By Hassan Gimba

This was first published on September 23, 2019. Considering the recent moves to return Nigeria to regionalism, I see the need to repeat it.

Since man became aware of himself and realised that whether by mutual arrangement or contrived by nature, there are always leaders and followers, communities fashioned out ways and means in which to live together under organised systems to regulate and conduct their affairs.

From primitive father figure leadership to the animalistic instinct of the strongest leading the flock, man has experimented with many ways in which to live in harmony with one another and with the larger community.

Since then, nations have tinkered with various forms, some of which developed into an absolute monarchy (absolutism), limited monarchy (constitutional monarchy), direct democracy and representative democracy. Others are dictatorship, oligarchy, totalitarianism and theocracy.

The presidential system of governance, on which we based our 1979 constitution, and first practised in governance that year, is modelled after the American system.

The presidential system is based on a tripod – the executive, legislature and judiciary, with the head of government, called the president, leading the executive branch. It is both a democratic and republican system of government with fixed tenures for elected officials.The presidential system of government is seen as democratic because the electorate directly elected the president and is, therefore, directly answerable to the people. There is also effective control by the president and also quick decision-making and execution of government policies.

Another advantage is the stability it offers because of the fixed term of office and where to locate responsibility for any acts of commission and omission.

While we can say it has such advantages, the presidential system tends to degenerate into a winner-takes-all ‘dictatorship’ with individual liberties taken away, citizens’ rights trampled upon and views of political opponents suppressed.

Other disadvantages include the very difficult processes for change of government before the expiry of tenure, even if the president’s policies are not favourable to the people as well as the thin line between national and partisan issues.

There may also be a strained relationship between the executive and legislature, where the president may refuse to assent to bills from the legislature while the legislature, generally multi-party in composition, may not cooperate with the president in some of his policies. Then, there is the possibility of distraction and loss of focus by the executive, who may be consumed with the ambition of winning the next election.

Another type Nigeria has tried is the parliamentary system of government. Parliamentary democracy is the system in which the executive derives its democratic legitimacy from the confidence the legislature has in it, typically a parliament, and is also held accountable to that parliament. In a parliamentary system, the head of state is usually a person distinct from the head of government. This is in contrast to a presidential system, where the head of state often is also the head of government and, most importantly, the executive does not derive its democratic legitimacy from the legislature. The head of government here is elected to power through the legislature. One of the disadvantages of this system is that the government can be unstable. The prime minister is elected by the majority party and can be removed at any time if the majority party loses confidence in that person as a leader.

Another form is the semi-presidential or dual executive system of government in which a president exists alongside a prime minister and a cabinet, with the latter being responsible for the legislature of a state.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, though, does not see Nigeria as practising any of the above. In its Democracy Index of 2016, it rated Nigeria’s as a “hybrid regime”.

In its definition, a hybrid regime is a mixed type of political regime that manifests based on an incomplete democratic transition. Hybrid regimes combine autocratic features with democratic ones; they can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. The term “hybrid regime” arises from a polymorphic view of political regimes that oppose the dichotomy of autocracy or democracy. Hybrid regimes are characteristic of resource countries (petro-states). Such regimes can be stable and tenacious.

Furthermore, hybrid regimes pay attention mainly to the decorative nature of democratic institutions (elections do not lead to a change of power, different media broadcast government point of view, the “opposition” in parliament votes the same way as the ruling party, etc.), from which it is concluded that authoritarianism is the basis of hybrid regimes, however, hybrid regimes also imitate dictatorship, while having a relatively lower level of violence.

We also have direct democracy or pure democracy, which is a form of democracy in which people decide on policy initiatives directly. This differs from the majority of currently established democracies, which are representative.

Switzerland is the closest state in the world having a direct democracy where citizens may challenge any law voted by the federal assembly. Switzerland’s Executive, Judicial and Legislative institutions are organised on federal, cantonal and communal levels. Switzerland, unlike many other European states, does not have a president or a prime minister, and the country’s citizens are at the pinnacle of power.

Its legislature is made up of the National Council and the Council of States. The Council of States consists of 46 members who represent the cantons. After every four years, the citizens of Switzerland vote for 200 members to constitute the National Council.

The two chambers of parliament undertake legislative duties and their sessions in parliament are open for citizens to attend. Any citizen can challenge any law or amendments proposed by the federal assembly.

Six members constitute the Executive branch – the Federal Council of Switzerland. They engage in what we can term a collective presidency and are elected by parliament. Each of these members leads a federal department (ministry). The country’s seven departments are Finance and Economy, Education, Internal Affairs, Defence and Sports, Energy, Traffic and Environment, and Justice.

The question here is whether the forms of government it has had have served Nigeria well. We have experimented with the parliamentary system. Though the army scuttled it midterm, even then Nigeria was already in deep trouble and wobbling as a nation.

We then went through the journey of nationhood under the military jackboots and yet again returned to representative democracy that was also scuttled and we found ourselves back in the stranglehold of the military.

Our current democratic journey is the longest in our nation’s history. From the short-lived Abbey Westminster form bequeathed to us by our colonial masters to another short-lived presidential system in the Second Republic, adopted because America was the bastion of democracy, we have come thus far and we have the belief it would last.

However, cries of marginalisation rend the air. Placing partisan interests above national interests is the order of the day; divisions along ethnic and religious lines have set in and the struggle for power and its retention have taken a “do or die” dimension, affecting the neutrality of the judiciary, the last hope of the common man.

By the day, the gulf in communication between the average Nigerian and his representative in government widens so much it seems they live in two separate worlds with nothing in common, perhaps except religion and tribe or party and town.

Can we continue this way? Is it the fault of the system? Should we scout for a better system? Should we look inward? Will a system in tandem with our inner being be the answer to our multifaceted and ever-growing problems as a nation? Perhaps we have been imposing on ourselves systems that are alien to us, to our culture, to our souls. We shall be examining this issue ahead, God willing.

Hassan Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime.

Hassan Gimba

NGO is the acronym for Non-Governmental Organisation and as the name suggests, they are non-profit bodies formed to carry out non-governmental functions and thereby fill gaps that governments and even the private sectors could not affect or where their impacts are minimal while the needs are necessary.

They are meant to be agents of development, more especially at the grassroots level, while engaging the citizenry with a deliberate agenda to awaken their awareness and desire for positive social changes that would enhance their quality of life while driving them to make their world a better place.

Non-governmental organisations are supposed to be interventionist bodies that are formed to improve the quality of life for people through various means, some of which are one or more out of the provision of necessities such as food, clothing, improvement of educational and healthcare infrastructure and provision of materials, training and many more that would improve the quality of life and enhance employment opportunities.

Aware of these herculean but noble tasks, when the United Nations was formed in 1945, Chapter 10, Article 71 in its Charter recognized them as such provided they remain nonprofit entities and independent of governmental influence, even if they receive certain funding from the government. That was probably inspired by The Anti-Slavery Society, arguably the first NGO in the world.

In Nigeria, the earliest NGO formally recognised was that to do with the work of Mary Selessor against the killing of twins considered evil in Calabar.

However, there are so many now in Nigeria that it may be impossible for even the government to know some, considering our poor database system. Even though according to AllAfrica, a multi-media content provider, systems technology developer and the source-of-record for African news and information worldwide, there are over 46,000 NGOs in Nigeria, lack of proper monitoring has given some a window to engage in activities detrimental to our well-being as a nation. The nefarious activities associated with some of them have made some states tag some of them with the toga of ‘persona non grata’, booting them out of their states.

Some prominent NGOs in Nigeria, some bearing names of individuals and some reflecting their works include the TY Danjuma Foundation, the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), Amnesty International, the North East Regional Initiative, and the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).

There are many others such as the Solutions for Internally Displaced (SOLID) People Project, Saving One Million Lives Programme, Africa Hope Alive Initiative, Mental Aware Nigeria Initiative, CLEEN Foundation, Federation of International Female Lawyers, Global Peace Foundation, etc.

However, apart from states that halted the activities of some NGOs, the federal government has had occasions to altercate with some of them because they deliberately incite the public or their beneficiaries against constituted authorities. Some of them prefer beneficiaries that will always be at loggerheads with the government; to them, such are friends deserving of more and more patronage.

Apart from all these, most of them are not corrupt free or super accountable as they want the world to believe. For those bearing respected people’s names, is it in collusion with the individuals or are they being blindsided?

When beneficiaries’ grants are in foreign currency, for instance, some of the NGOs “help” the beneficiaries by converting the funds into naira for them. However, in a show of corruption bordering on fraud, they do not do the conversions based on any known parameter: not official rate and not parallel market rates. While what they give is always lower than official or black-market rates, beneficiaries never get to see the excess, which invariably affects their activities.

Yet these are organisations purposely established to fight corruption and mismanagement in governance as well as fight for accountability and transparency among public officers.

The NGOs mostly get their funding from abroad as conduits to beneficiary bodies here. Do their funders abroad know of this misappropriation? Will they condone it if they knew? Is the government aware of such vices that can be deemed as sabotaging the nation’s economy?

The federal government needs to set up an inquiry into how many of these NGOs run their activities, including giving more encouragement to subversive elements and those calling on the depredation of national assets and how they utilize their funding, including how they disburse them to beneficiaries.

While we intend to subsequently present three-year evidence of such malfeasance to aid any action the government intends to pursue, we believe the Nigerian government must come out with a new policy that would guide the activities of all NGOs.

Many of them can be rightly said to be tools of neo-colonialism and outright agents of foreign intelligence services in the way they go about their activities. The amount of information they have at their disposal, using local organisations is far more than the Nigerian state has.

However, others are genuinely concerned with the well-being of Nigerians and are actively impacting positively on the lives of people in both rural and urban areas. They do not short-change beneficiaries because they are aware that they are not a profit-making body and therefore they do not collect funding from A, meant for B, but end up not giving to Caesar what belongs to him because Caesar has no way of asking A what was due to him.

They also do not, under the carpet, encourage and empower elements that see the governments of the day as enemies, fighting them, weakening them in such a way that the future becomes uncertain.

Hence we will look at basically two such NGOs, the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).

The WSCIJ is a “non-profit, non-governmental organization with social justice programmes aimed at exposing corruption, regulatory failures, and human rights abuses with investigative journalism.” SERAP desires to “advance transparency, accountability and respect for economic and social rights through other means such as media advocacy, public impact and strategic litigation, capacity building, institutional building, and education and awareness.”

To be continued ….

Hassan Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime

By Hassan Gimba

In the past few months, there has been some incessant din over the plight of education across the country, how deplorable it has become and concerns over how to bring it out of the shambles it has been shovelled into as a result of long-term negligence by those who should nurse it after benefitting from it.

Many of us who were in this part of the world before 1980 knew what schools were and how governments went the whole hog to make them qualitative while making the academic environment so conducive.

The managers of education  did not compromise quality and standards for they were aware that any pupil with the right foundation in primary and secondary education, can venture into the world and be a huge success. And funds for that were adequately utilised.

We had our primary and secondary education almost free. Uniforms, books and meals were provided. Mattresses, blankets, mosquito nets, detergents, soaps, pocket money and even transport fares were provided for secondary students. No student bought his chair, desk, or bench.

There was adequate power supply, and pipe-borne water was taken for granted. Nobody knew of boreholes because the central water supply was functioning. There were generators in case of power failure and the maintenance culture was commendable as well. School children were encouraged to engage in wholesome extracurricular activities.

Up to the mid-80s our primary and secondary schools were bastions of excellence while our tertiary institutions were citadels of learning. We were prouder to gain admission into a Nigerian university than to go abroad to study, then.

I recall that going to the School of Basic Studies (SBS) of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU) was more prestigious than even going to study in America. Any student you saw in ABU Zaria then had passed his General Certificate of Education (GCE) with flying colours while only those who failed the West African Examination ran abroad, where in most cases admission criteria were lower than obtainable here. And so we took the entrance examination to SBS and left our mates who failed their GCE to japa out on a scholarship to study abroad.

But since then, the reverse has become the norm; now studying abroad confers on one a status that studying at home does not. And all this is no thanks to those in charge of our education who deliberately allowed it to get rotten while profiteering from it.

What do you make of a situation where a person superintending education would take his child to a private school or abroad? What do you make of a situation where a student here may score nine credits but fall short by a few marks in JAMB to secure admission to study medicine while his classmate with three credits and zero points in JAMB can go abroad to study medicine and return to Nigeria as a medical doctor?

Perhaps, alarmed by the negative trajectory education has taken in this country, a lot of stakeholders who know what education should be like have started declaring, or calling for the declaration of, emergency in the education subsector.

For instance, six months after he was sworn in as governor of Zamfara State, Dauda Lawal declared a state of emergency on education, because, according to him “the neglected education sector in Zamfara affected all levels, from primary to tertiary, with poor learning environment and personnel.”

Similarly, the governor of Kano State, Alhaji Abba Kabir Yusuf, on Friday, 14 July, about two months after being sworn in, also declared a state of emergency in the education sector. The declaration was intended to “hasten actions in delivering services to guarantee access to quality education for all in Kano”.

Likewise, lending a voice to the forum of the wives of state governors who, among others, called on the federal government to declare a state of emergency on education, the International Ford Fellowship Programme Alumni Nigeria (IFFPAN) recently urged President Bola Tinubu to immediately declare a state of emergency on compulsory basic education programmes across the country.

The IFFPAN, an independent, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, private, nonprofit, social justice organisation for Nigerian Alumni (Fellows) of the International Fellowship Programme of Ford Foundation, United States, urged the president to spare no effort in ensuring that young Nigerians have a solid footing for the realisation of their dreams.

However, long before all of them, Mai Mala Buni, the governor of Yobe State had declared a state of emergency on education in his state. He said that the decision was to consolidate the solid foundation put in place by his predecessor, Alhaji Ibrahim Gaidam.

Unlike others who waited months into their tenure before declaring what is in the interest of their people, he made his declaration in his first inauguration speech as governor on 29 May 2019.

And perhaps they, especially the northern governors, may have some takeaways from his vision. This is because all the states have witnessed a fall in their standard of education. But, significantly, almost all the states, in one way or the other, have witnessed either insurgency or banditry.

Having known what education used to be and realising its fall in the state, aided by the onslaught of insurgents, Governor Buni wasted no time in establishing new schools, renovating and building new hostels and classrooms in existing schools, building and equipping laboratories and ICT Centres.

His vision led to the recruitment of over 4,000 education staff and the retraining of almost 30,000 others, rather than sacking them and compounding the problem of unemployment and insecurity in the state and nation.

There has also been a significant increase in the number of Yobe undergraduates studying at home and abroad due to improved scholarship programmes. The governor’s policies led to a drop in the number of out-of-school children by over 75 per cent, according to Dr Mohammed Sani, his former commissioner of education, who oversaw the transformation of almajiri schools into modern tsangaya, as a result of which he is now heading the National Almajiri Commission.

Hassan Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime.