Now that we have voted

Nigeria has in the past few months been caught in the throes of partisan political disputations. By God’s grace, that is about being concluded now and with it the shift of emphasis from political campaigning in favour of a re-energised focus on nation-building. It is also very important for our nation that the presidential elections did not only produce an acceptable winner, but that the loser has also accepted the fact of his defeat.


Now elections are good and as important as they can be. But they are only a means to an end. And it is that end that this correspondent would rather focus on at this time.


Along this line, two news items have attracted my attention, recently. One, the Army Chief confesses that the Boko Haram challenge had almost disgraced the armed forces before the latest determined push to roll back the tape and frontally confront the insurgents. And two, gun-totting OPC members took to the streets, asking for a halt to the card reader scheme and the sack of the INEC chairman, only days to the long-scheduled polls. To redress the first point, the military is being re-equipped. But the authorities must go beyond that to include equipping the police and reviving the practice of up-front and professional intelligence gathering and processing. We could also use the present situation to review our national security policy framework in such a way that all adults get to serve time and remain as reservists in the nation’s defence infrastructure as is the case in Singapore and Israel. The current Youth Service scheme can be the beginning.


Political actors must also be very clear headed in their security responsibilities. For them going forward, this must be more than having access to an innumerable company of escorts and approving and gobbling criminally insensitive security votes. Our long-term strategy for nation building must also, and most incontrovertibly, be one where all criminals, militias, and militants must be actively encouraged to demobilise and then functionally re-integrated into regular society. Granted that we have sadly put ourselves in a bull-in-a-china-shop situation today, they must however not be overly pampered, encouraged to be a permanent class of ex-militants, and of course, they must also not be manipulated to serve untoward political ends. It is not a decent and progressive leader that takes advantage of their brawn to further his political interests. No, you make them poorer in that way and the society you should be properly leading less secure


It is also time equally then to return all traditional state security activities (the currently most controversial, pipelines protection included) to the established security agencies, and to properly train and integrate serving and ex-militants that want to function in regular security agencies so they can have a chance of properly serving the nation in that arena provided they pass all the required tests and sign up to submit wholesomely to all of the laws of the land. But to leave them just hanging in there and continuing to make a living and profit contemptuously as permanent members of a dubiously acceptable ex-militants club is only disaster waiting to escalate.


Give me jobs, or…

There is also the jobs imperative. When President Goodluck Jonathan emerged winner of the 2011 polls, accompanied by the protests that greeted his emergence, notably from Northern Nigeria, I wrote a piece calling attention to the crying need for the administration to properly interpret that expression of angst and resentment. At the surface, it was ethno-political, but underlying all of that was a deeper crisis of alienation that was being fed intravenuously by poverty and a sense of hopelessness. These were further being fuelled by a very poor educational base, lack of skills and consequently outrageously very high levels of unemployment and under-employment.


To be sure this was not just a Nigerian problem, but it was getting most acute here and leading to other problems. As a document from one of the sessions at the 2015 World Economic Forum outlines, the problem has since persisted: ‘populations have expanded exponentially, literally taking governments by surprise. Saudi Arabia has 70% of its people under 30 and half of that number under 20. Kuwait has 60% under 25. Nigeria has 75% of its 170 million population under 35. It gets worse; 40-50% of them are unemployed.’ This is a demographic time-bomb any day and it is one that any government ignores at its own peril. Mr. President-elect, you got your job cut out for you. Already.