Old war, new enemy

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

G. K. Chesterton

Two reports in the last one week suggest a perspective that will make some sense in the manner the Buhari administration assesses the context of its challenges and opportunities. One reported the revelation by Vice President Osinbajo that many powerful elements of the Nigerian elite are discouraging the campaign against corruption. He said the administration will not be diverted from, or deterred from sustaining the fight, in spite of advice that it was taking up too much attention and energy, and dire warnings that corruption fights back dirty. The second report was a detailed crafting of an indictment of federal civil servants over their involvement in subverting the integrity of the 2016 budget proposals. The report suggested that many top civil servants may be punished for deliberately building into the budget proposals, items that will be milked by them in continuation of a tradition in the public service inherited from previous administrations.

These are of course, my summaries of the two significant reports. The observation by the Vice President that the anti-corruption war is being resisted by the elite through many devices may be interpreted as an attempt to rally more popular support in a class war that has a long history involving President Buhari at its head. Neither the attempt to cleanse the polity of corrupt public officers and their collaborators in the wider economy, nor the resistance of powerful and privilege Nigerians who live on corruption is new. The frontlines in this old war have never been clearly defined, and friends and enemies have changed sides at will on many occasions. Buhari had lost the earlier battles in his first outing when a fightback by powerful interests, cornered by his assault on rampant patronage and corruption, found an ally in a military leadership with its own narrow ambitions tucked under a liberalist posture to oust him.

The propaganda that followed Buhari’s tenure as military leader painted him as a high-handed ruler who had turned the nation into a huge prison for politicians and their allies. Ordinary folks were cast as sufferers who were forced to adopt unusual value systems and perform tasks intended to bring order and discipline into social life. The world was made to see a leader with no respect for the rule of law, democracy or economic policies that favoured international investor interests. The regime that overthrew him opened the prison gates to let out large numbers of politicians, and embarked on an adventurous journey into liberal macro-economic policies that altered the fundamentals of the Nigerian political economy.

By the time Buhari was freed, the civil-military coalition and their propaganda machine must have thought they had irretrievably destroyed his image and record. They were wrong. First, the path along which they re-launched the nation created a more conducive setting for systemic corruption and wider disparities in wealth and income between classes and regions. The nation made more money and the new leaders created more wealthy people. An emerging middle class was being severely squeezed. The size of the poor grew. The nation became more clearly polarized in economic teams. Then Nigerians began to yearn for some halt on run-away corruption and the increasing size of professional politicians who turned state power into a veritable and exclusive source of wealth.

Buhari’s re-entry into the political process gave many of Nigeria’s poor the hope that the nation could return to the era of a disciplined and honest leadership. His traducers saw writings on the wall and resisted him with all weapons at their disposal. The more he was frustrated away from leadership, the more many of the poor wanted him at the helm. An elite created and sustained on abuse of power and massive corruption failed to plan for the possibility that Buhari could return through the ballot until their nightmare was made real, courtesy of millions of voters who wanted him in power basically to settle their scores with corrupt and insensitive politicians and the privileged appendages they created.

President Buhari is a captive of an image created by his first outing and then polished by incredibly corrupt and incompetent leaders who have alienated the bulk of the poor and a disappearing middle class. His travails in the political sphere have hardened that image and today many Nigerians see his prime goal as fighting illegal wealth and privilege. That cluster which the poor believe Buhari can and must bring to its knees is much larger and more entrenched today than it was in the early to mid 1980s.

This is the elite Osinbajo warns the nation is fighting back. It is trite to mention that this is expected. Buhari has on his side his image, his promises and millions of the desperately poor and those precariously-balanced between a decent, honest living and poverty. He has state instruments to investigate and submit corrupt persons for persecution; to trace and retrieve stolen funds and plug loopholes and systemic leakages which feed corruption. Against these are a formidable army of legal luminaries versed in every art of frustrating the fight against corruption; a judiciary whose commitment to the fight against corruption is at best questionable; sections of the media that will cast doubt and aspersions on the anti-corruption war when they smell blood; and a host of other governance priorities that will beg for attention and political will to be addressed.

Not every call for a careful management of the fight against corruption needs to be treated with suspicion or classified as a resistance antic. President Buhari needs to manage expectations over the results of the fight against corruption. The nation is not about to emerge out of the gutter of corruption next year. Trillions in Naira are not likely to be retrieved or discovered and ploughed into rebuilding basic infrastructure and social welfare in the next few months. Institutional reforms that will drastically reduce abuse and inefficiencies will take a while to push through. Power and wealth will exhaust the entire gamut of the institutions available in a regime committed to rule of law to frustrate or escape from penalties. Nigerians could lose patience over failures to fix basic areas of social need, and public opinion could be engineered to blame it all on the time, attention and resources being devoted to the fight against corruption.

It is also important for the administration to decide which fights to pick and who represents the enemy. The appearance of attempts to visit the problems being highlighted in the 2016 budget proposals on civil servants is a good case in confusing friends with enemies. Clearly, there are many issues that could have been better handled in the preparations of the budget proposal. Civil servants have a major role in many stages of the preparations, but the political level has the responsibility for what is finally presented to the national assembly. If indeed there is evidence that some civil servants attempted to defraud the public through the budget proposals, they should be processed and punished by the rules of the service and laws of the land. If, however, there are grounds for reviewing the entire process and identifying lapses at all levels, this exercise should be undertaken without damaging a key institution the administration needs in its fight against corruption and waste.