Last Monday, I was briefly “detained” by a group of Air Force
officers manning a checkpoint at the International Airport in Lagos. I
was in a “Lagos Metro” taxi, approaching the ramp that leads to the
airport’s departure level, when we encountered the checkpoint. The men
ordered the car to park and then proceeded to announce, in that uncouth
fashion we have come to associate with men in uniform in these parts,
that taxis were prohibited from going beyond that point. I would have to
alight and walk the rest of the way.
Of course, I wasn’t going to have any of it, and so I challenged
them. How does it even make sense to ban taxis from an airport? Not
finding it funny to be challenged by a bloody civilian, they promptly
informed me I would not be allowed to leave until their “Commandant”
showed up. At least, one of them gleefully announced that I would miss
my flight; that, I believe, was their primary goal. And since they had
guns, they could enforce whatever they wanted.
I tweeted my encounter, made a few calls. After close to an hour of
standing by the side of the road, a superior officer intervened – thanks
to a connected friend. It turned out that it was only the conventional
yellow taxis – the ones with horizontal black stripes – that had been
disallowed from approaching the airport, not the newer ones like the
Metro Taxis and the Red Cabs. The armed men didn’t know; someone had
armed them with guns and sand bags, forgotten to provide them complete
information, and then unleashed them to intimidate travellers and
drivers. All of this in daylight, just outside the busiest airport in
Africa’s largest economy. (Now imagine what’s happening in the more
obscure parts of the country!)
Let’s even accept for a moment that an airport ban on taxis is
justified (it’s not, of course; how do you, in the first place, even
justify the wisdom in banning taxis – possibly the commonest means of
airport transport – from an international airport? How does that even
make sense?). There was nothing to suggest that the decision had been
communicated to the taxi drivers. My taxi driver said he hadn’t heard;
as did at least one yellow cab driver who was asked to disembark his
passengers while I stood waiting by the side of the road. Surely, you’d
have assumed that whoever is behind the ridiculous decision would at
least have made the effort to communicate it to those it would affect.
But this is Nigeria, of course; it would no longer be Nigeria if things
were done properly.
This is merely one example of the way this country takes us for
granted. In my case, I was fortunate I could contact people who could
rescue me. I could easily have missed my flight, not because I had
broken any laws, but simply because a group of uniformed men were eager
to demonstrate the power of their guns.
There’s of course a larger issue at work here, that of government
responsiveness. A question we should always ask is this: What measures
have been instituted to provide citizens a way to seek redress in the
event of mis-treatment or nonchalance by the state or its proxies? And
how open are our governments to urgently and comprehensively addressing
matters that affect the lives and business of citizens. Imagine if,
instead of me having to make private phone calls, there was an official
number to call to complain to the authorities that my rights were being
violated in the name of the state. What if there had been a formal
channel of protest to counterbalance the irrational force of the Air
Force officers?
On that score of responsiveness, the outgoing administration
performed badly. You will know by now that this column is obsessed with
citing instances that demonstrate that nonchalance seemed to be one of
the cardinal principles of the Jonathan government. President Goodluck
Jonathan somehow never seemed to possess the capacity to be bothered by
anything that really mattered. Regarding the Lamido Sanusi allegations
against the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – my feeling is that
had the President taken seriously what started out as an internal
government finance matter seriously, the former Central Bank Governor
would have had no reason to escalate it in the damaging and embarrassing
manner that followed. Similarly, had the abduction of the Chibok girls
been treated seriously in the early days, it would not have hurt the
standing of the government as much. With the NLNG-NIMASA controversy in
the middle of 2013, it still baffles me how one government agency
(NIMASA) managed to undermine another in such a flagrant manner as to
cause it to lose – on behalf of Nigeria – more than half a billion
dollars in revenues, let alone in reputational capital; all of this
without a word from the President or his office. Also, look at the
outcry that greeted Senator-elect Stella Oduah’s BMW scandal, and
Interior Minister Abba Moro’s state-supervised murder of 15 job-seeking
Nigerians. In Oduah’s case, it took weeks for the President to take any
action; in Moro’s case, we’re still waiting.
In the months leading to the elections, there were several complaints
from foreign journalists of visa denials. I imagined this situation was
in part due to official anger and frustration with the sort of negative
coverage Nigeria has got in the last one year over the kidnapping of
the Chibok girls. But I also imagined that much of it was the effect of
Nigeria’s trademark bureaucratic dysfunction; for several months (from
late 2014 into 2015) Nigeria didn’t have a substantive Minister of
Information, whose responsibility it should have been to handle any
complaints relating to foreign journalists’ visas. The Minister of State
for Foreign Affairs, assigned to oversee Information, was running for
office (Deputy Governor) in Jigawa State, and I imagine was spending
most of his time campaigning, not attending to ministerial work. (It
wasn’t until the middle of February that the President assigned another
minister to again “oversee” the Information portfolio.
Then, there was the diplomatic incident involving Nigeria and
Morocco; Prof. Wole Soyinka has said that President Jonathan had no idea
Morocco had recalled its Ambassador to Nigeria until he (Soyinka)
mentioned it to him in a conversation days later. “He (Jonathan) was not
aware that for about five days the media had been absolutely hysterical
with this embarrassing situation between the two,” Soyinka told the
London Guardian a few weeks ago. “It was that very night that he made a
public statement about it for the first time.”
It now seems to me that the outgoing government’s greatest
achievement is this: It has written the most comprehensive “How Not To
Run A Country” manual in the democratic history of Nigeria. That manual
should now be studied “cover-to-cover” by the incoming Buhari-Osinbajo
administration. There has to be a strong effort to create channels of
communication and escalation for ordinary Nigerians, so that people can
feel like they matter to the government. The government needs to
demonstrate that it can put the well-being of its citizens over and
above that of misbehaving government officials. It should quickly
position itself as a government that listens to the wishes and
complaints of citizens, and that, unlike its nonchalant predecessor, it
can move mountains for the sake of an ordinary citizen. Nigeria is full
of aggrieved citizens — at home and abroad — and any government that
intends to succeed ought to make it a priority to attend to these
grievances and channel them into its policy response pipeline.
It won’t be a convenient stance to adopt, and Nigerians can be a
difficult lot to govern. But public service was never meant to be a
state-funded vacation; and anyone unable to put in the hard, often
thankless effort it demands should waste no time stepping aside and
finding something else to do.
– This Piece was written by Tolu Ogunlesi/Punch. Follow this writer on Twitter: @toluogunlesi
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