Issues to shape governance beyond elections

• Published date: 12 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

The main bone of contention in electoral competition is power and it is not physical or spiritual power but state power. Therefore, to understand power without understanding the state through interrogating its nature, structure and even origin is grossly inadequate. In the same manner, to assess the candidates in the contest for state power, without examining their understandings, attitudes in relation to the state can also be fatally misleading. A common popular refrain in the current electioneering campaigns for the presidential poll scheduled for February 25 is that character, competence, capacity, agility and even age would define the quality of the leader to move the country out of the doldrums. However, these qualities are at best essential but marginal to the core issue of any of the candidate's understanding of the state and its central, strategic and transformative role as catalyst and also beyond been mere object of manipulations by vested special interests, factional cliques and a banal surrogate of international finance capital. Understanding the historical condition of the state and its trajectories, especially in the context of its current quagmire would unlock the historical imperative to transform it, reinvent its key institutions as competent, impartial and efficient service providers and legitimate interlocutors in public affairs.

The political capacity to understand the use of state power to shake up its institutions, realign them to the collective will of society and understanding of the transformative character of the state is beyond the mere technical capacity of any individual no matter how invested with character, competence and agility.

The historical condition and current stage of the Nigerian state has attained a chronic status of dysfunction due to incremental weakness exerted by vicious vested special interests, factional cliques and cabals, all functioning as gate-keepers, kitchen cabinets and other sundry manipulators of the state. In many instances and on several occasions, the state has degenerated to be mere rogue accomplice to manipulating vested special interests and factional cliques. To rescue the state from jaws of the vicious stranglehold of the vested special interests and other sundry cliques, as the historic mission of the state, is the only path that guarantees the restoration of Nigeria and its manifest destiny to accomplish prosperity and prestige for her numerous people.

The historic deficit of economic...