The former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Prof. Chidi Anslem Odinkalu, has called for a resetting of the country’s value system which, according to him, will culminate in a restructuring of Nigeria.
Odinkalu argues that the process of resetting Nigeria must start with addressing the country’s values problem, which requires a new kind of leadership that is national in outlook.
Odinkalu, who is a visiting professor at Harvard University, maintained that for effective resetting to be accomplished, the process must begin with paying attention to political values that underpin coexistence in the country.
The human rights activist, made these submissions in Abuja while speaking as a guest lecturer at the 10th-anniversary lecture of Just Friends Club of Nigeria.
Speaking on the topic “Resetting Nigeria” he posited that if we cannot restructure our values, we cannot restructure a Nigeria that is equitable and just.
The Prof emphasized that the theme, “Resetting Nigeria” is pregnant with more questions than illumination.
First, it implies that Nigeria was already set without disclosing who did so. Secondly, it suggests also that the initial setting is flawed, imperiled, or spent, without indicating why, when or how this happened. Thirdly, it suggests that this old setting now needs reworking but does not say who will do it, why they are qualified for that task or from whence they derive their mandate to do so.
He submitted that as a leader, we got to understand the diversity of this country and chose leaders who understand the diversity.
“Many explanations have been proffered for Nigeria’s current unhappy condition: corruption, violence, impunity, among others. I want to suggest that these are symptoms, not the underlying problem.
“Two decades ago, Chinua Achebe declared that ‘the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership’, and argued that ‘Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable.
“As a supplement or complement to this, I propose shortly to suggest that we have a structural crisis in our political economy indexed as it is on allocation rather than production.
“This is an important point to make to a gathering of professionals. The defects of this fundamentally flawed political economy are compounded by a long-established ethics of deliberate political innumeracy”.
“As a political economy, we specialize in fraudulent counting and accounting, legitimized post-hoc by the instruments and skills of the law.
“To preserve our innumeracy of public accounts, we have used everything from coercive instruments to commissions of inquiry whose reports have never been seen. In over half a century as a country, we have never held a credible census.
“To legitimize the outcome without addressing the underlying malfeasances, we establish Census Tribunals. In the same period, we have struggled to undertake credible elections. For each flawed election, we establish an Election Petitions Tribunal, procuring judicial legitimacy for returns that have been – in most cases – fundamentally flawed,” he lamented.
Odinakalu recalled various past avoided trajectories of the country and the deliberate choice of her leaders not to do the right things and warned of dire consequences.
“The only way to avoid those consequences is to come to terms with the reality that the country needs to be re-set. That re-setting, however, must begin with attention to the political values that underpin coexistence in the country.
“But addressing this values problem requires a new kind of leadership that is national in outlook. That is where we must begin and in this, associations like the JFCN have a significant role to play,” he stated.
