I was born more than six decades ago in the village of Agila, a quiet agrarian community of less than 5,000 souls located in the Ado local government area of Benue State.
By Joseph Egwurube (joseph.egwurube123@gmail.com)
I was born more than six decades ago in the village of Agila, a quiet agrarian community of less than 5,000 souls located in the Ado local government area of Benue State. This was well before Nigeria ostensibly gained independence in 1960 when Abubakar Tafawa Balewa announced grandiloquently that “We are called upon immediately to show that our claims to responsible government are well founded” in his inaugural speech as Prime Minister. Agila, which I visited not long ago during a recent homecoming trip to Nigeria, has since then hardly changed for the better. It is for example prohibited for villagers to fall gravely ill because there is no nearby health facility to provide succour. The more than three-hour journey on the bumpy large pothole-filled eighty-five-kilometer road that links the village to Otukpo, where there are better medical structures, condemns you to an unwanted fate. There are regular land-related skirmishes between Agila inhabitants and neighbouring Ngbo and Ezza Ibo communities who live in nearby Ebonyi State. Young able-bodied sons of the village are thus posted in strategic places outside the village to ward off ‘invading’ Ezzas and Ngbos rather than go to the farm to produce the big yams that Agila is famous for. More than sixty years after independence, I cannot but conclude that, like many other communities in Nigeria, Agila is a forgotten and abandoned territory, unsung and unremembered when national and state resources are allocated, and rural development projects conceived and implemented.
That Agila is one of the least if not the least developed community in Benue State is incomprehensible because paradoxically, many prominent sons and daughters of the community have occupied high positions of authority in past and current regimes. The logical question that comes to mind is why nothing has changed for the better for a great majority of inhabitants in the village. My thesis is that government has remained very far from the people even in the face of public discourse to the contrary and that key political actors at all levels, local, state and federal governments, do not see accountability as a major yardstick in their governing principles. On the contrary, they are informed by the ‘Kabiyesi’ model of power exercise, whose principal characteristics, values and consequences we will now try to explore.
Kabiyesi is the God that overrides everything, that does as he pleases, the king that nobody dares to question, according to Yoruba tradition. There is a Kabiyesi model/syndrome in how key elected political leaders conduct themselves in Nigeria. This model/syndrome has a number of salient characteristics. The first is the high individualisation and personalisation of power. The holder of the political function becomes the function. Logically, governance is vertical rather than horizontal. There is no empowerment of decision-making units below that of those at the apex of the pyramid at all the levels. Consultations with possible stakeholders concerned with particular policy orientations are kept to the barest minimum. There is a top-down management philosophy and a method of management by returns, the main yardstick used by decision makers to make and implement choices being the value of political, economic, social and financial returns these will generate for them and their inner circle, usually referred to as the cabal. An option that will generate visibly high personal financial, social and political returns is preferred to one that may lead to better outcomes for the common good but generate little personal material and immaterial benefits for the holder of the office.
The Kabiyesi model is founded on distance rather than proximity between the governor and the governed. There is physical distance. Physical contacts between the local government chairman/ State governor/ President and citizens are few and far between. It is rare to see a Nigerian President descend from his limousine to shake hands with the common man or woman lining the street to catch his glimpse, something that even King Charles 111 has taken to doing. There is also social distance. And then of course there’s economic and financial distance, governors living relatively affluently unlike a sizeable proportion of citizens who struggle daily to make ends meet.
The Kabiyesi model is equally founded on a paradoxically consensual discourse. Though the exercise of power is by nature individualized and personalized, the discourse that accompanies this exercise highlights the collective nature of public problem identification and solution. There is a more preponderant use of collective pronouns (“we”), collective possessive adjectives (“our”) and possessive adjectives (“ours”) rather than their singular variations in making public statements. The first inaugural address by the newly elected President, Shehu Shagari on October 1, 1979 begins with “Fellow Nigerians”, continues with “We have witnessed today the birth of the Second Republic of Nigeria” and in its concluding paragraph states among others that “Our government is committed to building a united, stable and prosperous nation…Let us with true conscience and determination join hands and re-dedicate ourselves to the service of this great country…”. President Bola Tinubu’s inaugural statement uses the same de-personalised language. In his inaugural speech, he states boldly, as if he’s engaged in a conversation with his ‘fellow citizens’ that “Our administration shall govern on your behalf but never rule over you. We shall consult and dialogue but never dictate. We shall reach out to all but never put down a single person for holding views contrary to our own.
We are here to further mend and heal this nation, not tear and injure it”. The language tries to sell the idea that public problem solution will be co-constructed and collective.
The reality is, however, quite a different story because the actual exercise of power is not a bottom-up process as these inaugural statements imply but rather a top-down one. Not only is the actual language of power exercise controlling rather than collaborative, the Kabiyesi model actually demands subservience and submission from those outside the realms of power. The recent injunction by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Wike, to Permanent Secretaries to come forward and publicly bow down to the President during an inauguration ceremony in Abuja speaks volumes about how the governing class views those required to execute their decisions. The Governor or President becomes sacred and those under them are required to sing their praises and submit to their wills. Focus on the collective in political statements is thus nothing more than an exercise in political marketing, an attempt to legitimize their leadership positions.
The Kabiyesi model involves the construction of political lineages. An incumbent invests very heavily in the choice of who will succeed him. Then, he is sure that he won’t be held accountable for what he may or may not have done during his tenure. President Tinubu in his inaugural speech qualified his predecessor, President Buhari, as an ‘honest patriotic leader who has done a lot for the country he loves’ and on a ‘more personal note’ as a ‘worthy partner and friend’. There was no critical stocktaking of the state of the country Buhari left. This is what happens at the level of most State and local governments where transition is usually between ‘partners’ and ‘friends’. The friend who takes over the mantle of governance from another is hardly critical of how public resources have been allocated by the latter.
There is thus almost zero accountability in governance because of the rarity with which citizens question their leaders and demand explanations for things gone wrong, for cost-of-living skyrocketing and for their increased inability to live with their salaries. Though unemployment is less than 5%, almost half of Nigerians are estimated to live below the national poverty line. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, 63% of Nigerians are multidimensionally poor. And yet we have Senators who earn almost 30 million naira monthly, 1000% more than the minimum wage.
Why has the absence of accountability continued in our political history?
A first explanation is the absence of credible centres of counterpower that would keep elected governments on their toes and make them deliver what they are required to for public interest. Many potential centres of counterpower such as the academia and labour unions have been coopted into the power equation. Which is why some analysts of the recent industrial unrest in Nigeria like Professor Jibrin Ibrahim are wondering how the NLC arrived, after only two days of industrial action over a multi-stakeholder demand for an increase in the minimum wage, at agreeing to a ‘joint’ decision with the Federal government that the new minimum wage should be 60, 000 naira, a sum that cannot buy a bag of rice. A second explanation is that the majority of Nigerians are taught right from their childhood the values of obedience to elders, to teachers and generally to those who are in positions of authority. There might even be some form of obsequiousness towards those in positions of authority, such an attitude finding translation in such ways as addressing individuals in authority with flattering ego-aggrandising titles such as ‘Your Excellency’, ‘Chief’, ‘Sir’, etc. A third possible explanation is how the governing class uses the strategy of divide and rule to contain protests and demands for accountability from the periphery and the lower crust of the society. Agila, like many other rural communities, is needy and an environment of want. In such an environment, many are willing to be the local relays and spokespersons of those who hold legislative and executive powers in Abuja or State capitals. These are given a number of carrots and are only too willing to defend the balance sheet of their patrons, living comfortably hundreds of kilometres away in airconditioned homes in safe and secure neighbourhoods. A final explanation is the fear of retribution for protesting. One never knows how the law will be used by those exercising power to quell perceived threats to their domination. The #EndSAR events on October 20, 2020, where innocent protesters were gunned down on Lekki Toll Gate by the army, leading to several victims, has clipped the wings and tempered anti-establishment proclivities by many who are dissatisfied. “That is how Nigeria is”, is the statement that many, fatalists, pronounce when their attention is drawn to the blatant inequalities that are seen every day. Agila, and many other similar communities in Nigeria, remain abandoned and betrayed. Betrayed by the promise of better living conditions that have not come to be. Betrayed by the hope of finally having access to such things as good potable water and health facilities dashed by the personalized Kabiyesi model of power exercise by those entrusted with the mandate to deliver things for the people. Agila remains isolated from ‘civilisation’, the deplorable state of the road that links Agila to Otukpo making it a herculean task to transport people and merchandise between these two locations without the paralysing apprehension that the vehicle being used would surely break down somewhere during the trip, leave one stranded with no mechanic’s anywhere close by to bail you out. For Agila, and other similarly quiet agrarian communities in Nigeria, to start getting the benefits of independence, they would first need to be opened up and be more accessible. They will need to be ‘discovered’ and rediscovered, especially by those who preach that government needs to be brought closer to the people, and who have the mandate and resources to do this. The 2024 Federal budget has a proposed expenditure of 27.5 trillion naira. ‘Only’ 13.6 million was budgeted to be spent in 2021. The Benue State government has a proposed expenditure of 225.7 billion naira in 2024, much higher than the amount proposed in 2021 (134.3 billion naira) and in 2022 (155.6 billion naira). These are huge sums. How come there’s an increase in public expenditure from one year to the other here and there, and nothing has changed for the better and the common good in my village since independence?
**Joseph Egwurube resides in France. He is a retired university don at the Faculty of Law, Political Science and Management in La Rochelle University in France. He has written two novels on the position of women in Nigeria: NOBODY KNOWS TOMORROW and WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER, both published by Olympia Publishers in the UK.
