This phrase was the end line for all elected and sworn in state governors and their deputies as well as the president of the country, Nigeria and his deputy. What God helps them to do as pronounced is to keep in truth and love to the spirit of the constitution they all swore to.
Beyond the rhetoric and pledges, it is time to sit up and face the job of governance and all the issues that add up.
This is how a nation is built and now is the time to confront the myriads of issues facing the country and move her to the next level as the president has so pronounced.
Few issues in Nigerian life have been as intransigent as tribe and nationhood. In every multi ethnic country such as this, race and tribe has presented the nation its greatest paradoxes, challenges, and opportunities, calling into question time and again the principle of equality on which it was founded.
But the victories of DEMOCRACY, however decisive they seemed at each time, did not bring the long-term parity that activists and policymakers hoped for. Bread-and-butter issues such as unemployment, substandard housing, inferior education, unsafe streets, escalating child poverty, and homelessness supplanted the right to vote, eat at a lunch counter, and attend unavailable schools. As new issues arose, appearing and intensifying in ways that fell beyond the scope of the legislation and social reforms, the old civil rights model—one that relied mostly on judicial and protest remedies—seemed less and less effective in dealing with them.
We all have made lasting contributions to the nation.
Twenty years of unbroken democratic rule has met national expectation that individuals and groups had the right to petition their government to right legal wrongs affecting them. In its wake there developed a broad base of constituent interest groups—women, the elderly, children’s rights advocates, the handicapped, homosexuals, environmentalists—that emphasize the rights of affected parties to be a critical part of the decisions affecting their interests.
Ironically, the emergence of those constituent groups, each with its own divergent interests, made it much more difficult to sustain the old civil rights coalition of members of labor, the faith communities, and sympathetic international organizations to advance the new issues of inequality, corruption and egocentric leaders.
The Nigerian citizenry is also divided over whether the unfinished issues of religion and ethnicity agenda has its origins in the class of leaders, and even whether government reforms such as affirmative action should address the lingering problems. The compelling evidence of progress found in the burgeoning big men class helps explain why opponents of a class based agenda feel the way they do. We all should have a right to the basic things of life. Meanwhile poverty in a large and intractable underclass of Nigerians reaches deep into inner cities and rural communities nationwide and decisively constricts the life chances for affected parties, particularly children.
Two issues remain on the front burner if this government is to succeed in her second term at all. The first is addressing the persistence of racial disparities. The second is redefining the agenda to fix the major amenities that affects all and not all rhetorics of “we are fighting corruption”.
Inequality persists in income, education, health, housing, technology access, and safe communities. The media increasingly report on racial profiling particularly of the “ruling” Fulanis in what has come to be euphemistically referred to as “fulanisation” in the denial of equal access to space, appointment and in disparities in arrests and sentencing in the criminal justice system.
Many still view government intervention as the most effective means to provide economic succor to the people and eliminate disparities. Although others argue that the responsibility for solving these problems rests neither entirely with government, nor with the voluntary, private, sector, but with a coalition of government, civil society, business, and individual initiatives. They see an invigorated role also for faith-based groups, particularly those making a lot from the people and still cheating the people through high cost of service, and also a stronger role for industry in hiring and training the most indigent and least prepared.
The issue today is how to develop flexible remedies for extreme poverty, the nation’s changing diversity, and environmental needs.
One way is to rebuild the voluntary sector that was for a time supplanted by the faith based organizations and youth groups.
The time to reinvent and restrategise is now by developing cross-cultural alliances and partnerships based on technical competence as much as on common goals; build public and private resource bases; and navigate the bureaucratic governmental maze for funding. The need to train a new generation of young leaders to succeed the present tiring hands is now. The skills they bring to the job include expertise in planning, finance, technology, and government.
There is need to design programs that are appropriate for the complex, multi-layered issues inherent in our nation and how to garner the resources to rebuild decaying infrastructures and overhaul human services to make them more efficient and less costly, even while pushing constituents to practice self-sufficiency.
As the next level begins, may we arise as compatriots and obey the call for development.
So help US God.
Ayo Ologun is a broadcast journalist, a social commentator and he writes from Osogbo.
