It is unusual for our politicians to unanimously agree on anything. But here is what may surprise you. All the presidential candidates agree that our country is broken.
They agree too that the broken country can be fixed. After all, Nigeria is not an Agila pot or Humpty Dumpty. A broken Agila pot cannot be put back together, I tell you.
However, before we get carried away by the promises in the manifestoes, we need to urgently do one thing: interrogate each of them to see if they really know the extent of the brokenness of our country. I made this argument in my last column on this page last week based on the initiative of the Arewa Joint Committee’s dialogue with the presidential candidates on what each of them plans to do for Northern Nigeria, the least secure and the poorest part of the country today.
Politics, like history, repeats itself. The current struggle to succeed Buhari next year comes with the implication that in his more than seven years in the saddle, he has left undone what he should have done and done what he did not need to do and now our country appears to be gasping for breath. Each man is, therefore, seeking the mandate of the people to do a better job than Buhari. Funny but it is the way the political cookies crumble.
Obasanjo took on corruption. For the first time, fighting corruption moved from strident condemnations of what every Nigerian knows as the nation’s cankerworm, to the law courts with the enactment of the EFCC Act and the setting up of the commission to wage the anti-graft war. Sure, there were areas to fix, such as the rapidly deteriorating infrastructure reflected in the death traps called roads that were trapping people daily and reducing our national population.
The truth is that ours is a broken country. We are badly divided by our religions and tribes, the fault lines we have been running away from in attempts to build a nation where the contents of the citizen’s brains matter much more than his tribe or the deity he worships. We are progressing backwards right now. Buhari will leave the nation in a greater mess than he found it.
Our national security has been comprehensively compromised such that the Nigerian state quakes before bandits, kidnappers, Boko Haram, and sundry criminals. The nation is in a weaker position and the criminals are in a stronger position. Banditry, kidnapping, armed robbers, and insurgency are crimes under our laws. Bandits, kidnappers, armed robbers, and insurgents break the law, and it is the duty of the state to make them answer for their crimes. This is not the case.