BUILD UP NIGERIA

Words That Build a Nation

Posted on February 10, 2015 Updated on February 10, 2015

By Reno Omokri

The words that have emanated from some of our politicians especially over the course of the months leading up to 2015 have been too desperate, and antagonistic, tending towards brinksmanship and giving the impression that they see politics as a zero sum game and not as a vehicle to offer service to the people.

If our electoral and judicial processes had not been sanitized to the extent we have today where the only way you can win elections and stay in office is for people to vote for you, then one may understand, even if not agree, with those who are making these desperate calls. But our electoral and judicial processes have been sanitized and our press is completely free, so there is no reason for any popular candidate or party to either directly or through its agents make such calls.

We must make sure that as leaders and followers, the words that we speak over Nigeria are sweet words because we are going to eat them when they manifest as they surely will.

I can not for the life of me understand why anybody aspiring to lead Nigeria can go on a major foreign medium as Al Jazeera and tell the world that the nation he aspires to lead is a “failed state”!

If Nigeria is a failed state, then why aspire to lead her? Are you a failure yourself?

I can just imagine what was going through the heads of the producers at Al Jazeera when that statement was made.

I imagine them asking how any serious minded person can call the nation projected by CNNMoney to be the fastest growing economy in the world a “failed nation”.

I can imagine the executives at KPMG asking how plausible it was for any potential leader to call a nation whose coastal railway project was listed amongst the top 100 infrastructure projects in the world a “failed nation”.

The World Health Organization, WHO, recently commended Nigeria for containing and defeating the Ebola Virus Disease and asked nations like the United States to learn from us yet our own son describes us as a “failed state”!

One of the greatest tragedies of the modern world is that people seem to have lost awareness of the power of words and so we speak words about ourselves, our circumstances, our environment and our nation and are actually shocked when our situations do not change.

The fact of the matter is that anybody who believes the biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis (Jews, Christians and Muslims accept it as true) will find out, if he or she cares to study, that the original purpose of words were as a means for creation before they became a vehicle for communication.

A study of the first chapter in Genesis shows that from the first verse to the twenty fifth verse, God kept saying “let there be” and there was.

It is not until the 26th verse that we begin to see God use words for communication when He told the Elohim around Him of His plans to make man in His image.

So, what do we learn from those very first moments that led to the existence of both us and our planet?

It is my assertion that we learn that since we are made in God’s image, our words cannot be mere media of communication or of describing what we see.

I am convinced that our words create the atmosphere that we live in even when we think that it describes it.

Look again and see how it was with God in Genesis. God spoke and His words manifested in reality.

We are not as powerful as God so when we speak, our words do not immediately manifest into reality, but in the fulness of time they do.

If we do not get a realization of this truth, we will keep on dealing with effects instead of causes.

If we want peace in Nigeria, we have to do more than just fight terrorism and insecurity. We must have zero tolerance for words that threaten, promise or augur violence.

It is my considered view that if politicians can curtail their use of violent and bombastic words no matter their eagerness to ascend to power then our nation will have more peace than if we were to buy all the weapons in the world.

Weapons are like medicine. Any good doctor will tell you it is better to change your life style so that you do not get sick than to get sick and need medicine.

In the same vein, it is better for politicians to change their language so that they do not stir up murderous levels of hatred in their followers.

A Harvard Medicine Magazine article once said that we could avoid most infections and diseases by washing our hands before we eat.

I rather think that we can avoid a lot of the insecurity in Nigeria if politicians can wash their mouths before they speak.

Words are powerful!

I offer Nigerians an analogy of how powerful words are.

I have visited the offices of some of the largest websites in the world and out of curiosity I ventured to ask a web designer at a Fortune 500 company in the Silicon Valley of California about the functionalities of his firm’s site and he told me that a website is just a series of commands in programming language and that if just one letter of the command was incorrect the whole site would crash!

How apt!

Nigeria is the sum total if the commands that leaders pass on to the led and if just one of those commands is incorrect the end result could be unpalatable!

In the book ‘Words That Built a Nation’, Marilyn Miller argued the case that America became the great nation that she is today because of the words of her Founding Fathers. Most notably, she showed how the seasoned and diplomatic words of the philosopher, Benjamin Franklin, helped move America away from war and into peace then into prosperity.

Benjamin Franklin realized that for America to attain her potentials as a nation, her politics must be a contest of ideas. He once warned American leaders of the danger of speaking in anger and said “anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one”.

Aristotle said law is reason free from passion. If we accept this as true,it therefore follows that unlawfulness is passion devoid of reason.

Let us be passionate and reasonable. Words devoid of reason is like power devoid of control.

Let me now say that Nigerians have nothing to fear from the coming elections.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Under President Goodluck Jonathan, elections have held nationwide and then in Anambra, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Osun and Niger.

All these elections have been free, fair and credible and upheld the President’s popular mantra of ‘One man one vote. One woman one vote. One youth one vote’.

Given that that is the case, any threats, whether they be of parallel governments or bloodshed or resistance or rejection, are totally uncalled for!

Given that we have a leader with such a disposition and history I think it serves everybody best to speak words that build a nation henceforth and forever!

And the media has a role to play here. Rather than give front page prominence to people who would poison the minds of our young people by calling for violence and bloodshed, the media can ‘write’ them out of relevance by ignoring them until they get the idea that if they want to make headlines it is better to speak reasonably than to speak threateningly.

Reno Omokri is Special Assistant to President Jonathan on New Media.

The Broom or the Vacuum Cleaner?

Posted on January 28, 2015 Updated on January 28, 2015

By Reno Omokri

On Tuesday the 27th of January, in Lafia, Nasarawa state, President Jonathan said “we are building a country for a digital generation”. Let us ponder on that for a second. That statement rings true, as I cannot imagine any truly patriotic Nigerian that will want Nigeria to remain in an analogue state.
That being said, what place does a broom have in a digital society?

You will agree with me that brooms are more suited for an analogue society.

Let me expatiate. One vacuum cleaner can do the work of one hundred brooms and can do it faster and more efficiently too. The APC and Muhammadu Buhari are representative of brooms. This is why Muhammadu Buhari keeps saying he will throw corrupt Nigerians into jail. Now, as a means of fighting corruption, there is nothing wrong with throwing corrupt persons into jail, particularly if you follow due process. But will that tactic work in Nigeria today? Yes, to an extent it will work, just as a broom will work to an extent in sweeping a dirty house.
But supposing you try a new and better way? Supposing that instead of just concentrating your efforts at sweeping people one by one into prison, you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the house at a faster pace by employing technology that makes it difficult, nay impossible, to steal?

Prior to the Goodluck Jonathan administration, there were fifty thousand ghost workers in the Federal Civil Service. They drained the treasure of about 2 billion US dollars annually. President Jonathan could have used the broom on them by unleashing the police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to investigate who and who were collecting these fifty thousand unearned salaries. It would have taken many hours of investigation, evidence gathering, judicial process and lawyers to achieve that.

Being the philosopher king that he is, President Jonathan chose instead to employ technology to tackle the problem and using the software of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS, this administration made it impossible for anybody who has not been physically captured in the IPPIS system, by way of entering his/her finger prints and biometrics, to receive a salary. And voila! in one fell swoop, all the fifty thousand ghost workers were excluded and the Federal Government was able to save billions every year that would have gone on salaries.
Also, it was common practice for civil servants to mop up unspent votes at the end of the year. The only problem is that they mopped up these funds into their private accounts rather than back to the government treasury.

But instead of going about with a big stick to bash in the head of offenders, the President simply approved a system that mandated that all payments be made by e-payments rather than cash and any e-payment that does not come under the sub head of salaries will shut down the system at the end of the year so that civil servants could not mop up funds as they were used to.

Take another instance. Prior to the rise of President Goodluck Jonathan to power, the fertilizer procurement and distribution system of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture was one of the biggest avenues for corruption. Contracts were awarded at hundreds of billions for products that either did not come or were substandard. Moreover, in the process of distributing the product, a lot of it was diverted and resold with the government not getting value for money and farmers not being able to feed the nation.

Enter the Jonathan administration and the e-wallet system of fertilizer distribution, in which the Federal Ministry no longer used middle men contractors, but dealt directly with the manufacturers and the end users of the product, the farmers, and used a simple text message to connect end user with manufacturer. The manufacturers simply debited the cost of the subsidized fertilizer from the e-wallet funds the farmer had on his phone, saving tens of billions and increasing efficiency.

These examples show that with a broom, you will work harder, but with a vacuum cleaner which President Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP represent, you will work smarter!

With a broom, you will deliver activity, but with a vacuum cleaner, you will deliver results!

It is this broom mentality that caused Major General Buhari to answer to the question “how do you intend to manage the economy in the face of dwindling oil price”asked during his Channels TV interview as follows “first we will stabilize the oil market and run an accountable government”.

Do you control the price of oil? How do you want to stabilize the oil market if you do not control the price of the product and the global supply of the same? This is analogue thinking! This is broom mentality! That is the mentality that says that you will concentrate on curing corruption instead of focusing on preventing it when even a nursery school pupil knows that ‘prevention is better than cure’!

And that is the choice before Nigerians. Are we going to go with a broom or with a vacuum cleaner? Are we going to go with an analogue leader or continue with a digital leader?

To make the choice easier for you, let me ask those who are able to remember how many schools were built by General Muhammadu Buhari when he was military head of state. The answer is of course none! But you might say that he only spent twenty months in office. But what if I told you that in his first twenty months in office President Goodluck Jonathan built nine new Federal Universities in Ebonyi, Kogi, Nasarawa, Bayelsa, Gombe, Taraba, Katsina, Jigawa and Ekiti?

Let me ask you also to remember how many Youth Empowerment Programme the Buhari led government put in place to spur youth employment. The answer is of course none! But five months after he was sworn in as Nigeria’s President, President Jonathan launched the Youth With Innovation in Nigeria Initiative which is a unique business competition where Nigerian youths submit their business ideas to a consultancy chosen by government who then selects the best proposals and then the government trains them in modern business skills and grants them between 2-10 million Naira. Remember that this is a grant, not a loan. They do not have to pay back. Over four thousand youths have gone on to be selected and trained and have started up businesses that are employing other youths.
So once again, I ask are we going to go with a broom or with a vacuum cleaner? Are we going to go with an analogue leader or continue with a digital leader?

Nothing exemplifies the fact that the world has passed the APC and its flag bearer by than the use of a broom as their party’s emblem. Yes, it is a fitting analogy for the All Progressive Congress, APC and its Presidential Flag Bearer, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (Rtd), but facts will bear me out that a broom cannot do the work of leadership that is expected in Nigeria today.

Reno Omokri is Special Assistant to President Jonathan on New Media.