By Chima Christian
It is good to criticise poor governance. But we must do so in a manner that empowers the citizens, not the other way round. Even as we flog government actors silly for their poor choices – and we seem to have many of those poor choices lately – we must equally do same to citizens who abdicate their responsibilities of co-creating the society.
If not, we suffer the risk of creating victims out of our citizens. I am afraid that we might have done that already. Today, majority of the Nigerian public perceive themselves as innocent bystanders, while government actors are the armed aggressors. This is a popular but a dangerously misleading viewpoint.
When individuals begin to perceive themselves as victims of poor governance, the collateral damage is that thy feel disempowered and hopeless. This ultimately leads to a situation where they do not believe that they have the ability or agency to create change. In such circumstances, the capacity for collective action and political reform becomes significantly diminished.
That is why we, at Africa’s Morning Centre For Public Policy and Good Governance, and Boqer School of Government, insist that citizens in any given society retain the full agency to determine their outcomes, both at an individual and at a collective level.
Even the Constitution of Nigeria that we always accuse of being defective clearly states in Section 14(2a) that “sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom the government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority;”
So the constitution clearly guarantees the citizens that sovereignty. But the citizens must assert themselves. At a cost of course!
We should do away with all the excuses we make for our people’s irresponsibility. All our excuses – poverty, suppressive governments, and all – are the exact conditions that catalyse citizens to mobilise and take back their country.
But we have successfully created a bunch of selfish and individualistic citizens with an outsized victimhood mentality. The damage is there for us all to see. It is daunting but we all – including the talking heads on the TV, the influencers, the media – will have to roll back the disadvantages by clearly distributing governance responsibilities.
It should be clear; government actors have the responsibility of supplying good governance. The masses have a role of demanding good governance. Without the citizens fulfilling their own part of persistently demanding, we might as well forget the government actors fulfilling their own part. Anywhere you see bad governance thriving, it is a tag-team effort of the citizens and the government they either chose or allowed.
Is it not about 500 lawyers or so who were reported to have taken a protest to the Supreme Court demanding that Yahaya Bello should not be prosecuted for his alleged crimes? If you ask these lawyers to come out and protest bad governance – the very conditions that made it rife for their protests to be brought at a ridiculously pitiable amount – they will tell you that they are too poor to protest or that the government will kill them.
If you tell the youths to mobilise, they’ll tell you that they will be imprisoned. But they will happily go to transit countries where they will be imprisoned for attempting to escape into other countries that do not want them. So Nigerian youths, what is the difference between being imprisoned in Nigeria for demanding change and being imprisoned in those transit African countries while attempting migrationbat all costs? Do we not see that prison term is an inescapable part of the equation? Why can’t Nigerian youths use our prison terms for good as we recently saw in Senegal?
Citizens always point at the risk of being kidnapped or killed by the government as the reason why they don’t deploy the their full agency to demand change. But they have happily surrendered and even pay ransom to non-state kidnappers who have practically taken over our villages and highways.
The very people who we say are too poor or too afraid to protest, are the very ones dying daily either in the hands of poverty, insecurity, lack of emergency care services or other manifestations of bad governance. So, how far with our poor selfish attempts at preserving our own lives? The Master is right, “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.”
Nigerians are not victims of Nigeria. We are the architects of Nigeria. With this knowledge, we can now rise to take back our country. We are well able to do that.
Africa’s morning is at hand.
Chima Christian is the Executive Director of Africa’s Morning Centre For Public Policy and Good Governance—a not-for-profit commited to addressing complex societal issues through actionable insights and strategic public policy recommendations.
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