Punch Occupying the spaces for reform JUNE 7, 2013 BY AYO OLUKOTUN ([email protected]) “America needs more than taxpayers, spectators and occasional voters. America needs full-time citizens” —George Bush, former US president The recent Democracy Day celebrations provided the opportunity for our leaders, campaign style, to make exaggerated claims about their achievements. Do they ever stop to ask that if their claims are true, then, why are we, the people, still complaining so heatedly about their lack of performance? A joke making the rounds in the social media has it that a high-ranking member of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet made the claim at a recently televised international conference held in Europe, that there had been substantial improvement in the electrical power situation in Nigeria. One of the aides of the state official worried about the possible backlash of making such a wildly inaccurate claim at an international forum, scribbled a note to the minister complaining about the possible effect on public opinion and the danger of being openly contradicted by Nigerians. The minister chuckled and wrote back to the aide, “Nothing to worry about; most Nigerians won’t have electricity to watch the programme.” Obviously, no matter what “marking scheme” or econometric models are used to advertise our so-called great strides or transformation, the swelling ranks of stranded humanity, vegetating on the margins of bare existence, know very well, where the shoe pinches. In other words, the task to reform Nigeria is too serious to be left to cynical politicians who regale one another with stories of how they outwitted the people with their bags of inexhaustible tricks. And this brings us to the people factor in reform or civic engagement. As the opening quote implies, alienation, apathy and switching-off the political arena are features of the advanced democracies as well. Oxford scholar, David Marquand, lamented a few years ago in an influential book, “The Decline of the Public: The Hollowing out of Citizenship”, how democracy has regressed because of greatly reduced participation in politics and the retreat of civil society in Britain. The causes and contexts of the erosion of social and civic capital obviously differ between the older democracies and struggling ones like Nigeria; but its consequences are even more severe in a developing democracy. The reason is simple. The state in the advanced democracies is hemmed in by institutional checks and balances which at least at the margins regulate predatory behaviour whereas in struggling democracies, institutions are weak or fictional and political warlords more or less do as they please. A variety of that same proposition is the capture of regulatory institutions by those they are supposed to regulate. Legislative oversight is perverted into cooptation and racketeering; for instance, the Nigerian Communications Commission acts often as the spokesperson for mobile telephone companies and whitewashes declining telecommunications services. Ordinarily, a transformation agenda ought to mean the building of institutions that can hold predatory rule in check and reduce the ravages of a criminalised state. But so far, there is no such thing in the offing. In this unhappy context, therefore, active citizenry must fill a crucial gap, through the exertion of its threefold auspices, namely, the performance of civic duties, electoral participation as well as political voice. Of course, there is a connection between state failure and eroding social capital or apathy from the simple example of citizens asking why they should pay tax if they are already doing for themselves those things that government ought to do for them; and in a situation where the treasury is up for grabs. In an informative write-up entitled, “Why Nigerians are Unwilling to Pay Tax”, The PUNCH columnist, Prof. Niyi Akinnaso (March 5, 2013), published the despairing narrative of one citizen who bristled, “I pay the Power Holding Company of Nigeria to keep me in the dark; I repair my car more frequently because I drive on bad roads every day. I pay to secure my life and for basic things like waste disposal and I have to drill a borehole to ensure I have water. Why should I pay tax if I already provide all the things I should pay tax for?” Here, we have a catch-22 situation in which pronounced governmental ineptitude breeds resentful withdrawal from a system that offers little or no dividends; which in turn deepens governmental dereliction, since withdrawal may mean that no questions are asked about how public money is spent. The problem is, of course, complicated by a bonanza mentality in public officials arising from the fact that most of our revenues come from oil viewed as nature’s bounty and not from taxes. This spending spree mindset is complemented on the part of the citizenry by a politics of entitlement, the proverbial share of the national cake; rather than a politics of responsibility, the obligations connoted by citizenship. The snag, however, is that no reform will occur so long as both state and society are locked in by a politics of irresponsibility that has no place for accountability of one to the other. How, then, can the cycle of impunity on the one hand and estrangement on the other be broken and our politics be regenerated? The concept of active citizenry which seeks to enlarge political agency by constantly interrogating officialdom, as well as occupying spaces for reform offer clues. At a Democracy Day workshop held last week on “Walking the Talk of Democracy” organised by Covenant University, Ota, to which this writer was invited as a lead discussant, several ideas were canvassed as to how citizens can seize the initiative in altering the routines of official brigandage. Kayode Soremekun, a Professor of International Relations and moderator of the talkshop, offered the example of how a letter to the editor complaining of an untarred road in his neighbourhood in Lagos State led to a call from the local government responsible for the dereliction and the eventual rectification of the problem. Of course, not all cases of abandonment are so happily and readily resolved; but the point is that citizens’ oversight and outspokenness are necessary prerequisites to ensuring that democracy dividends do not dry up before they trickle down to the common and not so common men and women. For example, our non-governmental organisations, moving over to evidence-based advocacy should by now be crosschecking the tons of claims made by Jonathan’s ministers as to what they achieved in the last two years. They need no other marking scheme than to verify whether the projects were carried out, and at what cost. In cases where further information is required, the Freedom of Information Act should come in handy. No doubt, the political voices of active citizens may sometimes include the name-and-shame games of putting the searchlight on corrupt deals, and thieving officials nonviolent demonstrations over promises and policies decaying in the pipelines; international embarrassment of cynical and greedy politicians; networks of deliberation and empowerment to canvass for change, among others. These examples are merely illustrative, but the point is that merely theorising about the woes of the system, complaining, praying unaided by action or ostentatious withdrawal will not avail. We must as good and active citizens urgently occupy the spaces for reform.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:08:28 +0000
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