Editor’s note: Pius Adesanmi, the Naij.com columnist, says that, in order to see the change promised by President Muhammadu Buhari, Nigerians must define and start demanding for it first. In his latest column, the internationally acclaimed author, professor of English and African studies suggests just two subjects for collective scrutiny out of the many that could keep the government on its toes.
The best advice a Lagos bus conductor ever gave a Nigerian citizen: “Hold your change o”. The change you need to hold is not money. The story this time is about a promise of change whose real meaning its authors – President Buhari and the APC – appear not to fully grasp. Making that promise as a political campaign mantra, as a soundbite, is turning out to be much easier for the politicians than settling down to fully understand its philosophical dimensions as well as actualizing it concretely in a manner consistent with the people’s understanding of change.
In the context of a gradual withdrawal from change by those who made the promise and are now pretending not to understand that it has actually become part of their social contract with the people, it is your civic responsibility to “hold your change” as a citizen and hold it constantly to their noses as evidence of your readiness to collect on the promise of change.
In doing this, you, citizen, must insist on empirical as well as symbolic change. If you invade social media every day screaming about the necessity of change and the failure of President Buhari and the APC to deliver on that promise without moving beyond abstraction, you’d be providing more room for politicians to provide the usual alibis and excuses about why change is not yet happening.
You, citizen, must insist on simple and every day steps that could be taken by President Buhari and the APC to actually change the polity. Here are two little things you could insist that President Buhari do to show that we are indeed changing our style.
Wings of change
President Buhari is still holding on to President Jonathan’s harem of more than a dozen planes in the presidential fleet. That is not acceptable. That is not change. President Buhari himself admitted during the campaign season that something needed to be done about the presidential fleet. That was before the post-election era of disowning campaign promises and disavowing covenants made with the people. Change should have started with setting up a process to reduce that Presidential fleet drastically on May 29, 2015. He does not need the approval of the National Assembly to do something about the planes. What exactly is he waiting for?
It is downright immoral, amoral, and irresponsible for a country with such levels of poverty as Nigeria to hold on to that many number of presidential jets. There is not a single reason why we should keep the planes. Every day that President Buhari pretends that the issue of the planes has been swept under the carpet, an arrow is plunged into the heart of his message of frugality and discipline. It is your responsibility as citizen to hold President Buhari’s feet to the fire on this matter until something is done about the planes. Hold your change and tell the President that we cannot afford the number of planes in his fleet.
Finding trust
Serious democracies take the issue of post-electoral finance accountability extremely seriously. That is one area in which you, citizen, must hold President Buhari and the APC to account. You must also bring the same pressure to bear on the former president, Jonathan, and the PDP. But, first, you have to understand what it means to retire campaign accounts. It means that after an election, a campaign must properly account for funds raised according to extant financial regulations. How much did the APC raise during the campaign? How much did the Buhari campaign raise? How much was spent? What was left? What has happened to what was left? Where can you, as a citizen, go to find this information?
If I want to find out how much Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party raised to fund his campaign in 1992, it is one click away. Can you do that for any campaign in Nigeria since we started this journey in 1999? After an election, politicians and their acolytes just share the remaining money and campaign jeeps and we all move on. No serious country does this.
You, Nigerian, should not accept this or live with it. You must ask President Buhari to be the change he promised in this regard. We need to know how much is on his campaign balance sheet and that of APC. That would strengthen our hands as citizens to go after President Jonathan and PDP. He cannot be working to enhance democracy in Tanzania when we do not know what was left of the dollars he spent the last few weeks of his campaign spraying all over Yorubaland. We want to know how his acolyte, Femi Fani-Kayode, has retired the campaign funds he managed. You have the right to know these things as a citizen. Post-electoral financial accountability is a culture we must fight for and nurture. Nigerian, hold your change o!
There is also the question of the loan President Buhari secured to obtain his APC presidential nomination form. So long as he has not defaulted on payment, it is a private arrangement between him and his bank. However, President Buhari publicly secured a great deal of political mileage with that loan. We parlayed it into his integrity narrative. It would help a lot if the repayment arrangements were made public. How is President Buhari doing with that loan? Has it been paid? How?
These are little ways in which the president could invest the change mantra with concrete meaning. He must not always wait to be dragged kicking and resisting to the altar of real, visible, and concrete change. Change that we can see; change that we can measure.
Nigerian, hold your change! More importantly, define it!
Professor Pius Adesanmi
Pius Adesanmi is a professor of English and African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. In 2010, he was awarded the inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing. A widely-cited commentator on Nigerian and African affairs, he has lectured widely in African, European, and North American universities, and also regularly addresses non-academic audiences across Africa. Naija No Dey Carry Last, his collection of political satires on Nigeria, was recently published to critical acclaim by Parresia Books and Premium Times Books. Follow him on Twitter @pius_adesanmi.
The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of Naij.com.
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Nigerians, Hold Your Change O!
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