TheNiche Lecture: Why Does Nigeria Stride And Slide?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

On Thursday, October 26, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, NIIA, Nigeria’s foremost think-tank on foreign affairs, will host the 2023 edition of TheNiche Annual Lecture spearheaded by the TheNiche Foundation for Development Journalism.

The lecture series, TheNiche’s annual corporate social responsibility initiative, is aimed at fostering the much-needed but ever-elusive national renaissance. Nigeria is at a crossroads, no doubt, teetering on the brink, facing the abyss. And this is not about being a prophet of doom. All the indices of human development, without any exception, are not only pointing south but are getting worse by the day. 

As disastrous as the eight years of the Muhammadu Buhari administration is, Nigerians are, sadly, beginning to compare between the “Next Level” administration and “Renewed Hope” of President Bola Tinubu. And the verdict is simple: While most nations stride and move to greater heights, Nigeria strides and slips – motion, no movement. So, why does Nigeria stride and slide?

That is the theme of the 2023 lecture to be delivered by Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, erstwhile Minister of Transportation. The decision to saddle him with that onerous task was deliberate. Though relatively young at 58 years, Amaechi, to borrow a cliché, knows where all the bodies are buried in this Fourth Republic by virtue of the positions of trust he has held since 1999.

A two-term Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly, he also became a two-term governor of the oil-rich state, and was twice the Director-General of the Buhari Campaign Organisation and in 2015, having successfully helped Buhari to Aso Rock after three failed attempts, he was appointed Minister of Transportation. He also aspired for the country’s political diadem – presidency – in 2023 and lost the All Progressives Congress, APC, ticket to Tinubu.

As Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly, he contested and was elected chairman of Nigeria’s Conference of Speakers of State Assemblies. As governor, he was also elected chairman of the highly influential Nigeria Governors Forum, NGF. But his political life didn’t start in the Fourth Republic. Transiting to the ill-fated Third Republic, Amaechi was secretary of the National Republican Convention, NRC, in Ikwerre Local Government. Between 1992 and 1994, he was special assistant to the then deputy governor of Rivers State, Peter Odili, and in 1996, he was secretary of the Democratic Party of Nigeria, DPN, caretaker committee in Rivers.

Understandably, there are some murmurings by people who question the propriety of Amaechi’s choice as guest speaker. Luckily those who are eagerly waiting to hear what he has to say outnumber the worrywarts. But because we also acknowledge the fact that Nigeria didn’t start striding and sliding in 1999, the lecture will be chaired by Dr. Uma Eleazu, chairman of the Board of Trustees of Anya-Ndi-Igbo, a non-partisan, socio-political and economic development-oriented organisation, committed to equity, peace, unity, justice and progress of Nigeria.

At 93 years, Elder Eleazu, no doubt among the last of a vanishing breed, has seen it all. He has been a teacher, consultant, writer and commentator on public affairs. Prodigious in his writings, his magnum opus, Nigeria, As I See It: Reflections on the Challenge of Leadership, a 418-page book is a most authoritative commentary on Nigeria. He was doing his Ph.D. in Public Administration at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, when the civil war started. 

In an exclusive interview I had with him on June 17, 2021, a day after he marked his 91st birthday, he told me of his regrets not being around to defend his homeland – a Biafra – as most of his age mates did. But when he eventually came back, there was no dull moment. He told the story of his one and only encounter with the then Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed, at Dodan Barracks in Lagos. “Two weeks after, he was assassinated,” he recollected.

Dr. Eleazu set up the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, NIPSS, Kuru, served in the 1978 Constitution Drafting Committee, CDC, set up by General Olusegun Obasanjo to midwife the 1979 Constitution and was also a member of the Constituent Assembly. “Literally, I wrote the section on the Executive in the 1979 Constitution except the bit under the Directive Principles which Prof. Ben Nwabueze wrote almost single-handedly,” he said.                           

He was also invited by General Abdulsalami Abubakar to be part of the Constitutional Debate Coordinating Committee that supposedly midwifed the 1999 Constitution but regrets that Abdulsalami used Justice Nikki Tobi and Prof. Auwalu Yadudu to defraud Nigerians in the process. When General Ibrahim Babangida started his ill-fated transition programme, Dr. Eleazu threw his hat in the presidential ring having also been in the team that wrote the original Social Democratic Party, SDP, manifesto from which he developed his own personal manifesto.

But he got his fingers badly burnt. “They use all kinds of underhand means, including devilish means to ensure that the good candidates don’t emerge. In Jos, Babagana Kingibe was giving N25,000 per delegate and MKO Abiola topped it to N30,000. As a student of politics, I wanted to see what was actually going on and money was moving from hotel to hotel. Abiola was giving N30,000 per delegate and there were over 3,000 delegates in Jos. So, you can imagine the amount of money he spent and, of course, he won. I was so sad,” he said.

Just as we did last year when former Lagos State governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, was the guest speaker and 96-year-old Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, former Liaison Officer to President Shehu Shagari and founding member of the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, was the chairman, and members of the audience ended up with double ration of the intellectual banquet, Dr. Eleazu will fill in the gaps, if any, in Amaechi’s offering. At 93, he is too alert, remembering things that happened decades ago as if they happened yesterday. He is simply a walking encyclopedia.

But besides the guest speaker and chairman, there is also a five-man panel of discussants that includes Senator Shehu Sani, a human rights activist and leading figure in the struggle for the restoration of democracy in Nigeria. The last time we met was at the 2012 Chinua Achebe Colloquium on Africa at the Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.

The literary prodigy, who was then a professor of Africana studies at the Ivy League university, had just written his personal account of the civil war, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, which did not sit well with a section of the country. Fashola, as Lagos governor, attended the colloquium just to issue a rebuttal of the issues Achebe raised in the book, considered one of the defining works of modern African non-fiction.

That year’s colloquium, titled “Governance, Security and Peace in Africa,” which focused on several key issues that defined and continue to define political and economic developments in Africa and the world was Achebe’s last having died the following year on March 21, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts. Senator Sani and I had a robust discussion at the Perry and Marty Granoff Centre for the Creative Arts, venue of the colloquium. He still remembers. Unfortunately, 11 years after, nothing has changed. We are still striding and sliding. It worries him. We also have the redoubtable Dr. Chidi Amuta, scholar, author and journalist. When it comes to intellectual and literary criticism, he takes no prisoners.

He is excited to be on the panel and so is Mr. Yakubu Mohammed, a pillar of Nigeria’s print media who left indelible marks at the New Nigerian and National Concord newspapers, and the Newswatch magazine which he co-founded in 1984. At 73, he has also seen it all and knows what the issues are. And lest I forget, Mohammed is also a politician.

Then we have Mr. Valentine Ozigbo, politician and business executive, immediate past President and Chief Executive Officer of Transnational Corporation of Nigeria Plc and PDP candidate in the November 6, 2021 Anambra State governorship election and Anike-ade Funke Treasure, a broadcast journalist, certified media trainer, speech and leadership coach, who was the first female journalist to manage an all-news radio station in the Radio Nigeria Network and indeed the Nigerian broadcast industry. It promises to be a great national dialogue. The idea is to have a variegated panoply of opinions that will shed light on why Nigeria continues to stride and slide.

*Amaechi is the publisher of  TheNiche