Nigeria is a nation of absurdities and contradictions, a mosaic of ethnic nationalities and language groups knocked together by historical happenstance. Nigeria is a nation of vast human and resource potential but for decades has remained largely a nation in the making. A chain of uninspired and uninspiring leadership has structurally and materially condemned the country to a plundered wilderness, a wasteland littered with the debris of squandered opportunities.

In today’s civil democratic environment we are concerned essentially with the enterprise of governance and development. In other words, whatever the quality of leadership, civil society has a continuing fundamental responsibility as watchdog, to monitor the delivery of good governance and development by the people's supposedly accredited representatives. Over the years our focus has been preoccupied with the pedestrian, if not retrogressive, disposition of leadership to governance and development.

In normal times in any serious political entity, development is driven by a symbiotic partnership between the political leadership and organized civil society. However, in the convoluted Nigerian context the leadership is neither inspired nor is civil society sufficiently organized.

Let us therefore begin this brief discourse by acknowledging that we all constituting civil society, and particularly the so called elite leadership class, are guilty to a lesser or greater degree, if not of complicity but of complacency in the face of the enduring graft, indiscipline and stunted growth in the land. Civil society is not totally at one with the evaluation of the score-card of development and leadership in Nigeria. While some consider the level of growth as satisfactory and promising, others are crystal clear on the evidence of leadership ineptitude, institutional collapse and economic stagnation. Can we continue to pretend that all is well and to let the nation drift blissfully into disintegration? As some would insist, must we shut up and play the ostrich to the world when our posterior is so shamelessly exposed? Or must civil society rise to the challenge as the nation’s leadership consistently flounder and demonstrate abysmal ineptitude?

The serious worry today is our incapacity or rather our unwillingness to humble ourselves and come to terms with our situation. Yet we must confront the truth of the Nigerian condition. Given the fundamentals of Nigeria’s endowment it will be tragic and unacceptable to continue to look beyond its borders at the (mis)fortunes of some nondescript and decrepit third world nations as comparative evidence to rationalize the level of our national well-being. If we care to be realistic, the statistical evidence and empirical development indices are there to show that Nigeria has been overtaken and outpaced by nations with which she started the development race only a few decades back. Civil society must therefore heed the wake up call now, if there must begin a process of emancipation from a blighted future to which unborn generations seem to be condemned.

Over the years Nigeria has been assailed by a basketful of social, political and economic difficulties and heavily infected with self inflicted injuries of deep national consequence. These range from the abuses, the neglect, the imbalances and loss of focus in the economic terrain, in our constitution-making, in government related contracts, in the provision of social facilities, in our floundering education system in the operation of our judicial system, in the implementation of statutory laws such as taxation, in the operational institutions of government at the national state and local levels and in our other democratic structures; they include our dilapidated transport system, the state of our health care delivery, the handling of our petroleum and power industries, our political evolution, the electoral process, a national census and citizens identification exercise, the implementation of policies, the establishment of investigation panels and release of reports, the state of our environment, the cultivation of a maintenance culture, the operations of our entire security system, the standards of civic rights and responsibilities, the state of tourism development, the subtle discrimination on the basis of gender, religion and culture, and generally keeping faith with development policies and public accountability.

Which ever way you turn Nigerians are nearly too willing to work at cross purposes against the common good. Spreading malevolently over the Nigerian landscape in the corrosive evil of corruption, the acid touch that consumes the core of our national morality. To the extent that it almost literally drives this nation, the demon of corruption is taken for granted and comfortably domesticated by the leadership.  Anyone stupid enough to be exposed is greeted not with “Why did you do it?” but “Why did you get caught?” Nigerians can hardly meet the challenge of singling out any high profile citizens brought to book for corrupt enrichment, notwithstanding the hollow claim that the country is effectively under the rule of law. Rather it appears that corruption is celebrated and adored.

The Nigerian civil society, made up of labour organisations, religious groups, the press, students unions, civil rights and pro-democracy groups, etc, cannot afford to fold its hands, sit idly, or watch as it were helplessly, while a few professional politicians mortgage our common patrimony, destroy our commonweal, and render desolate our national landscape. The greed of many of these professional politicians often rides in tandem with their lust for power. Over time they have demonstrated that they are not genuine democrats, honourable statesmen or true patriots, but neo-feudalists, contract chasers, callous mercenaries and prostitutes of power. So we cannot leave our fate and fortune in the hands of such people. Indeed the exigencies of the times demand that all hands must be on deck and that all serious-minded groups and individuals of talent and vision must be passionately engaged in the project of national reconstruction which in my view demands first of all an ethical revolution or a process of moral regeneration. If the nation's leadership is not about to champion this cause, then civil society must be prepared to take it on.

What has ruined this country - if we must confront the truth courageously - is the cumulative effect of the corruption, the indiscipline, the injustices, the economic exploitation and the political manipulation perpetrated by Nigerians of all geographical, ethnic and religious extractions. It is true that there are contradictions, flaws and injustices in the very structures of the country that need to be addressed at a national conference or through a major constitutional review process. Nevertheless, the negative input of many individual Nigerians from North and South, and from East and West, especially the monumental fraud, the greed and graft, and the politics of bitterness and acrimony, which we have witnessed at the hands of successive leaders at all levels, have been a major factor in the failure of the Nigerian state, and there is no amount of restructuring that will resuscitate ailing Nigeria, if these deadly viruses are not identified and expelled from the polity.     

Notwithstanding the bleak national scenario, Nigerians have obvious choices to make. We can continue to bemoan our fate or we can resolve to re-possess our land from the band of renegades holding pretensions to leadership at various levels. The latter choice is a daunting task because no colonizer, foreign or home grown, ever gives up the hold on power voluntarily or easily.

Properly channeled, there is so much that is positive about this country and its peoples. Nigerians are highly knowledgeable, energetic, resourceful, innovative industrious and enterprising. Civil society must begin to instill discipline in harnessing these positive attributes that Nigerians possess in abundance. There are millions of Nigerians in diaspora offering value to social and economic development in other lands. Part of the problem with us is our inability to hold attention for long on any single national issue or to follow its course to its logical conclusion. This has often allowed room to dubious leaders to take advantage of the citizenry.

In sustaining the vision for promoting and entrenching democratic principles in Nigeria, civil society must begin to inject discipline, focus and commitment in preparing for the many engagements in national affairs it plans to address. No initiative is likely to succeed without civil society being positively predisposed to the basic national ideals of unity, self-reliance, economic well-being, justice, egalitarianism and freedom in democracy. These ideals must remain permanently in the front burner of civil society. Their articulation by visionary elements in civil society must remain an unrelenting crusade for they will come under the subtle frustration by greedy and selfish interest groups out to override the common good with their private agendas.

Civil society must develop a cohesive network for the incremental engagement of the nation's leadership on national issues, drawing on the sectoral specialisation of citizens across the country to educate and lead the masses. This cohesion a rogue leadership will continually attempt to neutralize by throwing wedges of discord and disunity among interest groups in civil society, and all stakeholders must be wary of this. The rampant formation of NGOs for the ulterior motive of cornering foreign funds cannot be part of this networking. The issues of impropriety in governance for example, whether in relation to electoral or constitutional manipulation, corrupt financial dealings in the Assemblies or such exploits as the celebrated Anambra state gubernatorial debacle, can be appropriately tackled by the legal class acting as the arrowhead of civil society action, closely supported by an alert and committed press. Properly organised, civil society can coordinate picketing action to highlight public disaffection on social issues and policies, engaging simultaneously such groups as in organised labour, market women, students, okada riders, etc. Civil society groups must work assiduously to form and strengthen coalitions to mount pressure on leadership that pay lip service to good governance and development. In the same vein, civil society must stand ready to employ the same networking process to enlighten and to support, encourage and promote public policies that offer positive benefits for the people, without necessarily becoming tools for manipulation.

It may be paradoxically instructive that even in today's national lament we are adjudged to be the happiest people on earth, although cynics would say that indeed Nigeria's masses are all of the SS blood group - suffering and smiling. Let's not trivialise the 'happy' assessment. We must allow that there is something in our being the happiest people in spite of our country being classified as about the most corrupt nation on earth. How much happier can we then be if we put our act together and get it right with our governance and development. We would indeed be smiling all the way to true happiness.

We must all realise that it is only by sustaining democratic ideals through good governance that we can reduce poverty in the land and thereby enhance all round development and well-being. Good governance is an irreducible precondition for national stability and peace. Genuine freedom, peace and happiness will come when our leaders do not foist their corrupted wisdom on us but truly lead the society.

August 2003