,because everybody wanted a piece of him and the largesse that it entailed, and nobody was really in his corner for the big fight. However, his Government, even though tainted by massive corruption, was a pioneer in what democracy can achieve when in the hands of intellectually equipped practitioners. Under his Government , Nigeria became the largest economy in Africa. There were also great strides in privatisation of the power sector, banking and stock market reforms. The automobile industry development policy attracted real local and foreign investment into the sector. There was also the initiation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund; the first in Africa, and a Local Content Policy that moved Nigerian operators massively into the previously totally foreign controlled petroleum exploration, production and services industry with the promise of greater value addition and the ultimate control of this critical industry by local entrepreneurs.
However, since the inception of the new Government of the APC, which is based on the mantra of change from the perceived negativities of the Jonathan Government, especially in the areas of security, economy and the perennially debilitating problem of corruption in all aspects of national life, there has been a steep and noticeable descent to the past of dictatorship,impunity, arbitrariness in government policy and sheer primitivity in the management of the economy, as is to be expected in an intellectually challenged and politically constrained operating environment. The anti-corruption war,touted to be the major source of revenue for the “disappearing” and unprecedentedly bloated national budget(a totally oxymoron idea for revenue generation, considering the disconnect between the revenue requirements of the national budget and the actual amount of collectible restitution) has been turned into a witch hunt of perceived enemies, the destruction of the opposition and therefore the idea of democracy. It has also provided an opportunity to settle scores with the dramatis personae of a previous incarnation, like Sambo Dasuki, who helped send the new President out of office 30 years ago.
Again, we are back to the era of impunity by the Presidency, a situation that is anathema to the practice of democracy. Institutions of government that are, by their nature, patently independent of direct Presidential control, are now beholden to the New Sherrif in Town, a sobriquet used by his spin masters, to describe a supposedly civilian President in the second decade of the 21st century. Government ministers, who under the previous proper democracy, were allowed to develop policies and institutions to drive the agenda of Government, now cringe and genuflex before the all-knowing Commander-In-Chief, who unfortunately is an economic and political novice, but is, in keeping with his military and dictatorial underpinnings, unable to appreciate what some of the experts in his team bring to the table. He has therefore failed to allow them free rein to dig the country out of the security, political and especially economic hole that it is in at this time.
The Governor of the Central Bank and the Minister of Finance, both designated custodians of monetary and economic policy , are paralysed and unable to effect the necessary policy changes required to counter the debilitating effects of the more than 60% drop in oil revenue and its immediate effect on the exchange rate of the national currency,because an economically illiterate President has vowed to defend the exchange rate for purely narrow sentimental and even political considerations. While the economy goes into a tail spin and he travels round the world, like the perpetually travelling Olabisi Ajalla of yore, in search of solutions to our problems, which solutions are really quite simple and located in our Sokoto as the saying goes. Heads of MDAs now claim to report directly to the Presidency, against extant Civil Service regulations, like the comical and cynical Hameed Ali of the Nigerian Customs Service, who flaunts his closeness to his kinsman from Katsina, and refuses to report to his supervising ministry.
The unintended consequences of all this, is the descent to anomie and perdition that the country is now witnessing. There is a total disconnect between the populace and the political class and especially the Government. Government policy has been reduced to periodic disinformation by a patently confused and rambling media team led by the incorrigible Lai(Comical Ali) Mohammed, who consistently issues victorious war reports from the northeast, while Boko Haram is killing more people than they ever did before their “technical” defeat by the Nigerian soldiers,that he claims were equipped by the previous Government with backward-firing weapons( a feat that will get the Nigeria army into the Guinness Book of World records for doing the impossible).
There is a palpable sense of despair in the land, but unfortunately, our new heroes are Neros, fiddling while the country burns. With 10 aircraft in his fleet, a figure perhaps higher than any President in this world, our ascetic and patriotic President scours the entire globe, casting aspersions on the morality of his subjects, while at the same time asking the international business community to trust their hard earned funds in the hands of these morally compromised minions. How naïve can a leadership get and why did we do this to ourselves? The descent to anomie is now complete, but unfortunately we can do nothing about our debilitating situation until 2019, a very frightening prospect indeed.
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