In 2023, the phrase 'A New Nigeria is Possible' became more than a slogan. It became a political rallying statement that captured the raw sentiment of a weary populace. This is one of the slogans used in nearly all of Mr. Peter Obi's writings, the man who seeks to be the President of Nigeria. He introduced this phrase during the 2023 election, causing a political upheaval that shocked the nation.
Lagos was considered untouchable. An absolute dominion. Yet, in 2023, the unthinkable happened. How did a politician many wrote off manage to take Lagos state from its absolute ruler? Many believed a politician from the East - a region often marginalized despite its leading role in the fight for Nigeria’s independence - could never win Lagos. But Mr. Peter Obi did, in Lagos state where President Tinubu is holding absolute dominion.
But beneath the political shock lies a deeper reality that no election has yet fixed: a perforated national purse that is starving the people..
To understand why this 'New Nigeria' slogan caught fire, you have to look at the hopelessness of the Nigerian people and the desire to see Nigeria work for all. Mr. Peter Obi who is now seeking again the seat of president under the banner of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, the NDC, captured this yearning for a new Nigeria that can work for all.
I have been trying to diagnose what is wrong and not working in Africa’s and Nigeria’s political leadership and where they are headed with previous articles.
Nigeria, just like mother Africa, is a blessed country with so much potential from the human resources to the mineral resources but is bogged down not only by leadership failures but also a lack of economic freedom.
The greatest problem of Nigeria may not only be leadership coming from election malpractices and imposition of declared winners and devolvement to hybrid regime - a democracy on the outside, but a dictatorship on the inside, or the pursuit of ethnoreligious supremacy; it is fundamentally an economic problem. We often focus on the faces in the posters, but we ignore the numbers in the balance sheet. That is where much of the real problem is. And it could be the biggest Nigerian problem - the perforated purse.
Let us not make the mistake of looking only at Abuja; this perforated purse is enabled by the thirty-six state governors who systematically pocket government allocations, it is also by oil marketers who exploit the people and by the business class who benefit directly from this perforated purse, starving the people of economic oxygen.
We see the perforated purse in everything, from a lack of foundational infrastructural development that leaves the country suffocating without electricity or roads, to the systemic neglect of health infrastructure with broken hospitals that drive medical minds to flee the country. We see it in the educational development crisis that leaves the classrooms crumbling and the youth unprepared for an expanding modern economy, and a poor harnessing of the God-given minerals that, if managed well, can put many people to meaningful employment instead of being lost to illegal syndicates. The vast arable lands that currently sit idle due to lack of know-how, insecurity and displacement must be utilised and lives and properties of the people who have been left entirely vulnerable by a state failing its most basic duties, must be secured.
As I wrote in my last article on how the leaders sold Nigeria, you cannot have political hope if your economic foundations are shaky.
There is belief that Nigeria can never be made to work due to decades of entrenched behaviour of those who found themselves at the corridors of power. They are ready to fight any change. This includes the external dictators of Nigeria's policies.
The question is not whether a New Nigeria is possible or if it can be spoken into realisation, but how it can be translated and implemented fundamentally.
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Politically and socially speaking, Nigeria can be transformed from the top to down if the leaders are sincerely up to the task but how can a country of about 230 million people be transformed only by role modelling or slogans? The entrenched Nigerian mindset of ‘how it is done in Naija’ - the ‘anyhowness’ of cutting corners, systemic bribery, and societal decay prevalent across our private, public, and cultural lives, is a serious roadblock.
Is the problem that the leaders aren't leading, or that the system is designed to engulf anyone who tries?
When the economy excludes people, survival becomes their only law. "Anyhowness" becomes a total negligence toward the system: a deliberate abandonment of civic rules and order because the state itself has abandoned its duties. It becomes an accepted norm against a system that does not work for all.
While there was hope that the slogan would have an effect on Nigerians, in 2023, the IReV stopped working specifically for the presidential result. The university professors played their role of announcing the results of obvious malpractices and the Supreme Court Justices took care of legalising the said announced result. And this has been going on in Nigeria. While the young were set to take up the new Nigeria challenge, the entrenched older people were ready to sustain the status quo. Talking about the hope of getting Nigeria anew under these circumstances, is in itself an illusion.
But here lies the lesson: a New Nigeria cannot be an event we vote for every four years and then abandon. The energy of the youth must transition from election-day emotional outbursts into continuous, organized civil activities that hold institutions accountable every single day.
A new Nigeria requires dismantling a system built on economic exclusion and institutional weakness. A system of neglect that does not respect the people. A corrupt system sustained for continued graft and normalised. A system that depends on foreign loans and know-how. A system that glamourises forgery and fraud and applauds ineptitude and a system that does not encourage excellence and merit.
But, conversely, the economy is not favourable to many Nigerians which is the root cause of many behavioural dysfunctions. The societal neglect and the spiral down of social decadence all goes to the non-working economy.
Millions of Nigerians are living in abject poverty, hunger and insecurity.
To get the system to work towards the new Nigeria, Nigerians must first of all allow the system to work. The government must strengthen the institutions but must as well create economic windows that will put a larger number of the people to work. Nigerians must eat good food. To create that window, Nigerians must take hold of the extraction, the refining and trading of the several mineral resources that are in considerable abundance. We must move from a mere extraction economy to local industrial manufacturing; we cannot expect a New Nigeria to survive if we keep exporting raw commodities only to import the finished products back at triple the price. We cannot continue to yield our future to external interests and control that make profit from our stagnation, whose interests do not align with the likely principles of the new Nigeria. We cannot build a New Nigeria on old concessions or loan traps. We must seek economic freedom from external and internal strangleholds and forces of an underperforming economy.
In addition to these, the most important Nigerian document, the constitution, must be made a document originating from and endorsed by the people and not clinging to exclusive, concurrent and residual lists for underdevelopment that overlooks what is important in favour of political manipulations. The current constitution which was handed down by the military, was designed for control, not development. A true New Nigeria requires a document born from the people and by the people returning power from the entrenched few to the millions who work hard and actually keep this country breathing and running. It will be a bright morning on the waking day.
To inspire hope in Nigerians is good, but away from sloganeering, there must be concrete and bold steps to be taken to forcefully break the chain of hopelessness, anyhowness, leading to a desperate desire for exodus. Otherwise, the level of illusion will devastatingly affect the social and economic sanity of Nigerians.