May 29: Wasted years of civil rule – Punch

Just 16 years into the unbroken 60 years it had boasted that it would hang on to power, the curtain falls on the Peoples Democratic Party by midnight today, leaving behind a sad, dishevelled country. Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress will mount the saddle on Friday. An appraisal of this epoch (May 29, 1999 - May 28, 2015), from the prism of our 1999 Constitution, which enshrines that, 'the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government,' turns in one verdict: crass failure of governance.

Nigeria is in sharp decline. It is sinking under successive corrosive and corrupt administrations, insecurity and crumbling infrastructure. Nothing best evinces this fact than the current asphyxiating fuel scarcity and the abysmal dip in electricity supply. The authorities declared on Monday that 18 power generating companies were out of service as there was no gas supply to the thermal plants. Thus, only five plants are functioning, explaining the present 1,327 megawatts for 170 million people.

At the inception of the Fourth Republic, however, there was a riot of optimism. Such false hope was premised on the emergence of Olusegun Obasanjo as president. Many had believed that his prison nightmare, having been jailed by the brutal Sani Abacha regime, and his antecedents honed him well for the exalted office. Nigerians had craved accountability in governance, improved living conditions, renewal of decrepit infrastructure and strengthening of institutions for a national rebirth.

But instead of the expected regeneration, from Obasanjo (1999-2007) to Umaru Yar'Adua (2007-2010) and Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), the country slipped from bad to worse, and now at its worst. As president, Obasanjo behaved like an emperor, a fact underpinned by his interference in National Assembly affairs, deciding who became the President of the Senate; Speaker of House of Representatives; failure to appoint a petroleum minister for seven years; tolerance of an opaque and unaccountable Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation; and imposition of Yar'Adua as his successor and his deputy, Jonathan. It is not easy to forget the serial high-profile political assassinations, including the day-light killing of a sitting Justice Minister, Bola Ige, in December 2001, during Obasanjo's years of infamy.

Obasanjo's declaration in 2007 that '…this election is a do-or-die affair for (the) PDP,' poisoned our electoral space. That garrison DNA still remains in our electoral system. It is not surprising, therefore, that that poll was adjudged the worst electoral heist globally. And because electoral malfeasance serves as a short-cut to power and looting of public treasury, no concerted effort has been made by the authorities to implement the Muhammadu Uwais's well-thought-out report on Electoral Reforms.

As Barack Obama observed in 2009 during his first official trip to Africa as president of the United States, 'Development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient, which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long.' Dogged by policy paralysis, corruption and stalled economic growth under the PDP, no country on the continent epitomises this statement than Nigeria. Our roads, power, educational, security, energy and health infrastructure have become insignias of negligence or abuse of power. Yet, national revenue from oil since 1999 till date outweighs earnings from 1961 to 1998.

For instance, the average price of OPEC crude in 1961 was just $1.57 per barrel. In 1999, it was $17.44 per barrel; it rose to $69.04 per barrel in 2007 when our national journey to wilderness began with the Yar'Adua/Jonathan presidency. Save 2015, when it has averaged $50.3 per barrel, the Jonathan years, beginning from 2010 represent the era of the biggest oil boom. Take a look: $77.38 per barrel, $107.46 per barrel, $109.45 per barrel, $105.87 per barrel and $96.29 per barrel were the averages for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively.

For Jonathan, therefore, he never truly got on top of the problems he inherited, and his one year slot after the sudden death of Yar'Adua and the electoral victory in 2011 before losing the 2015 polls, are five years of lost economic opportunity. The PDP government sustained this criminally dubious fuel subsidy transactions for 16 years to oil its patronage network, degrading our four refineries to 10.4 per cent capacity utilisation after billions of dollars had been expended on crooked turnaround maintenance.

It reflects the utter irresponsibility of the Jonathan Presidency that, as it signs off, the syndicates behind the 2011 subsidy scam that involved N2.53 trillion still go unpunished. As the country failed to get it right in the downstream sector, so it was in the transport sector. Our road and rail infrastructure are in a total mess as Nigeria was placed 191th out of 192 countries surveyed in unsafe roads.

It is a cruel irony that a country that freed itself from debt overhang in 2005, paying as much as $18 billion to the Paris Club of creditors, during the Obasanjo presidency, with the current Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, also in charge of the finance portfolio, is again walking a debt (domestic and foreign) tight rope. Nigeria now has a debt burden of $63.5 billion for federal and state governments. This comprises $9.4 billion foreign, and $54 billion domestic. If the funds were deployed to service delivery, where then is the result?

We have never had it so bad in insecurity in the last 16 years, which climaxed in the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls of Chibok by Boko Haram Islamic fundamentalists on April 14, 2014. Some 219 of these maidens are still in captivity, despite renewed, but belated, efforts of the military to rescue them. The story would have been different had Jonathan demonstrated leadership and decisiveness when it mattered most, especially when Boko Haram captured vast swathes of Nigerian territory.

Questions would continue to cascade: why government at all levels failed in the past 16 years to create the environment for job creation; why graft has become an article of faith in governance; or progress elusive in the corruption trial of 10 ex-governors since 2007; why our national landscape is littered with abandoned projects and why public schools have collapsed, resulting in teaching without learning. These embarrassing posers find explanation in the report of Global Financial Integrity, a US-based group, which relied on World Bank and International Monetary Bank data, that a staggering $182 billion was stolen from Nigeria, and laundered offshore, between 2000 and 2009 - during this republic.

Nigeria has a precious chance to renew itself and a golden break to re-engineer its economy. But the question now is whether the APC, peopled substantially by the same, irredeemable caste of corrupt politicians that were predominant in the PDP, could change anything.

If he must govern for all, Buhari should not allow himself to be captured and caged by the rent-seeking politicians that wrecked Nigeria for 16 years. Globally, citizens no longer brook the orchestra of deception in public space. Nigerians must be ready to rise against incompetent, corrupt and self-serving leaders as the APC ship sets sail tomorrow.