Abimbola Adelakun
Two days ago, the Ninth National Assembly elected its
leadership. The elation of the crowd on television should have been
tempered by the knowledge that a whopping N4.8bn will be expended
on this newly inaugurated club of spendthrifts as “Welcome
Package.” Despite these new National Assembly members hawking the
usual platitudes about democracy, growth, and development, we
remain locked in an endless nightmare of our habits of
underdevelopment.
The culture of waste the lawmakers represent was similarly
enacted in Osun State where some 68 council chairmen were approved
to travel to Dubai for a 10-day workshop to be “exposed and groomed
on the international best practices in the area of Local Government
Administration as it is being practised in the Advanced Democracies
Worldwide (sic).” Thankfully, Governor Gboyega Oyetola cancelled
the trip approval. It is commendable the governor was not
impervious to the criticism, because no argument justifies that
journey. Expecting anyone to learn to institute best practices from
being exposed to “advanced democracy” (sic) in the UAE is like
waiting for President Muhammadu Buhari to build functional
hospitals in Nigeria because he has seen best healthcare practices
in the UK.
Now, anyone who knows Nigeria enough should also be certain that
while this trip has been killed in the wake of the outrage that
attended it, it will likely be resurrected in another form. I am
sceptical that the embarrassment that led to the cancellation of
this one will be enough to deter public officials from organising
future trips. This sort of jamborees sadly mislabelled “capacity
building workshops” are the norm of the Nigerian public service,
and one of the many means public officials get to vacation at
public expense. We can recall that in 2012, the Speaker of the Oyo
State House of Assembly, Monsurat Sunmonu, took the wives of the
lawmakers on a trip to London, United Kingdom, for an ostensible
special training they curiously captioned “Husband Support.”
According to Ms. Sunmonu then, Oyo State was not the only culprit
in such ventures, and the trip was warranted because the state
government needed bipartisan cooperation. Taking the wives of
lawmakers –including opposition politicians– to London to fete them
was a strategy to achieve their political goals. Not much has
changed since that time.
If there is any lesson to be learned from this Osun debacle, it
is that in the age of social media and the ways it breeds
propensity for mischief, government officials will be more wary
about laying out detailed information when they want to misuse
public funds. Official notices for trips that could cause them
embarrassment like this one will more likely be subsumed under a
more harmless agenda. Our leaders are sworn to waste of public
resources, and they will stop at nothing to burn money for these
kinds of frivolities. This latest incident hardly means a turning
point in Nigerian political behaviour. These types of travels come
with estacodes for those who take the trip, and that in itself is
enough motivation for continued rapacious and unconscionable
plunder of public tills. It is especially worse that Osun State is
the one involved this time. Osun is one of the poorest states in
Nigeria. It produces little and contributes even less, yet it
borrows everywhere and spends themselves into insolvency. This trip
is an example of the waste that must pervade Osun, and which
explains why they are trapped in perpetual poverty and debt. Our
leaders, who do not have enough prudence to know that a poor,
struggling, and heavily indebted state like Osun has no business
sponsoring mass tourism, have failed already the first test of
understanding the best practices of advanced democracies and its
application to their local situations.
The Dubai mission for the Osun LG chairmen is telling in a lot
of other ways too.
There is a clichéd statement about hiding knowledge from black
people by storing it in a book, and this instance has almost proved
it axiomatic. It is concerning that these LG officials are going to
Dubai to be “exposed and groomed” on the best practices of local
government administration when all of that knowledge is extensively
documented in books and is circulated widely enough for anyone to
read without stepping on the plane. Up till now, I am still
slightly confused as to how Dubai became the choice location for
this fast food education. Are they trying to learn about the
success of the United Arab Emirates by being directly exposed to
the society, or they are trying to advance their knowledge of local
government administration and the Dubai location merely happens to
be a backdrop to this pursuit?
Whichever one is the answer, they were still wrong for even
initiating the idea. Why did they have to go to Dubai to learn
about practices that have been extensively archived in books and
similar materials? You want to be “groomed” on best practices of
local government administration? Read a damn book on the subject!
There are plenty of them everywhere for serious leaders to learn.
The story of Dubai/UAE has been written in various books. These
books have explored its history, culture, politics, and even
critically analysed the plans for their future. Learning about the
UAE modernity requires a personal commitment to learning, not a
fly-by-night trip for 68 people (along with aides, etc.) seeking
what is not lost. How did they ever imagine that the bureaucratic
acumen and the strategic insight that built Dubai could be learned
by mere exposure to its skyline for 10 days? Such knowledge comes
from committed and lifelong study, not from hasty trips designed
for our leaders who want a break from the stale air of poverty and
despair that hangs over their constituencies.
And that brings me to the last point on the subject of books vs.
capacity building workshops: there is no workshop or crash course
that can produce the kind of modernity that the UAE currently
boasts of without a leadership that has also developed shame. If
Osun politicians will take their time to read these two books- With
United Strength, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Leader and
the Nation, by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and
Research and My Story: 50 Memories from Fifty Years of Service by
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – and perhaps others, they will come
off with the insight that what built the UAE was more than a
hurried grooming of clueless leaders at the expense of taxpayers.
These books document the (auto)biographies of some of the founding
fathers who built the modern UAE. They show that the evolution of
the UAE happened, not just because they had strong and visionary
leaders who pursued their goals with clear-sightedness, but that
they have shame as well.
By shame, I mean these leaders had a measure of dignity and
integrity to understand that they could motivate their society to
be better than what they are. Unlike some countries, they did not
just rely on the cure-all body language of their leaders. Even
though they are very religious people, they did not relinquish
their agency to God; they deployed secular insights into solving
their problems. They believed it was possible to do better than
reduce economic governance to borrowing from China to pay for goods
imported from China. They do not just mouth “integrity” every time
their leader watched a 32-inch TV; they worked hard at creating
institutional mechanisms that embody integrity. They made the best
of their natural resources, not just by disembowelling the earth
for the ultimate goal of funding foreign jamborees, but to create
prosperity for their people. They are not just about consumption
and spending, but production as well. That is why they were able to
transform into a country that dazzles all of us. None of the wisdom
that made Dubai and the rest of the UAE can come to a people whose
leaders watch them wallow in poverty and misery, and still lack
shame to the point they could take out of their meagre earnings to
go fool around for 10 days.
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