Two years ago, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said at a Daily Trust Dialogue session that problems continue to fester in this country with no solution in sight because of a lack of elite consensus on the issues. How do we get this consensus?
Ideally, a President or a state governor in Nigeria should have arrived at the high office with a comprehensive document outlining his or her understanding of the country’s or the state’s major problems as well as his plans to tackle them. Such programs are amenable to adjustment and elaboration; nobody ever entered the office of a governor or president without finding out that certain issues are slightly or very different from his earlier understanding of them.
It would have been even better if our political parties had clear, well-articulated and well publicized programs that identify key issues and programs and present their plans to tackle them. That makes it easier; when a person is a certain political party’s candidate, even without asking him or her, we have an idea what his ideological and policy orientation is. We now have a situation in Nigeria where neither the parties nor the major political actors have clearly identifiable programs or policy planks. We therefore lurch from one problem to another, from one policy line to another, often contradicting ourselves.
Right now, each federal ministry has a Planning, Research and Statistics Department responsible for compiling data, analyzing it and recommending policy options. How much of that they do in practice is another matter. Rather than being central in a ministry, civil servants often see PR&S department as relegation zone and they prefer posting to departments that are juicier. In any case, even if PR&S departments are functioning optimally, there are issues that transcend agencies and ministries. Some issues transcend tiers of government and require concerted action by two or all three tiers of government. There are also issues that transcend the country and will require active cooperation of neighbours, regional or even international bodies.
In the absence of party/key political actor programs, given the weakness of ministerial PR&S Departments and given the inability of National Assembly committees to generate serious policy options for the country, one possible way to engender elite consensus on key problems and issues is to have an official Think Tank.
This is not a new idea; it is seeking to revive an old idea. Of course in Europe and North America there are numerous Think Tanks, almost all of them privately owned, often with clear ideological orientation. The Brookings Institution, for example, is a liberal think tank while the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank. These institutions are heavily funded by private sources that share their ideological leaning. Their copious research efforts are utilized by elected officials who share their ideological orientation. We do have in Nigeria some public institutions such as NISER that undertake a similar function, however weakly, as well as some private institutions that also provide similar stuff.
During the Murtala-Obasanjo military administration of the 1970s, there was an official Think Tank attached to the Cabinet Office. I cannot remember who was its chairman or who its members were, except for our late uncle Alhaji Abubakar Koko. It was a part-time job because he was a permanent secretary in the old Sokoto State but he regularly travelled to attend meetings of the Think Tank, as we heard from his children. Its work was not publicized. It did not issue press statements; the public hardly knew what issues it discussed or what it recommended to the government. It was only much later that we got snippets about what it did from references in some books and interviews. The Federal Military Government referred to it major issues such as the electoral system to adopt, and it undertook studies by engaging Nigerians or even foreigners who had the most knowledge and experience in the issue at stake. Quietly.
President Buhari will know better because he was a member of the major ruling councils of that period, including the Federal Executive Council and the Supreme Military Council. Some of the top civil servants of that era are also around to explain exactly how the Think Tank system functioned. I think it is time that the Presidency inaugurates a similar Think Tank and immediately refers to it the pressing issue of Boko Haram insurgency.
Boko Haram is primarily a military and security issue but as we have all realized by now after 11 years of fitful success and setbacks, there are many dimensions to it. All of them must be brought together and neatly tied up in order to ensure a quicker and successful conclusion of this war. Some people are already talking about a US-Taliban style negotiation. Other people may table before the Think Tank a ruthless military option, such as defoliating the entire Sambisa Forest with Agent Orange, as American troops did in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Presidency, please assign kidnapping to this Think Tank for a thorough study. As we are now learning, technology has a way of solving problems and immediately creating new ones. From 1970 up until ten years ago, armed robbery was our biggest internal security headache. The coming of mobile phones, soon followed by debit cards, ATM machines and bank Interswitch greatly minimized armed robbery but it soon gave rise to kidnapping. This scourge will not be possible without mobile phones because there will be no way to contact family members and negotiate ransom payments. The Think Tank should provide actionable social, technological and security options.
Please refer to the Think Tank the matter of rural banditry, the fastest growing sector in Nigeria after kidnapping. Why is it that rural folks in Nigeria, who twenty short years ago were a hundred times more law abiding than urban folks and who practiced turning the other cheek, now invade fellow poor communities and kill people by the dozen, including women and children? Maybe a Think Tank will come up with an answer, after listening to all the people who are knowledgeable in the matter.
Refer to it also, farmers/herders’ clashes. Even though these deadly clashes, attacks and reprisal attacks have somewhat abetted in the past year, the underlying problems are still very much there and it could explode again in the near future. In 1980, the outgoing President of the Nigeria Economic Society [I think it was Professor Edozien] said in his farewell speech that “We have not decided what to do with our small farmers in this country. Should we mechanise them, commercialise them, collectivise them, turn them into cooperatives, or destroy them?” Forty years later, no one has answered this question. Please turn it over to the Think Tank, as well as the related problems of pastoralists and fishermen.
Maybe the Think Tank will provide a nationally actionable solution to the issue of almajirai and the related issue of 12 million out of school children. In the past week alone, two Northern state governments banned street begging and ordered the arrest of any child found begging. Apart from the lack of custodial facilities to keep millions of street children, I think they are also arresting the wrong party because the children’s parents and the clerics who brought them into the cities are roaming freely. Anyway, let us meet before the Think Tank and argue our different points of view.
Presidency, please refer the issue of corruption to the Think Tank, if and when you guys constitute it, because from all indications the current anti-corruption fight is not making much headway. Ask the Think Tank to ponder long and hard over our electoral problems, electricity sector, smuggling, public service reform, fake news and hate speech. With luck, we might get some very good answers from the Think Tank, if and when the Presidency constitutes it.
