Let The 2015 Polity Be On Issue-Based And Not On Elite Power Struggle… It was Matthew Hassan Kukah in his book ‘Democracy and Civil Society in Nigeria’, who argued that development must be anchored on human development…because the people must be the chief beneficiaries since leadership are holding forth for them… For weeks, the issue of ‘rebel and loyal’ PDP governors have become the major issue that kept dominating our air waves…the noise is too much about reconciliation that is still far from reality. The President has literally shelved pressing national issues to this mirage…many governors too have also abundant their states and now governed states from Abuja… In the whole brouhaha, the power struggle is not about fixing the economy, education and health sectors. It is also not about addressing insecurity and myriads challenges we are facing as a people… Let their feud hinge on how to sincerely serve the people of Nigeria, and not politics of what individuals stand to benefit. It is clearly case of prebendal politics as advanced by Richard Anthony Joseph in 1983. According to the scholar, prebendalism is the disbursing of public offices and state rents to one’s ethnic-based clients, and is inherently rooted in state corruption. The concept was applied specifically to the context of Nigerian politics. It is an extreme form of clientelism where state resources are corruptly allocated in order to mobilize cultural and political identities. It is an established pattern of political behavior that justifies pursuit of and use of public office for personal benefit of the officeholder and his clients. Under prebendalism the position in public office becomes secondary to personal pursuits. As with clientelism, the officeholder’s clients comprise a set of elites to which he is linked, typically by ethnic or religious ties. The ethnic and religious ties are a key element of the concept and demonstrate its application to Nigeria, a country marked by over 250 different languages and cultures, and where religions are generally divided between majority Muslims and Christians. Joseph had further argued that, there are two sides to prebendalism: that of the officeholder and that of the client. The client provides support to the official, and in return the client holds expectations from the officeholder in a relationship which perpetuates the system. This system of patron-client relationships has deepened sectional cleavages and eroded resources of the state in Nigeria by discouraging genuinely productive activity in the economy and expanding the class of individuals who live off state patronage. This system of prebendalism is arguably one of the main causes for corruption in our country. Let the people decide.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 06:05:23 +0000
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