Pat Utomi

These times are times of a patriot’s nightmare in Nigeria. Conduct is zero-sum. From extreme ends, the pressure is high to smother intelligent public conversation and typecast those who dare to raise their voices. As citizenship behaviour retreats, you see threats to the promise of Nigeria. At the security level, it goes from gruesome murders by herdsmen, pipelines being blown up by militants, to the Boko Haram savaging of the North-East and kidnappings and armed robberies elsewhere. At the economic policy level, we see a worsening of the misery index as people cannot find fuel or jobs. And on the politics level, we witness gridlock and increasing polarisation. A true existential crisis looms for Nigeria. Yet, the intervention of statesmen is scant, and disruption to the path of progress, much. Nigeria has never more needed leadership in Thought Media that is socially responsible, Business Enterprise that creates jobs and wealth; and politicians that unite, from giving sacrificially of themselves; but reason remains embattled.

Travelling abroad at this time, I was intrigued by reporting of remarks I made more than a month ago at a Fellowship and the usual social media play on it. As one trained in journalism, I have often pointed to how strands of comments in what is a nuanced conversation gets pulled out to express a view a reporter desires and should write up in a column. But my concern is not so much living with attributions reported by a journalist from an agenda but worry that players at many levels seem not to be sensitive to the importance of the need to note that these times are perilous ones in which a zero-sum win-lose mindset can deepen crises already queuing up, to take away from the future we all desire for our children, peace and prosperity. But I am even more worried that we are in this zero-sum mindset failing to realise that progress is more likely from rational, quality conversation than from those who can raise the tone of this conversation and erect the public sphere being maligned into silence. The outcome of such fleeing from the public sphere and the marketplace of ideas is for me more likely to be regrets on how the times of Nazi Germany crept up on Europe. Had the public sphere been as should have been in Germany, the well-known remarks of the Rev. Martin Niemoller about keeping quiet when it came to others and there being no one to speak up when they came for him, the human race could have been spared the horrors of World War II. It is not an accident that one of the great philosophers of the idea of the public sphere as the heart of the democratic phenomenon and modernity is the contemporary German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas.

In a few lectures of recent, I have turned to Habermas to support the point made by the Nigerian academic in the US, Olufemi Taiwo, who used to be a socialist, that the problem of Africa and progress, is the need for modernity. Taiwo’s book, Africa Must be Modern, points to these issues which I believe Habermas analyses critically. Sadly, the use of social media, in which abuse and extreme views seem to be celebrated, takes away from the rational conversation Habermas talks about. On some platforms, if you supported the candidacy of the incumbent, you have forfeited the right to say we could do some things differently. If you opposed the incumbent, it is sour grapes. You would think the US Speaker, Paul Ryan, from the Nigerian perspective, would be crucified for declaring he was unable to support the presumptive candidate of his party, The Republican Party, Donald Trump. It should make sense that a person who has supported a candidate has more credibility in saying things could be different. But these dispositions of intolerance take away from serious issues we must build consensus on if the future is not to be as bleak as Trump is alleged to have said prescribe a recolonisation of Africa.

Our commonwealth is challenged, our dignity is threatened and our peace is confronted in the rolling civil war that characterises our current conditions as Robert Kaplan predicted in The Coming Anarchy. It would seem therefore that it is in the shared interest of all to move towards talking to how we change for good rather than creating conditions that further compound a bad situation. I can speak as one all over the world at activities that the world is mocking us. So, what kind of elite can be an object of global caricature and not move to work together to change things? As I write, the BBC is broadcasting the British PM David Cameron jesting in conversation with the Queen and The Archbishop of Canterbury that his guest at the Anti-Corruption Summit in London, our President, is from a fantastically corrupt country. Yet, we are not prosecuting the war on this thing that brings us such shame well because we cannot create the leadership to have shared values on the matter. Discussing such issues need to be premium matters on the public sphere we are undermining.

The mockery that has become the lot of Venezuela, who we seem to emulate in the policy choices we are making, could worsen the work we have cut out for us. Have just read remarks of a Johns Hopkins economist reducing the naira to junk status. Can we, in good conscience, have all of these matters to confront and allow the public sphere to atrophy? The stakes are high for Nigeria and the hope it holds for a generation of Africans that we cannot afford the petty power games that many around political authority positions are toying with. The work that needs to be done need to be apportioned to many.

Clearly of great importance in this hierarchy of players to pull us away from the brink and try to claim the Nigeria promise are the political parties. There has been much talk about the absence of internal democracies in our parties but the even more troubling fact is that the leadership of our parties have not done enough to build platforms for discussing choice issues, building worldview its members should subscribe to and inspiring thought leadership. I shiver to think that with the economy the way it is, our political parties are not having retreats, workshops and setting out position papers on different issues.

Also critical to the stature of the public sphere is the role of public intellectuals and the moral authority of men and women of learning. The Nigerian academic today may not quite command the moral authority that James MacGregor Burns ascribes to intellectuals in his seminal book, Leadership, which academics of the 1970s and 80s in Nigeria had more of, still the activist-intellectual is important for progress. They must be stimulants of the civil society which desperately needs to wake up. Then, there is the media. There are too many columnists but not enough media influence. Returning columnists, Ray Ekpu and Dan Agbese, will find that media influence is not as it used to be when they started out in the 1970s. Back then, when Gbolabo Ogunsanwo spoke, Nigeria listened. The bigger problem though is in the gatekeeping function and the training of reporters to better seek accuracy and not play on attribution as the soul of journalism to the detriment of sources in nuanced conversation but the king of them all is the enlightenment of the citizen.

I think the citizen has a duty, an obligation to be at the village square raising his voice. The mesh of those voices and the strong voices of the committed, for the voiceless, will assure that tomorrow is in the picture and the commonwealth is protected and not raped at the altar of the tragedy of the commons.

* Utomi, political economist and Professor of Entrepreneurship, is founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership