By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
“She said he made love to her like an intellectual. In the political jargon of those days, the word ‘intellectual’ was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 6 (1978)
*Soludo
Months before assuming office, Governor-Elect of Anambra State, Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has done a world of service to perceptions of south-east Nigeria and traditional ideas of politics in the region.
At the end of a year in which news
about south-east Nigeria was defined by the economic self-immolation of chronic
#SitAtHome enforced with deadly violence by armed non-state actors;
state-sponsored violence masterminded in some cases by governors in the region;
widespread taunts of collective irrelevance; not to mention popular tropes of
victimhood, Soludo transformed all that negativity in a stroke with the
announcement of his transition committee (ANSG-TC).
Now that the ANSG-TC has been inaugurated, its first task is to
help him calibrate expectations. Here’s why and a peek into how.
For
someone whose sojourn in the surreal world of Nigerian politics has been
chastening to the point of brutal, Soludo’s first step as Governor-Elect showed
an audacious understanding of both subliminalism and symbolism in power. His
Transition Committee, comprised of 80 persons, has received mostly positive
reviews for its “novel inclusiveness in terms of gender, geography and
competencies of the members.” But its composition was clearly also designed to project
a message beyond the borders of Anambra State of constructive identity-building
and harnessing of human capacity for the one region in Nigeria characterized by
net export of its best human assets.
Soludo’s implicit message with the composition of his transition
committee is three-fold. First, is a constructive disposition that aims to
project hope. Second, he clearly projects the message that the destinies of
Nd’Igbo are joined inextricably and the job of rebuilding that requires all
capable hands on deck. Third, he reassures anyone interested that Nd’Igbo have
among them the calibre of hands needed to get that job done.
Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, famously said of successful
runs for office that “you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose”. Soludo’s
campaign or what there was of it, regrettably, had no room for such luxuries
and his tenure may require more artisanal than artistry. His emergence is a
tribute to the iron will of Ndi Anambra, who saw off the best efforts of a
malevolent political family to render the state hopelessly ante-diluvian. His
run for office was forged in blood and his tenure, when it begins on March 17,
2022, will be defined by an in-tray full of crises that defy the constitutional
capacities of any governor in Nigeria.
After a career at the highest levels of academia and technocracy
outside Anambra and beyond Nigeria, Soludo the state governor will confront
rather profound challenges at the retail end of life-and-death significance.
One
is insecurity. It is the first order of business. Anambra, the smallest state
in south-east Nigeria and the second smallest in Nigeria after Lagos, is
nevertheless the epicentre of Igbo enterprise economy, which has been blighted
by viral insecurity since the Supreme Court contrived to topple the legitimate
governor elected by a neighbouring state and imposed on them the man who came a
distant fourth in the ballot. In official Nigerian lore, security is guaranteed
only by AK-47s and Tucano Jets. Such hardware and human assets for their legitimate
deployment are constitutionally controlled, however, by an indifferent or
incapable Federal Government. Standing down the democratization of violence in
a state the size and density of Anambra will require skill, imagination and
nous that cannot be found in the barrel of a rifle.
For this task, Ndi Anambra have chosen to invest trust in a man
whose surname translates into “follow (the path of) peace”.
Second, is a crisis of human ecology. Lagos may be the smallest
state in Nigeria but it is gaining landmass through land reclamation. What used
to be Bar-Beach on the Atlantic coastline, for instance, is today a
multi-billion dollar development known as Eko Atlantic City. By contrast,
Anambra is losing land to arguably Nigeria’s most rampant crisis of erosion and
human survival with over 900 active erosion sites. Entire villages in places
like Nanka have vanished, swallowed by an angry earth, the inhabitants
displaced eternally never to return. The Ecological Fund, a federal facility
for these kinds of situations, has been dissipated by a tradition of grasping
malfeasance.
Reimagining human settlement to precede the deployment of Soludo’s
vision of a “One-City Mega-State” will require the skills of a brain surgeon to
stop further loss of territory first.
Third,
is a crisis of energy. If Anambra is to realise the promise of powering up
enterprise within its territory and in adjacent states of southeast Nigeria, it
will need energy on a scale that is presently absent. States can invest in
generating power but transmission not generation is the heart of Nigeria’s
energy incapacities. Here the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), a federal
entity, has proved adept in ineptitude.
Evacuating power and getting it to the homes of the people and
factories in the Nnewi-Idemili corridor will be a challenge. It will not be
enough to sell people the promise of solar energy. Apart from being beyond the
reach of most, the factories in Nnewi will not power up their production and
operability margins on solar.
Quite clearly, Soludo’s first step(s) as Governor-Elect appear to
have inspired stratospheric hopes in Ndi Anambra and Nd’Igbo generally. In the
state and on social media, the new slogan is #SoludoIsComing. That is not a bad
thing. He is clearly a man whose every career platform has been defined by
audacity.
An academic of considerable distinction, a serial ideas-preneur
and a professor of economics since he was 38, Soludo is also the youngest ever
Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN).
As the Chief Economic Adviser to President Obasanjo before becoming CBN
Governor, he was the architect of the National Economic Empowerment and
Development Strategy (NEEDS), which drove Nigeria’s economy through its most
promising growth spurt in the past four decades.
As CBN Governor, he engineered an ambitious consolidation of
Nigeria’s banking landscape, which “led to a remarkable reduction in the number
of banks from 89 to 24 in 2005; changed their mode of operations and their
contributions to the nation’s economic development.”
He has seen off murderous political hounds in one of the bloodiest elections in
Nigeria’s history.
These
credentials inform the hopes of Ndi Anambra in the fruitfulness of Soludo’s
history of leadership audacity.
Soludo is clearly impatient with the fate of a region that prides itself in the
stagnation of cartographic identities that are not potable. The evidence is not
hard to see that growth and progress correlate quite positively with
portability of expertise and integration.
Lateef Jakande, a man from Omu-Aran in Kwara State, north-central
Nigeria and a contemporary of Alex Ekwueme and Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu in King’s
College Lagos, was also a Lagos boy who became unquestionably its most
celebrated governor.
In Kano, north-west Nigeria, Sabo Bakin Zuwo, a Nupe, with origins
in north-central Nigeria, was elected Governor in 1983.
In south-east Nigeria, by contrast, Igbo workers separated from
their historical origins by lines in the sand drawn by military adventurers
were made to die in penury after they were sacked for being so-called
non-indigenes of states in which some of them had worked for over three
decades.
Soludo clearly realizes that he will be navigating delicate
borders of territory and habits. He knows that insecurity in the Anambra-Imo
borderlands of Isseke, Lilu, Orsumoghu and Osumenyi or in Umunze in Orumba or
Amansea in the Anambra-Enugu borderlands, will not be fixed by Anambra State
unilaterally. He needs advocates in those states. He will not be able to
address any of these and more without a renewed public service. While focusing
on those, he must find ways to limit the traditional political profiteers to
minimal damage.
Keeping
all these in focus will require the skills of a contortionist. That’s why the
new government may wish to invest in managing expectations and in re-examining
the appeal of heuristic metrics like “First 100 Days.”
Addressing what will be his confounding in-tray on that first day
in office will require new partnerships with the people, communities, private
sector, the Diaspora and with internationals to overcome Nigerian-made
obstacles. It will also require new standards of ethics in government that
forge new bonds of trust to justify their investments. But because they are
new, they will be resisted by entrenched interests.
Soludo has made it seem sexy to be called an intellectual. If he’s
not a blow-out success, the same people who now adore him will be the first to
cavil at how intellectuals cannot even make love and only know how, in Nigerian
vernacular, to “speak grammar”. In his first steps, Soludo has shown he knows
his biggest job will be to instill that intangible, hope, in Nd’Igbo generally.
How to do that while keeping expectations from becoming disabling will define
his record and, possibly, his legacy.
*Odinkalu,
a lawyer and teacher, can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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