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Maiwa’azi Dandaura Samu, PhD

Consultant Conflict, Security & Intelligence

Justice & Human Security Initiatives (JUHSI) USA

Graduate School of Humanities & Social Sciences, NOVA Southeastern University, Florida

www.juhsinitiatives.com, juhsinitiatives@gmail.com; juhsinitiatives@yahoo.co.uk

+1-954-802-8860; +2348035925057

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION – Bad Governance, Broken Systems 2 Dissolute Leaders 2 Social Equality 29 Fragmentary Democratic Systems 4 THE NATION NIGERIA 31 SYSTEMIC AND STRUCTURAL CONFLICT 6 Social Inequalities 31

The Systemic Implication 6 Gender Inequality 32 The Structural Implication 9 Ethnic Inequality 33 Faces of Bad Governance and Broken Systems 11 Age inequality 34 Creating a new Social Order 25 Class inequality 34 Hard-line and Soft-line Approaches 27 Inequality before the Law 35 Social Equality & impartiality 28 Changing Governance Lenses36 Impartiality 29 References 38

BROKEN SYSTEMS

BAD GOVERNANCE,

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INTRODUCTION

To understand bad governance, one must begin by appreciating good governance. Never evaluate a

stick by itself, assesse it comparatively. As a stick may look straight whereas it really lacks straightness

integrity in some millionth of a millimetre. So lay the stick beside a ruler, then only can you tell that it is truly

straight. By best practices, security implications and conflict prevention standards, good governance can

simply be seen where efficient institutional and systemic processes exist. These include:

• Establishment of democratic institutions and well-organized public participation and cooperation

• Responsiveness (to the needs of the people)

• Responsibility based on valid value systems and attitudes

• Transparency and equity

• Accountability processes and efficient service delivery and explicit unbiased, non-preferential anti-

Corruption procedures

• Organic respect of human rights

• Transparent rule of Law (everyone equal before the Law)

• Multi-actor partnerships

• Political heterogeneity

• Operationable and sustainable productive public sector

• Leadership legitimacy

• Transparent access to information, and education,

• Political empowerment of the masses, and values that foster responsibility

• Solidarity with the people and tolerant processes

Bad governance is the opposite of all the above conditions, it reverses positive institutional and

systemic processes creating deleterious consequences that result in grievances, conflict, violence and

insecurity. It enables intentionally perpetrated chronic poverty, dislocations, societal distortions,

susceptibilities, vulnerabilities, and oppression.

Dissolute Leaders

The desperate situation of the developing nations has been masterminded by the joint actions and

inactions of rogue leaders, their cronies and a passive followership. These multifaceted actions and inactions

have caused numerous shortages that have raised all kinds of intentionally induced shortages, conflicts,

security risks, liabilities and helplessness. The leaders are wild, recalcitrant, uncontrollable and innocuously

oppressive (the innocuous or inoffensive nature of the oppression inoculates or sedates the whole nation

from rising up in arms to riot against their vices). They are so pretentious and pious, playacting to serve and

help the people while in reality, they are busy helping themselves. They put on a facade of goodness and

godliness but that’s all a sham, a cloak to cover their nakedness and shameful savagery. They lack the

awareness of what responsibility and responsiveness to the needs of the people truly is. If democracy means

the rule of the people for the good of the people, then what most developing nations have is not democracy

but fascism. It is most injurious and insultive to the intelligence of the public when leaders pretend to serve

them but actually serve their own bellies and interests and those of their cronies. These failed leaders

leading mostly failed states don’t understand what fairness, justice, social balance and the rule of law means

and so mix things up. Confusion therefore reigns all through the nation’s systems. Yet such leaders have the

servitude tokens of good will from their people, and all the advantages of knowing what is necessary, with

the strongest reasons to do what is required; still they persist in unfruitfulness, selfishness, savagery and

wildness.

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Leaders often are more active in doing wickedness than followers are in doing good, thus wickedness

and vice continues unchecked and unabated. If the people were fast in reacting to bad governance, bad

leaders will not last long. Alas however, the public is always slow in doing this good. Therefore the leaders

continue like rapacious lions. The judges also are voracious timber wolves, out every morning prowling for a

fresh kill, since they can’t fight for and protect the masses’ interests. The religious leaders who should have

corrected all grievances, wrongs, and the pervasive evils, themselves aggravate the situation like barren

beasts when most driven by famine. They are out for what gain they can get. They're opportunists – one

can't trust them. They desecrate their sanctuaries and worship places with lies and perversions, declaring

smooth things to their deceived, so as to collect the pay of greedy Balaam. They use God's law as a weapon

to maim and kill leader and followers alike in extreme rapacity, devouring at once the whole substance of

the poor and the gullible rich and the powerful who will pay anything for pretentious prophecies that will

place them into or make them stay in power. These priests, pastors and ministers have been turned into native

doctor style blind seers who will say what people want to hear as long as the price is right. Now, now results is their

approach to prayers and dividend delivery.

The leaders in the very midst of the masses should be naturally trusted by the society to feed the

people with a true heart, but how can they when such leaders destroy the national treasuries and resources

at will, and the people, having no protection against such rogue leaders, resort to violence and armed

defiant resistance. Past and current leaders are unmanageable and companions of thieves, they eat up local

and national resources, and the spoil of the poor is in their houses. They are like wolves, ravening the prey to

shed blood, to destroy the poor, and the common wealth to get dishonest gain. They are out every morning

prowling for a fresh official, political and economic kill. They defile themselves in every way with all these

abominable things, therefore the land is defiled, and evil in violence visits these defilements to cast such

rogue leaders out. Unfortunately when the land is visited with evil it is the masses that suffer because the

leaders are protected in their castles and immunity offices. But punishment keeps visiting the land for the

heinousness of their doings till the land vomits out even the innocent inhabitants. The very possession of the

land in their elected or political offices was a warning to them to be fair. Since they did not learn to use the

resources fairly, the ruins from the violent reactions of terrorism and insurgency, which will crown many of

such nation’s hilltops will become silent preachers to them in witness against their greedy insanity. They will

live among the memories of the visitations of providential justice and judgement. They abused the collective

resources, justice and fair play were neglected, the resources which were meant to be surety of future

prosperity, became curses for judgments on them and the people. The most carefully fortified parts of their

fortified exotic homes will be desolate due to greed, unfairness and injustice. The streets will be made waste

from violence and local conflicts. The desolation will be complete within as well as without. Ruin itself is

hardly so desolate as the empty habitations and forsaken streets of the troubled cities, which were once full

of life, now the echoes and the empty business and economic treadmills will sound like voices from the

dead.

Did the leaders want peace? If they did, they did not follow the path to peace. Leaders in search of

peace don't lie to their people, don't use words to flatter or seduce. They would be content with who they

are, and where they are. Not anxious, they'll live at peace. When leaders are insecure in themselves, they

believe accumulating wealth will make up for that gap and emptiness. But that hardly fills or satisfies, so

they have to get more to feel better. Unfortunately the more they fill-up, the more the gap grows. To return

nations to sanity, leaders and people alike must be content in themselves, feel secure and content in their

skin and in who they are, and not what they possess. Possessions don’t make a man, men give human

relevance and legitimacy to things, but valuing one’s own dignity and humanity is greater than the priciest,

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choosiest possessions in the choicest capitals of the world. Developing world societies must be taught to

reject quick gain and deny instant wealth. Praise singing and sycophancy are forces that engender classism,

corruption, and impunity, and precipitate levels of jealousy, envy, and intractable personal and communal

conflicts and insecurity. When the leaders and the systems generate conflict, they short circuit themselves.

Conflicts are unavoidable, but most debilitative systemic conflicts are entirely avoidable because they are

mostly man made, and disrupt political and regime progress designs. They can be avoided by equitable

resource sharing, fairness and social justice.

Fragmentary Democratic Systems

When a system is consisted of small, disconnected parts and institutional efforts that can’t operate

productively together to deliver a people satisfying outcome, the picture that emerges is a reduced, broken,

disconnected, inadequate and incomplete socio-economic and political image. So both the actors and those

acted upon are left dissatisfied, agitated and provoked. Fragmentary democracy systems promote

liquidation of dreams and visions. Fragmentary democracy inspires and vitalizes inequalities in all places

based on race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic dynamics. It sets the system controllers, ruling actors,

and population in suspicion of and against each other and the system. It is an arrangement where

professionals and the real productive sector of the society have no voice in societal decision making

processes and policies, seeding power and wealth in society to some of the insensitive and most

disconnected figures but self-ordained talking-heads in society not innovative thinking heads.

Fragmentary democracy is the resultant conundrum of the adoption and wholesale application of

corrupted Western democracy framework into foreign and indigenous cultures in Africa, Middle East and

Asia without adequate local contextualization and rationalization, thereby, generating and intensifying

multifaceted dimensions of conflicts, criminality and violence. The fragmentary effects make people anxious,

short tempered, irritable, irrational, reactive, aggressive and impatient. Watch any nation toiling under

fragmentary systems, you notice the chaotic state and nature of things, the roads are death traps, airports

are dead and dry, anywhere the people meet in mass crowds for transactions, you notice chaos and an

impossibility atmosphere. Everything is in a state of flux, disrepair and disarray; one wonders when such

nations will get it right. The system is set up to eat itself, the buildings and structures are unmaintained,

nothing can be kept sane because there is either no agency responsible for seeing to it that building codes

are maintained, or those empowered to do so help themselves with bribes and allow deterioration to

continue unchecked and the environment becomes a shameful sight. Most times then, it is no one’s business

to make sure things work, and if one rises up to do so, the crab business voices will crab him/her down till

one is so ashamed and backs down. Many return back to their developing nation homes from their diaspora

nations where they have gathered boundless skills with high zeal and fire to change things and make things

work, they are soon laughed and ridiculed out of their fantasy and utopian thoughts. They then settle down

to business as usual – running, oiling and sustaining the failed system. Confusion everywhere all the time,

and because people don’t want to be traceable, no one wants to maintain a structured documentation or

database to keep track of people’s performance or criminality, so people at will shift base and continue

committing same crimes unchecked elsewhere.

The broken nature of fragmentary democratic systems in developing nations are repeatedly ruined

and exasperated by impunity. There are those Individual, State sponsored, Corporate and group impunity.

This is the latitude to do what one wants without taking responsibility and get away with it because of the

failure of the system, and the failure of the judicial system and the rule of law egged on by protectionism.

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When a system is this broken it demands total restructuring, and reformatting like a broken computer hard

drive, and transformation like the heart of a man from inaccuracy to accuracy in rhythm.

"Impunity arises from the failure by States to meet their obligations to investigate violations; to take

appropriate measures in respect of the perpetrators, particularly in the area of justice, by ensuring that

those suspected of criminal responsibility are prosecuted, tried and duly punished; to provide victims with

effective remedies and to ensure that they receive reparation for the injuries suffered; to ensure the

inalienable right to know the truth about violations; and to take other necessary steps to prevent a

recurrence of violations" (International Criminal Court, 1998). To add to the list of required fields for fixing

the needs created by impunity, consideration must be made on restoring the enmeshed actors – perpetrator

and survivor, restoring relationships, clearing bad air, dealing with harms and trauma, reassuring those

oppressed and restoring stolen rights.

The power of impunity ravishes the developing nation in many ways. That is why developing nation

must be reimagined. The nation is leprous with all kinds of complications of corruptions in its varied

disciplines and directions. It is accused at the family level, where it actually begins, of domestic violence,

demonstrated by men oppressing and physically abusing their wives and children at home. Men eat up the

family by the profligacy or spend-free manner in which they plunder family resources. They drink away their

lives and meagre income in alcohol and slack women. They take advantage of the patriarchal situation in

their nation and are not accountable to anyone in the home. The wives and children have no space, equality

agenda, nor social justice within the family framework. Men are the gods of their families so have the license

to abuse them with code red latitude sovereignty. They have immunity from the detrimental effects of their

wayward actions, and feel exempted or freed from punishment, harm, or personal loss; so family laws are

flouted with liberty. Neither such men nor their families can ever move forward because their resources are

destroyed by their profligacy. The man has no vision, so lacks the muscle for investment, and since his wife

cannot caution him or take any vertical or lateral action against him for his recklessness, the family is busted

and necessarily broken, and damaged. Intractable conflict becomes endemic with this family because of the

male malevolent impunity. So impunity begins at the micro level of the family and then expands through the

ranks and levels into the national affairs.

The same culture of impunity is carried from the family level to the public spaces in the busted

broken nation. The police and the army unilaterally and in blatant disregard of constitutional arrangements

set up check points, road blocks and toll gates. Sham structures where they create traffic hold-ups and

bottlenecks, and rob the people of their hard earned meagre income in corrupt extortions. And there is no

recourse available or at sight against them or their actions by anyone vertically or laterally. Their wicked

activities at such road blocks also contribute to severe horizontal damage to the national economy. They

cause long queues at these artificial toll gates, forcing motorists to burn gallons and gallons of petrol that

could have been used by their owners for probably a full week runs without having to refuel. They take

advantage of every violent riot to perpetrate this act of check point vandalism. They do this without shame

because they know there can be no repercussions. The police and army check the populace, no one checks

them, they are the gods of the nation, and no one can escape their stranglehold. They perpetrate all kinds of

forced extortions of the people in all kinds of innumerable situations and circumstances. The perpetrators of

these heinous sham road blocks and other in-community extortions are aware their victims have no way to

instantly redress the situations, since their bosses are most of the time part of the game plan, and aware of

what they do, and demand or collect their cuts or ‘returns’ at the end of the day; so, the people simply

wallow in the shame and disgust of such latitude in broad day light. I celebrate citizens who are now using

their handsets to secretly video tape such corrupt shameful acts and uploading them to YouTube. I

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encourage that this be done on a massive scale, and in a professionally calculated manner. The population

needs to set up an anti-police/army security vigilante who will be armed with their cell phones only, and visit

such road blocks or extortion situations in communities to stealthily record and document such shameful

activities and immediately upload them to YouTube. If those meant to keep the law are not able to purge the

security forces, the people can help themselves. These cell phones can be used to stop any form of

corruption at its tracks. Citizenry should agree to use these tools every day to shame the rogues till the

nation is rid of such impunity. Use them at the offices when the boss is demanding for the corrupt, and the

unhealthy. Use them in job interviews, use them in contractual meetings where demands are being made for

bribes. In this age of technology, the population doesn’t need to keep taking the beating silently anymore, it

can do something to help itself.

SYSTEMIC AND STRUCTURAL CONFLICT

The Systemic Implication

In the light of the fragmentary democracy system, a systemic conflict is any general flux situation that

is created by public or private policy or procedural practice that affects, or has the potential to affect a

number of actors and stakeholders either deleteriously or productively and supportively. This can be caused

by any modification in processes and performance, procedural tactics, methodologies or measures (e.g. way

of providing support services and quality of such services, supply, and degree of access to such services by all

segments of society). In this connection, the law that is expected to fight for the public becomes an

oppressor in the hands of wicked and rapacious leaders, and order which should be looked up to as the

guarantor of the peace and safety of the society becomes the very instrument used by the powerful to injure

and destabilize society comprehensively. A systemic conflict is any situation that is created by public or

private policy or practice, communication, interactions and setup arrangements or networks that affect, or

have the potential to affect, a number of actors and stakeholders. It is therefore any service provision

condition or disorder that evokes reactions and push backs from stakeholders. It may even be as a result of

lack of formal, deliberate operationable policies or procedure to doing things, so those served and those

providing the service are left to second guess how to deliver or find help or proceed with meeting

stakeholders or the customer’s needs. Systemic conflict can also be as a result of a lack of clear regulatory

guidelines, and official non-compliance to set regulations. These failures can result in stress, tension and

misunderstandings. The way public or private employees conduct or provide services to stakeholders either

escalates or de-escalate systemic conflict. When their actions or inactions lead to intolerance, non-

acceptance, discrimination, misunderstandings and dislocation or disenfranchising of the stakeholder’s

interests, they are promoting deliberate systemic conflict. Any legislative, regulatory, or procedural change

that causes mix-ups, misinterpretations or misapplication of the change procedure, results in a systemic

conflict. When the system is stacked up against an individual, systemic violence is said to have been

committed against which the person can hardly rise above its drowning waters.

A systemic problem is usually due to a problem inherent in the overall system rather than just a

specific individual, or isolated factor. Such problems are usually sped along by structural complications and

interrelated factors. A change to the structure, organization or policies in that system could sometimes

contribute to alleviating such systemic problems. Systemic problems are identified through the complaints,

circumstances and issues reported for services not well or fully rendered. These may be investigated and

remedied where the system can be transformed, however, many systemic problems are so extensive and

institutionalized that they become almost impossible to fix. So, in many cases the errors keep rolling on

unchecked because of the costs that may be involved in fixing them. People sometimes don’t show any

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interest in challenging the system because of the depth and pervasiveness of the problem. They just choose

to walk away, so the evil keeps on being perpetrated and the inherent conflicts remain unabated with the

society. A systemic conflict may also be identified by the structures perpetrating it.

There are turnover systemic conflicts that happen due to the movement of people as they change

jobs and occupations. This is voluntary systemic problem which is controlled by the stakeholders for the

purpose of vertical growth up the structural ladder. The constant movement of workers from one

organization to the next means that employers suffer most from these kinds of conflicts because they

cannot be sure of keeping the same workforce over a consistent period of time, thus affecting productivity

and consistency of performance. Recurrent systemic conflicts happen when stakeholders lose jobs due to

fluctuations in business cycles and output. These are sometimes created by downsizing, globalization and

other cost cutting measures. The normal vacillation, oscillation and hesitancy of the economy as it g oes

through the cycles of prosperity and recession in all kinds of business weathers which takes its toll also

creates many issues that stem from the interaction of the business systems of inputs, costs, and profits.

Workers suffer most from the recurrent systemic conflict as many lose jobs they have worked at for decades

and may not have the skills that fit into the new business model of the organization.

When people report systemic miscarriages, and challenge systemic issues, or if the affected

organization, being proactive about the potential systemic dispute, reflect and make modifications, they can

address the emerging issues and restore trust and confidence in the stakeholders and the public. Facilitators

should always work with the organizations rolling out the systemic conflict to find ways to redress all

stakeholders’ interests affected, and not just those who report such miscarriages. This reduces the possible

wider impact, and minimizes public trauma and grievances that are aggravated by such conflicts.

A system is created when things, processes and organizational constituents interact and work

together to produce a seamless supportive outcome. Everything interacts with or affects, and is affected by

the things around it. So to deliver different outcomes from any state of affairs, the system that underpins

the situation must be fundamentally changed to enable and empower it to deliver different or superior

outputs. The constituent parts of any conflict cannot be dealt with alone or in isolation if a comprehensive

transformation is desired, they must be treated comprehensively and in concert. The elements of the

conflict situation and how they interact with each other must be adequately understood and addressed. For

example, no business organization can change the interrelated constituent elements of consumer, price,

cost, volume, quality and profit without impacting on or having to change the interplay arrangement

between each part. Everything operates in a continuum-tandem since they operate in relay pattern to make

business happen. So it is with conflict, the interplay factors must be addressed in relay fashion to achieve a

comprehensive resolution.

A systemic problem treatment approach is in contrast to the analytical/investigative problem

treatment approach. The analytical approach is used mainly for understanding the individual parts of a

conflict situation, but systemic thinking helps us to understand how those parts interplay and work together

to either produce failure or success, pain or pleasure. When things are broken down into their minor

components, without seeing the whole conflict forest, we tend to lose that total view of the interactions

between them. When one is caught in the vicious cycle of seeing only the smaller component parts, he

defines the whole conflict from the perspective view of that component part and can’t see the whole

picture. This produces definite interactional complexes and complications. One is then said to have tunnel

view or analysis paralysis. This is where one fails to see the whole or the system view of a conflict and is

going round the cycle of trying to fix the whole conflict by concentrating on analysing and fixing a single

component part. Most of life is spent on the perspective dominant focus rather than the altruistic or realistic

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dominant focus or looked at from the way things truly are in real life. Analysis paralysis keeps one from

adequately complexifying the issues; he thus loses insight, awareness, outcome visibility, synthesis, good

judgement and farsightedness. Synthesis helps one to put things back together again after one has taken the

individual components apart, studied them and appreciated how things work together. Both the analytical

and synthesis action approaches are required to happen simultaneously to perform systemic healing.

Synthesis allows you to find the repeated patterns and themes in an event so that when the systemic

rational is applied, one is able to list all the different components of the situation as one can find, after which

the similarity pattern and themes interaction can be established between them. This aids in establishing

entry points and allies that can be applied to addressing the situation. In doing so, one very valuable

approach is to order the patterns and themes according to their impact value, setting priorities on such

values and determining which aspects will be most important for use in addressing the conflict, and

discarding what may not help. Doing this, one is able to focus on the very important sickly componential

patterns and themes. This isolates a systemic emphasis-point (this will normally consist of a cluster of related

issues) in the conflict situation that may be mended so that the total conflict situation may be impacted with

the highest effect instead of focusing on any single componential part of the situation that can be enhanced

the most. Enhancing one component of a system never gives that far reaching impact needed to address a

conflict that has interacting parts. But striking a systemic cluster point will deliver the best promise of

recovery. Finding the componential pattern to focus on, in addressing the conflict allows one to also de-

emphasize or defocus areas that may be the highest escalation triggers to the conflict situation. To remove

escalation energies, parties need to stop focusing on these conflict triggers by blurring them out, this can

lead to a dramatic reduction in the conflict situation. The skill of the peacebuilder will be taxed to its highest

performance level at this instance, because failure to blur conflict triggers correctly could lead to other

unintended consequences. Conflict trigger blurring is like narrowing the pipe to stop a leak; however, if this

is not done properly, it could lead to a widening and weakening of the pipe all together causing greater

leaks. But a skilled peacebuilder can narrow some angles of the conflict in such a way as to occlude some of

the conflict triggers and incubate or initiate healing. When the wood is kept from being combustible either

by wetting the wood or taking it out of the fire, the fire naturally dies. Occlusion changes the conflict

dynamics. When the conflict dynamics are changed, the conflict itself enters a new phase – either for good

or bad, but hopefully for good. This occlusion can be done by appeasement of distant or smaller actors in the

conflict so they put off their interest in the conflict; compensation of some, where justifiably possible; and

the recognition of each actor’s traumas. These and many other factors can be used to occlude conflict

triggers. One has to defocus to focus. This allows one to narrow out somethings that are not prioristic to

things that are top level priorities. One magnifies the most essential priorities by defocusing on the

necessaries. If you find the heart of the escalators and treat it, usually the rest of the issues answer to the

treatment of the heart of the conflict. Defocusing any aspect of the conflict doesn’t mean ignoring them or

becoming blind to their demands. It means dealing with first things first, and last things last. Trying to handle

everything at the same time mostly generates more heat than expected, and could destroy valuable efforts

to heal. Systemic issues require focusing and defocusing to heal. Because a system is so big that no one

solution-fixes-all can ever be available. Identifying the systemic issues and finding their heart beat is always a

craft that takes all one has to offer professionally. Some systemic issues in developing nations include:

High dependence of the economy on foreign loans and investments or economic

dependence and slavery

Institutionalized bribery and corruption

Negligence or carelessness to infrastructural decay

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Neglect and abuse of the farmer and farm needs

Poor service delivery in all sectors of the economy

Recycling of old hands (career politicians) and never allowing a change of guard in those who take a run at

government positions and political appointees – the same people have been permanent secretaries,

ambassadors etc. since the 1960’s till date

Propagation of oligarchies – senators who want to be there for life etc.

Bureaucracy, vice and exploitations

The rich and large corporations protecting their interests by employing the National Assembly to write laws that

forge and force their interests against the interests of the poor and dying

Judicial system deterioration

Religiosity, bigotry, talking, living, and acting in a false, hypocritical, or affectedly moralizing ways

Vanity, conspiracy, complicity, and collusion to cheat the nation through over-invoicing and cooked up account

books

Public exclusion and lack of inclusiveness in systems, poor educational systems that produce vanishing youngsters

who have zero drive

Self-inclination, greed and passionate lust for money

Ethnicity nationalism and brutality to the innocent in homes and the work place

Self-deception, constituency deception and override

Banking systems and housing markets unpredictabilities

Professional abuses, university lecturer – student abuses

Security agents, police and military supply deficiencies, growing graduate unemployment and the unavailability of

real jobs based on training and education acquired at exorbitant costs

Stock market and profit market complications

High corporation and business profit margins that skin the public to the teeth and impoverish the people

Too many rules and taxes placed on the people that slow down development and hinder businesses from hiring

people

Lack of public and private institutional information, or deceptive information/data or blatant disinformation meant

to make government or the organization look good

The broken system hoards information so the people can depend on it as slaves losing their personal initiatives,

independence and creativity

The system collects information from the people but never trusts them nor can it be trusted

When government development priorities are not rightly placed and located in the needed localities or needy

communities but sent to constituencies of the favored and the feared

The system constantly shows that it is broken by its regular unpredictability and its amorphous nature, as it can be

interpreted according to each person’s understanding instead of a standard model of measurement

When everything in the system is screwed up, everyone gets sick, the list of systemic violence continues ad

infinitum depending on environment and business frameworks.

The Structural Implication

A structural conflict exists when an organization’s set up and arrangements favours some people and

disenfranchises others. Position and power arrangements most often tend to cause imbalances that

frustrate, and enmitize stakeholders. Vertical or horizontal hierarchies sometimes are complex, non-inclusive

and misaligned, thereby creating intractable conflicts. Work schedules, appointments and positional

selections, pattern of engagements, organizational or program agendas, distribution of development

projects, manner of alignment of relationships, etc., all tend to aggravate structural conflicts. Most electoral

structures are set up to intimidate or disenfranchise parts of the electorate and grant access to others. One

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requires a key or connection to penetrate such structures to find any headway or make any benefit from the

structure’s systems. Ethnicity, tribalism, classism, ageism, sexism, discriminations of all kinds, inequalities

between blacks and whites, separation of neighbourhoods composed of people of one homogeneous

religious, racial, or ethnic background; collection in an area of the city of families of the same income bracket

or religious affiliations are consequences of structural violence. In more developed economies, the black and

white separation is said to be worsened by racial steering where realtors control home buyers towards

neighbourhoods based on their race, religion or ethnicity. Poor budgetary allocation, and pursuing party

interests rather than the needs of the people results in the structure oppressing the people. Oppressive

legislation by the Executive, National Assembly or the Judiciary contribute to structural oppressions that

result in violence.

Structural conflicts are in some cases initiated when an organization makes any workforce change

due to globalization, or structural adjustments to meet with technical changes such as automation, or

changes in the composition of new type of product output due to variations in product demand by the

public. For example, if there is a decline in the demand for computers, the company is forced to shift to

textile production since there is more demand in that area. A structural conflict then results. When the

systems of an organization are set up to favour people from a particular region of the country, a structural

problem is created. Unmanaged population explosion can drastically affect how public and private structures

operate to cause or deescalate conflict. If the structures of the nation are not set up to handle such changes,

a competition or resource race could ensue resulting in job cuts, and income loss thereby triggering all kinds

of violence. This puts a lot of economic pressure and strain on the poorly paid. Structural conflicts

exacerbated by a weakened currency, illegal immigration, blurring of the skill job lines (where anyone can be

hired to do any kind of job), thus leading to wage stagnation and payment of dead income as opposed to

living wages. Unemployment is created by structural oppression and failures, where the public and private

sectors all fail to create jobs so that graduates from secondary and tertiary institutions are sleeping at home,

or kidnapping and robbing innocent people on highways instead of being gainfully involved in labour and

productivity. Over a million graduates are churned out annually from Nigerian tertiary intuitions alone for

instance, without the plan to accommodate them in the workforce. This forces all kinds of pain,

dissatisfaction, disaffection, grievances, dislocation, consequently sectarianism, extremism and violence in

the bid to find consolation or support from the systems and structures that have failed them. A powerful and

oversized central government at both the federal and state levels at the detriment of the local government

development creates irreconcilable, irrevocable, and major structural conflicts. The increase in goods,

product choices in entertainment, news, internet and social media and allied activities have made both the

public and private sectors intrude on the people’s private lives allowing the individual fewer choices. With

government regulations increasing on all fronts, it is becoming more and more difficult to start a business

and make a decent profit. The more government influence in the economy increases, the less the people’s

freedom, and the less vibrant and healthy still the society becomes. Dishonest military structures skew

recruitment into the military and security forces unfairly toward a particular religion, and ethnic group which

results in severe structural dislocation, stress, and tensions. The control of family rights to discipline and

raise up children who will grow to fear God and respect their elders has released the violent generation into

the society, so one can no more seat in a public place or even his house and feel safe, without the fear of

being shot. Poverty, oppression and hunger have all been on the alarming increase all over the world due to

domination, subjugation, cruelty, manipulation and control by the consistently powerful, aided by public

institutions skewed to protect them. The government is supposed to protect the people, instead,

government and corporate structures collude with one another and form structures and systems that dumbs

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and dumps the public. Money and power trump the rights of the masses who are defenceless and deserve to

be protected by those who signed the political and social contract to do so. The powerful and the rich make

cheap merchandize of the poor. The one percent of society enslaves the ninety nine percent.

Structural violence appoints unequal favour or support to one group of people over another, or

discrimination which is maintained and strengthened by a convergence of unacceptable and unfair dealings

especially in the areas of position, social usefulness, decision-making inclusiveness, rights, and prospects.

These conflicts are rooted, supported and re-enforced by the systemic conflicts in the normal operational

processes of public and private institutions and structures.

Structural conflicts result in economic consequences of housing shortages, the isolation of minorities,

a deficit in the potential for developing human capital, poor public schools and education, increase loss in

areas of low socio-economic status who will continue to underperform, in part due to the limited budgeting

such areas receive from the limited tax base in the region or allocations allowed by federal and state

budgets. Structural conflicts exacerbate the loss of social and security support systems that used to be

represented by business ownership, homeownership and communal ties. Political structures and dynamics

pulverize these securities thereby rendering communities vulnerable to all kinds of destabilizations and

reactionary elements. Subtle gender barriers in career advancement for women and youths, known as the

glass ceiling that limit the upward mobility of women and youths in the workplace owing to social restraints

that edge their chances and affect their professional choices are recognized structural conflicts that deserve

attention and prompt redress.

If the systems and structures are not set right, no matter the quality of leaders nations put in

government, the systems and structures will either bend and deform them or eat them up. Put a straight

man in office, the crooked systems and structures will make him crooked. However if the systems and

structures are straightened out, conversely, if a crooked man is put in office, the system and structures being

straight will either break him, or force him to change for good. It will be necessary to put policies in place

that will address the balance between the rich and the poor, work and family life, non-discrimination of

wages against women and youths, job creation and better living conditions, fair job opportunities and

streamlining of all public institutions and all instruments of governance into people friendly approaches.

Official action required must be accessed by the public promptly and freely at no extra costs or

discrimination of any kind. Monetized political arrangements, godfatherism, rotational or regional political

arrangements all are products of structural violence. The pyramid hierarchical arrangement of leadership,

top down or even bottom up organizational systems, classism and tribalism are all unfair structural

arrangements that hurt and traumatize the people. These structural and systemic ‘brokennesses’ support,

re-inforce and exacerbate the evils perpetrated by the service providing officials.

Faces of Bad Governance and Broken Systems

It is a shame to talk of the extortion happening at our sea ports where custom duties that should be

duly paid are circumvented highhandedly and stolen by people who join the custom ‘gang’ just for the

intentional purpose of corruptly enriching themselves. It is openly celebrated by unscrupulous citizens who

pronounce customs service as the fastest road to riches in the civil service. From school, young men and

women can’t wait to finish their National Youth Service so they can join the customs service and get rich,

build their mansions and ride their exotic custom built cars. True to their expecting, after a few weeks of

joining the customs service, they come home with new things that those working in a dead, dry government

office will never afford to buy with a lifetime income. It is told of how officers who refuse to join in the

corruption rut are molested and disgraced by their colleagues and top officers for daring to be different by

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rejecting exploitation of the society. How can such a nation be developed when those charged and trusted

with the very responsibilities of building it are stealing the building materials and tools? How will conflict

depart from such nations?

The armed robber in Nigeria is angry that having subscribed to the norms and demands of the

system, went to school and has been out of the university for over ten years with a degree recognized by the

system, yet no job, no safety net to ameliorate his pain, but he seats out there day in, day out, without hope,

then suddenly, he sees this young rooky who joined the police or army or customs service yesterday return

with a big flashy car. What?! He thinks to himself. He knows this can’t just happen like that, how did the

fellow even get the job, through bribery of course? You never get into the custom service for instance

without a god-parent, or paying some heavy bribe which will take an ordinary civil servant ten years income

to recover. Then when one gets the job, he has to execute ‘quick runs’ or ‘hammers’ to recover. The senior

officers know the costs that new recruits into the service incurred while seeking for the employment, so they

join them in exploring the tricks on extracting from the people illegal usuries without getting caught. Thank

God for the GSM camera, things are changing globally. So, the unemployed, watching the get-rich-quick

drama, tells himself, the best way to get his/her portion is to buy a plastic gun and go out to the high ways

and the plush homes and rob the people to collect his/her share of the national cake. So, conflicts are born

or escalated, and the nation is trapped into cycles of violence, armed robberies, vandalization, plundering

and harassments. The violent conflicts in the developing nations are a direct response by the deprived

masses to hit back at the system that has ignored, abused and extorted from them for so long. If the masses

don’t become violent, the blood of those who die innocently because of the deprivation of families caused

by these extortions will cry out to God. Natural disasters may also follow the land and one may be tempted

to ask why God is not doing his job in preventing these disasters. But the ground itself is tired of the

corruptions and the taking of all the innocent blood, so it’s vomiting the land in natural disasters.

Unfortunately, when natural disasters come, they visit everyone and don’t make selective judgement.

Insecurity due to foreign religious fanatic’s infiltration of northern Nigeria looms over the nation, yet

no one seems to be proposing anything clear to address this conflict except more state sponsored cycles of

counter-violence. Of the 1,497 known illegal paths of entering and leaving Nigeria, none is manned or

controlled; only 84 legitimate entry points are appropriately manned to check and prevent penetration by

radicals. Nigeria is ranked 148th, out of 162 countries evaluated, on violence and insecurity reduction

between 2012 and 2013 by the Global Peace Index (Deolu, 2013); with over 25,000 people killed since the

beginning of the Boko Haram conflict, no wonder Nigeria rates so low. Most western nations have declared

Nigeria a no go area due to insecurity. This squelches foreign investment sources along with the fallen

compatriots. Nigeria being the 14th most troubled nation in the world, beaten only by countries like Somalia,

Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Pakistan, Chad, among other conflict ridden states says a lot.

Nigeria ranked 117th out of 121 in 2007; 129th out of 140 in 2008; 129th out of 144 in 2009; 137th out of

149 in 2010; 142nd out of 153 in 2011; 146 out of 158 in 2012 (Elegbede, 2013). What are these numbers

telling us? They are saying, no one has given enough attention to internal insecurity since the early 2000’s

beginning from General Obasanjo’s administration, and the sharia conflict in northern Nigeria.

There are three levels of attention and controls required to end extremist terrorism problems – they

include the political, military, and security attention. Agreement among security scholars is that

Counterinsurgency is 70% Political control and 30% Security and Military control. If this equation is missed to

any small degree, counterinsurgency efforts will only be wasted and outcomes very dismal from the desired

effects.

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1. When the action of finding and destroying or expelling insurgents, keeping them from mushrooming,

protecting communities from terrorist forces is required, it is a military operation.

2. Police operations will identify, arrest, interrogate insurgents, political agents, financiers and sympathizers,

and bringing to justice the offenders and rehabilitation.

3. Political operations include public mobilization and participation in governance, repair of electoral

processes, political parties’ processes, designing, imposing and enforcing control policies, providing capable

political leadership, de-radicalization and counter-ideology efforts, managing non-kinetic counterinsurgency

like the provision of safety nets and support systems to absorb the shocks vulnerable sectors of society

suffer to reduce on generators of grievances and violence.

If the political control and policies re not given enough attention grievances will grow and the use of

excessive coercive action can create more cycles of violence.

As an oil rich state, Nigeria ought to be a very comfortable place, able to support her people in many

ways if not all, but this is not happening in terms of present national development and individual life

improvement indices. Disgraceful infrastructural facilities, and low industrial economy proves that Nigeria,

missing from the fast action tempo of the African economy, is in a lethargic condition with poverty boldly

engraved on the appearance of the average Nigerian. All pointers prove that the nation has been going the

wrong direction for ever – power supply, education, health delivery, and telecommunication etc.

Investments that would have ordinarily come to the nation swiftly change routes to other nations, to make

matters worse, Nigerians have grown to become aggressive foreign products consumers.

Youth unemployment is publicly said to be at 99.5%, those who have jobs are paid so irregularly,

pensioners who spent their lives for the nation queue up under the sun till some die just to access their poor

entitlements, and most times, go without their paltry stipends for many months. The rich and the powerful

travel to India and elsewhere in the world to get adequate medical attention because of the sorry state of

the health care system. The medical structures are built, but are just tombs for the dead and dying, the

needed tools and medications are swallowed up by the elected officials and hungry civil servants who rape

the economy with impunity since no one can ever prove their corrupt acts. Drugs and equipment are said to

have been bought only in the documentation in the files, but in actuality, the money budgeted for them was

never expended for such purchases. They were stolen by those trusted to ensure performance,

unfortunately, such theft is carried out in collusion with the higher monitoring authorities. Everyone gets his

cut. They stealthily package their corruption monster against discovery.

Public schools are dilapidated, students are studying under trees, classrooms lack seats, students seat

on the floor to receive prescriptive classes since books are not seen or known to be in classes or the school

libraries, that is, if any libraries even exist. School laboratories are so inadequate that students, who finish

out of these universities, hardly see any reagent nor perform any true experiments in such laboratories

before they graduate. When one block of classrooms out of the needed fifty classrooms in a particular

school are ever rebuilt, the governors will trumpet that as a most outstanding achievement. Yet there may

be over two thousand schools where pupils are still seating on dilapidated desks or floors to receive

instruction in the state. Every year, budgetary allocations are appropriated for the repair of these schools,

but none ultimately gets close to the schools, but at the end of the year government account books would

be cooked to show that the schools have been maintained, desks and books supplied. One goes to school

now, and never can tell when he will graduate. A four year university education can easily become seven or

even ten years, because of incessant strikes, lecturer’s tantrums, and corrupt detainment of student results

due to ungratified departmental staff who rope students down by bungling-up their results so they have to

repeat years in school till such administrative staff is paid a bribe before they report the student’s true

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results correctly; an aggravating situation that university heads of department seem to enjoy since they own

the fall outs from such extortions.

The education systems are completely collapsed. One wonders who is in control, is it the never

ending striking lecturers and teachers or the government. Government says university professors are not

doing their job, when money is given for research, no results come out of all the years of such investments.

The universities blame the government for poor, irregular, and epileptic funding. Who is right? The conflict

keeps raging and the students bear the brunt of the war of words and wits. The students in turn have their

conflict with the university system, they pay exorbitant fees but no delivery in terms of upgrading and

connection to the latest global trends in education. They don’t get the attention worth their investment

from instructors. Schools are overcrowded and the teacher-student ratio is abysmally overloaded, depriving

the students of the needed instructor’s individual developmental attention and care. The prospective

students and parents have very serious tensions against the university system too. They pay money to the

government so their children can take the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board examination (JAMB), when

this is done and the student has the required points from this aptitude test to enter the university of his

choice, the university comes up with a blockage by refusing to accept only the JAMB test results as enough

pre-requisite for admission, and insist on running their own admission examination where they are able to

manipulate the list of those to be admitted after the secret payment of bribes between three hundred and

four hundred thousand naira (N300-400, 000=00). So the best students may never get into the university if

they can’t afford the bribe. Parents bear the pain and burden. Having to pay that much bribe to get into the

school, cheating to pass examinations through sex favours or monetary insertion and extraction becomes

the new normal or the unremitting and the advised ‘legitimate’ way of life in school. If students succeed in

eventually graduating, they walk into the unemployment queue that never gets enough. At the end, society

takes the fall, because if this poor performing bribing-to-pass-examination student was a medical student,

and she graduates without really understanding what she was doing in medical school, patients will pay with

their lives at her consulting room in the hospital! And typically, as it is in developing countries, malpractice

suits are much unknown, so the student gets away with damages as a mal-practitioner, but the society is left

crying. Consider this scenario, the twist of faith may just set it up so that the patient that dies at her hands

may be a relative of the lecturer or director she bribed to get the initial college admission, or pass her

college examinations, or get the hospital job! What an irony?

When one gets to finally graduate from the university, hopefully eight or ten years down the road for

a four year degree, he cannot find a job. If he must find one at all, he must pay a bribe again of over five

hundred thousand naira (N500, 000=00) to get space and position in any office. I have personally been

drawn into the rampant issues of such bribe price conflicts for the acquisition of both jobs and admissions,

resulting in my cautioning perpetrators and consoling victims or the cheated. The most disarming thing

about this situation is that when the job seeker gets into that desired job, the first motivation is to recover

his bribe price, so he invents crafty undetectable means of doing so. Unfortunately a vicious cycle now sets

in, once he has become good in that evil invention, it continues as a way of life and the broken system rolls

on with impunity. No one can find the monster, so no one can really stop it. It’s such an invasive Trojan horse

in both private and public service that you can’t trace it. Because the very collectors of these bribes, may join

the disaffectioned voices to condemn the practice, so that even those who gave them the bribes and know

them, are truly baffled. Everyone in the civil service is singing the anti-corruption song, so one wonders who

then the corrupt persons really are. They steal and blink, selecting to believe that their own corrupt practices

are not as bad as those practiced by others, so those “others” must be the corrupt persons. When I pray

these days about the amorphous corruption situation that is so intertwined in the lifestyles of Nigerians, I

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continually hear God say, leave that thing alone, I don’t know how to handle those Nigerians. Please pray

about something else on how to innovate in the midst of the corruption situation so your life can be made

easier. That’s how bad and desperate the situation is. It is so ingeniously ingrained into the fabrics of the

nation, from the Imams to the pastors, from the police to the criminal, from the army to the insurgents,

from the schools to the work place, from the teachers to the students, from parents to their children – how

then do you help it? They say sometimes God doesn’t change the situation, He just changes you to meet

with and effectively confront the challenges of the situation.

All these factors alter the developmental direction of the nation by little degrees in their little areas,

when all these little areas and their little degree misalignments are put together, they shift the nation off its

developmental balance and course by a monumental angle shift.

All over the nation, roads have become death traps and oceans where cars swim through pot holes to

reach their destination. Where they don’t hold enough water for cars to swim, they become death traps for

hurrying motorists who jump into them unsuspectingly and become accident victims leading to many

untimely deaths. Unfortunately these roads are well provided for in annual budgets for maintenance, but as

usual in a fragmentary economy, some wicked, nonchalant greedy Nigerian has cornered the funds for

personal profligacy. When road contracts are awarded, they are given to party or personality loyalist who

are totally incompetent, and may never have known a roads engineer ever before all their lives, but because

they offered the best support or bribe, they got the job and are paid more expensive road construction

prices than anywhere else in the world per given road length. Unfortunately the contracts are given for

phantom roads that were never meant to be built, the contract was just a façade, a repayment for loyalty

and support. I was told of a state where the contractors win a contract, collude with the governor, and black

top one kilometre of the planned road construction from both ends of the road, the governor would then

perform a sham launch or flagging off of the pretended “completed road.” The media will be invited as usual

to cover the road flag off occasion, believing the road has been fully built, yet it’s just a farce. Corruption

swept the road away in its flood tide, and the rest of the road is still laterite, nothing done on it whatsoever.

If the road is built at all, the infrastructure cannot stand the test of seasonal heavy rains, and heavy traffic,

so, dilapidation quickly follows, and the road is again rendered impassable, needing immediate redemptive

renovation and the cycle of corruption continues unabated.

The procurement processes in government business is so rife with over-invoicing, figure alteration

and rogue receipts for expenditures that were never made. Despite the ‘Servicom’ operations to ensure the

success of Service Delivery Initiative, formation of due processes, and control measures put in place to

prevent fraud and corruption, nothing has changed. Nigerians always know how to circumvent order,

organized lifestyle, and due processes. The nation continues to be bled unabated by its managers and

supposed official protectors.

Though there are many honest, hardworking Nigerian business people making clean money every

day, the type of money being thrown around by people who lack the required entrepreneurial base or

profitable production investment and clout makes one wonder how they acquire such monies. This creates a

special ever growing class of underprivileged people, making poverty so pervasive. Most Nigerians admire

rich people and wealth, treating it as the only reason one has to live, and so, no one cares to check these

sham people throwing money around, because everyone would prefer to be left alone when they also hit

their criminal ‘jackpot.’ Owing to wide scale corruption, and the disenfranchisement of Nigerians, the nation

continues to breed widespread resentment that fuels crime and criminality, escalates regional tensions,

ethno-religious hatreds, terrorism, armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom.

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The lists of woes bedevilling Nigeria are uncountable and almost looking incurable. Someone not

familiar with Nigeria would wonder why they can’t just use the oil money to fix these colossal complications.

A complication has no cheap and fast way around it. The underpinning monster is simply extensive,

undiscoverable, inexplicable, enigmatic corruption. The reasoning of the system sometimes can be seriously

challenging. A Nigerian Senator earns in a month what would take the average university Professor thirty

years to earn as income. Conversely, 70 per cent of Nigerians exist below the poverty line of $2.00 a day,

harassed by deteriorating infrastructure and chronic petrol shortages due to the absence of NNPC petrol

refining capacity.

People go into politics with the principal intention of becoming rich by any means since there are no

proper checks and balances. This is the place where a man gets to political office very cold poor, and in a few

weeks he is a billionaire. An asset declaration at the beginning of their political life is all a sham and doesn’t

really man much. They soon will own properties in many cities of the world. No one can evaluate their

performance, and call them to be responsible since they are immunized against scrutiny. Successive

presidents and governors have great liberties with disbursement of state resources which they use as their

own private pocket monies. Monies re spent without accountability concerns, or sham audit reports are

prepared even ahead of the spending. They are aware no one can find their tracks which are well covered

and immunized by compromising members of the legislature, so they look away as the presidents and

governors dissipate public funds on themselves, their relatives and political acquaintances. Billionaires they

have become, flying their private jets, throwing parties in luxurious islands around the world at unbelievable

costs, enjoying multiple, multiparty overseas trips, all at the expense of the over milked masses who are

unfortunately an apathetic people. However, these political croons are not ‘really’ corrupt in spite of their

show of wealth in the midst of raw poverty, the show of wealth is their share of the national cake and rights,

who can stop them? If one cares for the same pleasures, then, run for elective office. Sometime ago while

finishing my PhD studies in Florida, a Nigerian was known to throw a week of parties in Florida, USA. The

man came into the US with over twenty private Nigerian jets, rented an Island where the rooms cost ten

thousand dollars a night and washed the weak naira away in the powerful dollar economy. But Nigerians in

this man’s village are grovelling in the ground for a meal everyday but no one will reach out to them. I am

not saying don’t enjoy your wealth, but be sure the money honestly belongs to you. If one makes his money,

I have no issues with him lavishing it the way he would, but if it is public money, why blow it away so

wickedly, and that, during a time of insecurity where thousands of Nigerians are living in Internally Displaced

Persons (IDP) camp shacks.

Owning a personal home is a nightmare and housing arrangements are completely an utter jumble.

No government has been able to comprehensively and successfully articulated a housing program, and come

out with a clear implementable vision on housing. Until people can build and own homes and live in them as

young people, we have really not helped the masses. The situation where your savings is what you must

depend on to own a home is entirely non-supporting and unhealthy. If one hasn’t saved enough money to

build, no one gives you low cost mortgage to build and own your own home. In this arrangement, people

either have to steal to build or they just remain perpetual tenants, paying rents that lick up all their meagre

income. They live to earn income for the landlords. All over the nation, one sees abandoned building

projects, started by their owners using their hard savings. As inflation kept biting deeper, they had to quit

work since they have to eat and take care of immediate basic needs. People may finally end up owning their

homes when they are almost dying. If one takes a survey of new building dedications, one will discover that

most home owners able to complete their buildings are in their fifties and sixties. This is totally

unacceptable. In the rural areas, people live in mud shacks and dirt floors, so communicable diseases are

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always what the hospitals keep struggling with every day from that constituency. The other fall out is that

many families use small homes, and live in overcrowded conditions that encourage outbreak of diseases.

National housing strategies controlled, and coordinated by government, have only been used to dupe both

the system, and the masses in the past, and have never worked. Affordable mortgage programs must be

made truly accessible to all with little or no collateral except for the house to be built. All these shortages

cause madness in the mind and kindle conflicts and violence.

Portable water supply is a nightmare to most of the population in the cities and villages. Those in the

rural areas have no such nightmarish luxury. Their well or river water collection habits are all they can pray

for that God would allow the ground to give them water to drink year in, year out. Where pipe water is

available, it is not trustworthy, its integrity is questionably complicated with microorganisms.

The health sector has been given so many ramped-up attempts, but always abandoned on the way to

success due to the severe activities of the behemoth of corruption. Hospitals are mostly consulting rooms,

with private pharmacies situated next door to the hospitals doing brisk business and smiling to the banks. In

the meantime, drugs were supposed to have been supplied to these public hospitals, but disappear as soon

as they are supplied. No one is ever called to take responsibility for the disappearance of such drugs, or they

are shabbily investigated and abandoned, and life continues as usual, people are dying every day from

avoidable health situations. The preventive and primary health provision, represented in vaccinations, and

community health services, have been a little more successful. In some reports from Direct Relief, "Over half

of Nigeria lacks sustainable access to safe water supplies and sanitation. Life expectancy is very low and

Nigeria's infant mortality is high. A large percentage of women die in childbirth. Other key public health

problems include HIV/AIDS, malaria, and respiratory infections" (Business day, 2010)

Business in the Nigerian government offices and systems are a major disaster. Nothing happens

because the established processes are sacrosanct. Officers change operational formulas and goal posts at

will as they go. That you got through the process yesterday with ease is no guarantee that the next time it

will be so. Nothing is to be expected as a standard but anything can be done if the price is right. Nothing

happens openly and in a timely fashion. Everything happens in shades. When one is told in the civil service

processes, ‘go and come, we will fix it soon,’ or ‘we’ll see what we can do about it,’ he must find something

else to do, because nothing usually will be done. The file will get lost, or the officer will always be too busy to

see the victim anytime he shows up to follow up the process. What a broken system, unfortunately things

are getting worse with each passing day and no end at sight.

Power supply is an essential commodity for development and industrialization. It was the singular

most definite element of the age of the industrial revolution. Successive Nigerian governments have fallen

into the trap of this behemoth’s never satiated hungered multi-dungeon belly – power issues. The country

has one of the poorest records of power generation, distribution, and services. No manufacturing

organization or business can thrive at the rate power supply is afforded in the nation, most manufacturing

production is always below 25% of installed capacity, some even much lower. So they turn to buying diesel

or petrol to run generators for production processes thereby forcing the prices of goods to rise above the

over pricing sharp edges, leaving the masses bleeding raw and panting. When the companies can no more

stand up to the angry product rejection by buyers, they just fold up. When prices reach their feverish highest

pitch, buyers just don’t buy, they go cold and the products are never sold. It is popular knowledge locally in

Nigeria that over 85% of the population cannot boast of going for six hours without power outages any day.

Most rural areas still don’t know what is called electricity despite the billions spent for rural electrification.

The corrupt behemoth got the billions, leaving the villages in their most familiar thick African darkness which

is darkest it seems in Nigeria.

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Millions of Nigerians and their investments always end their business day with a curse and sighs of

disgust against the corruption behemoth trumped government systems, and their failed power supply

companies or arrangements. I wonder how the brain of the failed power supply behemoth keeps living

every day with all the curses and insults rained at it. Lagos business areas and indeed any other city in the

nation in the day time is full of smug from the numerous little power generators that businesses have to run

to keep their petty commerce open to customers or for production. Of course, refrigeration for keeping food

and medicines fresh, air-conditioning and entertainment are all knocked out in the hot steamy weather

where power shedding is king. Consequently everywhere one travels people smell sweat and grime on their

bodies and environment without apology – the system is to be blamed. The use of diesel and petrol for

generators make nonsense of the meagre income or profits individuals and businesses make.

The behemoth of corruption in the power system has become a critical issue requiring a state of

emergency to enable its fixing. The failures of power supply programs suffered by the successive

government administrations have been due largely to intentional and outright embezzlement and

mismanagement. If all the monies allocated to the power sector by the successive administrations were

honestly used for the power supply purposes they were earmarked, the nation will now have no issues with

power failures. During the General Obasanjo era alone an estimated $13.5 billion was said to have been

spent on the power sector. This is not including billions also purported to have been sunk into the

Independent National Power Projects (INPP), which under all probability could have been enough to solve

the Nigerian power conundrum. The Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s administration’s power reforms anchored

round the Egbin Generating Company Ltd, a subsidiary of the then Power Holding Company of Nigeria

(PHCN) was bound to fail even it began, unless the power sector corruption behemoth dies and its practices

cleaned up from the Nigerian public service sector.

The importance of power to the nation’s industrialization cannot be overemphasized. “The

development of the stationary steam engine (for electricity generation) was an essential early element of

the Industrial Revolution. The world was becoming an industrialized place before the advent of steam

power, but would never have progressed so quickly without it” (UMW BLOGS WEBLOG, 2011). The industries

that existed before the power revolution were hand production methods that power generation

transformed using power propelled machines, it also created new chemical manufacturing and iron

production processes. Improved efficiency of water power and the increasing use of steam power led to the

development of super machine tools that resulted in the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution

marked a major turning point in history; practically all facets of daily living were irreversibly influenced one

way or another by it. It was noted that in particular, the average income of the general population activated

extraordinary sustained growth. The Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (2002) said, "For the first time in

history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ...

Nothing remotely like this economic behaviour is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a

theoretical possibility"(2002). “The real impetus for America entering the Industrial Revolution was the

passage of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. Americans were upset over an incident with the

Chesapeake whereby the British opened fire when they were not allowed to search a ship. They also seized

four men and hung one for desertion. This resulted in much public outrage and the passage of the Embargo

Act which stopped the export of American goods and effectively ended the import of goods from other

nations. Eventually, America went to war with Great Britain in 1812. The war made it apparent that America

needed a better transportation system and more economic independence. Therefore, manufacturing began

to expand. Industrialization in America involved three important developments. First, transportation was

expanded. Second, electricity was effectively harnessed. Third, improvements were made to industrial

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processes such as improving the refining process and accelerating production processes. The government

helped protect American manufacturers by passing a protective tariff” (Kelly, 2012). Sustained power supply

holds the key to the poverty elimination dream all so keenly desire. The defeat of sustained power supply is

the defeat and overthrow of the liberation of the masses; and those responsible must be called to account

for their performance failure. They have kept their fellow countrymen in the darkness of under-productivity

and under-achievement. No right thinking government will allow such an essential sector slip its grips if it

deserves re-election.

According to World Bank estimates, Nigeria currently loses in the average more than $ 2.5 billion

(N332.5 billion) annually to gas flaring. At about 57 % of the daily production of over 2billion cubic feet, the

volume of flared gas is said to be capable of generating up to 6 GW of electric power annually (World Bank,

Climate Change and Energy Financing Report Web, 2011). A lot of noise was made about the Liquefied

Natural Gas project, not much seems to be coming out of that investment, its gone cold. Wasted attempt? In

comparison, South Africa secured a loan from the World Bank for her Eskom electricity generation of an

additional 4,800 Megawatts by 2012 at the cost of $3.75 billion US Dollars using their abundant coal reserves

(World Bank, Climate Change and Energy Financing Report Web, 2011). Though South Africa is almost power

efficient, they make investments that pay off due to the close scrutiny of the system by the civil society

groups against corruption. The lesson for Nigeria from this conversely is that with proper planning and clear

focus, Nigeria can use their gas abundance to generate an unending expanding cheap power supply. South

Africa with its abundant coal reserve are taking advantage of it to generate the cheapest electricity available

anywhere in the world. Nigeria has abundant gas reserves, instead of flaring about 60% of it and exporting

about 90% of the rest (that is the remaining 40%) as Liquefied Natural Gas (they however embezzle this

income anyway) while their power generating capacity drops to a paltry 3, 000 Megawatts for a nation of

180 million people, they may do better ending the regime of gas flaring altogether to up their gas power

generation capacity.

The Nigerian Telecommunication service (NITEL) behemoth died sudden death at the hands of the

private telecommunication GSM services. Otherwise it was a glutton that never said no to non-reproductive

investments. The greed that was composed in the NITEL system was so bad that even phones to the homes

of the officers of the company at the time were not functional. How about the Nigerian National Petroleum

Corporation (NNPC)? The out of earth levels of looting and damage that have been going on in that sector

for generations since inception will take only God to discern, detangle and disassemble. For instance, 136

million barrels of crude oil worth $11billion, was illegally drawn off Nigerian income between 2009 and 2011.

80 per cent of the country's substantial oil revenues go to the government, which ultimately end up in the

hands of individual governors and hundreds of their associates, effectively locking a substantial part of the

national income yearly in the hands of just about one per cent of the population. Every succeeding president

is given orientation on how to swim in that NNPC adulterous river of corruption from the very first day of

taking office. They go into office breeding fire and brimstone on the NNPC enclave and institution, but the

operators of the corrupt system allow them to cool down, and then go for the kill when the new leader

seems to be hungry to recover from campaign overspending. Soon the president begins to speak with a

bifurcated tongue, making sweet promises of transformation and deliverance from all the broken NNPC

systemic failures of the past. When they begin to make such promises, one good at reading the signs of the

times will know the battle, and even war against oil block allocation racketeering, oil bunkering and fuel

shortage has been lost, everything gets reduced to mere talk, good words, fair speeches and hotel

conference room rhetoric that deceive the hearts of the simple. It is hard to believe that importers of refined

petroleum products will destroy all the refineries in the nation to keep their unholy petrol importation

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afloat, just like trailer owners to sure-up their trailer transportation businesses destroyed the Nigerian

railway system which was benefiting rural travellers and businesses. NNPC has cooperated with those

crooked Nigerian importers and refused to refine crude oil in the nation choosing instead to import refined

petroleum products sapping away billions every month from the local enervated economy. These monies

could have remained in Nigeria to provide jobs and services to the population, and reduce on the tensions

and local conflicts being experienced due to political grievances, unemployment and poverty.

The Nigerian Postal Agency (NIPOST) and the Nigerian Railway Corporations (NRC) have been so

mismanaged and rendered ineffective that one wonders how heartless and greedy people could become

against their fellow citizens. The railway, till tomorrow, is the only connection some rural dwellers have to

transport themselves and their goods to the market and other rural and city destinations. During the 1950’s

and 1960’s some of us used those systems to go from village to village and to the city to school. Without

them, we would have been locked up in farms and never would have known the four walls of the classroom.

There were, and still are no roads connecting many places cut off by rivers and rocky terrains that the

railway alone was master of, but all that has for long now been relegated to the history books. Trailer

transportation power brokers and owners have drunk the blood and tears of their rural victims all the way to

the banks with their ill-gotten monies from the destabilization of the railway services.

Today the Nigerian state aviation industry failure has proved that it is not enough to just invest

money into a sector, but the capacity and efficiency of managing, guiding, facilitating excellence and curbing

corruption is what matters. If corruption is curbed, very little investment can yield quantum profit results.

Nigeria in the recent past has experienced some of the highest fatalities of air crashes of any place in the

world because investments are never allowed to reach their targeted locale of change.

The National Population Commission (NPC) has failed to produce any credible census since its

establishment, nor has the nation succeeded in generating an honest national citizen’s ID card after billions

were invested. Population figures were downplayed in some areas and overplayed in others for the purposes

of winning political and ethnic playoffs, and national budgetary allocations.

With all these major clear acts of corrupt practices, insincerity and mismanagement, very few if any

have ever been prosecuted honestly, convicted and made to take responsibility for their shameful acts. If

convicted at all, a man who stole 300 million naira is given a slap on the wrist conviction and may be charged

to pay a paltry five hundred thousand naira to the court and he is released to continue the so-called ‘good’

life with his stolen money. His conviction will soon vanish from minds and records, and he is soon back to the

limelight of some other political or public service arrangement. How then can the population trust the

leadership? They cover for one another but hope that corruption will soon die. How? What magic will make

this cure happen? Thunderbolt from heaven may be? This goes a long way to entrench corruption with

impunity in the hearts of the political, professional and working class people and in fact the general public.

So everyone aspires to office for his turn with the national cake – steal or loot which ever works, they say to

themselves, let us do it since there is always a way of escape. But the nation continues like a dilapidated

building about to crash on its occupants or a car on an unstoppable unavoidable collision course.

Poor policy designs and the dearth of functional grounded research and long term planning capacity

joined with gross inconsistencies in policy implementation have compounded the Nigerian problem. One

administration plans and begins the journey of implementation, the next government comes in and reverses

the processes and begins all over. So the wheels of the cycles of underdevelopment continue to grind.

The anti-corruption institutions have been completely politicized and corrupted. Cronies of those in

power have been put into office as stooges. They are watch dogs that can neither bark nor bite. They are

domesticated play pets. Cases abound to my knowledge and in the print media where officers of the

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Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission

(ICPC) who are supposed to be the independent bodies to fight corruption in public and private service, were

accused for demanding bribes to end cases. They are also known to be used as instruments of intimidation

against political opponents, though these systems worked for a while, and seemed to have meant business,

they are presently fully broken and discredited, and so they can’t hold their heads above the waters of the

corruption in the nation. When they made honest public pronouncements about the corruption of public

officials and the system, they actually shamed corrupt officers enough to cause momentarily fear and panic.

Many were arraigned in courts and actually received dud jail sentences for a while, some others fled the

nation to avoid prosecution and disgrace, but the agencies soon found out that money can be made using

their organizations as milking machines. The brief mirage of success by the anti-corruption agencies showed

just what Nigerians need, that is to sit up and imbibe probity. Unfortunately all those indicted or suspected

of corruption in the nation today are walking around gleefully. They are made chairmen of the committees

of these same anti-corruption agencies in both upper legislative chambers of the nation. The seriousness of

the fight against corruption has been well watered down and softened. Those that temporarily ran away

from the mighty axe of the agencies have fully returned, have been pardoned, and now parade themselves

as the great advocates of the dividends of democracy. They carnival their private jets and showcase their

mountain cleft homes in USA, France, Singapore, Dubai and the list continues. Without any acknowledged

business investments these men are able to afford millions of dollars for private jets, yachts and a lifetime of

amusement and merry making.

Until a truly anti-corruption agency is established that is independent of the executive, legislature

and the judiciary so it can have the power to publicly shame established corruption patterns and cases,

corrupt public office holders, politicians, and policemen, Nigerians will have no confidence in the system

whatsoever. The whole national system has lost its legitimacy and credibility, and no one feels he should

contribute his best to the system where “monkey de work, baboon de chop.” It is possible to stem the

corruption tide with the right political will. Developing nations like none other need super anti-corruption

agencies that can fearlessly parade offenders, dock them in courts, call them to accountability, collect

reparation and restoration of all loots and send them to jail where necessary for correctional activities. They

need to be debriefed publicly sharply to discourage and teach lessons to those watching and desiring to join

their ways. They must be re-schooled in the essentials of ethical behaviours, public probity and

accountability and being their brother’s keepers. What Nigeria has now as EFCC and ICPC are but stage

managed and well-choreographed corruption cronies, without impetus for honesty and accountability

themselves. They have lost the will and any real courage to pursue small or large scale corruption scandals.

They have become mere mediators of personal disputes who have no interest in intelligence and

investigation but wait for cases based on petitions, yet pursue cases that are ludicrous, frivolous and unreal

with fervent hunger-like zeal. They run after frivolities and the ants, while neglecting the weighty matters of

the big elephants in the house that need sledge hammer to contend with. The air has been taken away from

their balloons. Those men and women that showcase wealth with reckless abandon, dress ostentatiously,

and ventilate with the air of importance need investigative scrutiny and visitation and not celebratory

chieftaincy titles. Politicians speak about dividends of democracy but really, they are ravenous wolfs that

empty government treasuries, and rape the masses of their needed support interventions, taking such loots

into their private water tanks and underground bedroom bunkers.

A young Nigerian living in the United States, asked why the Nigerians he sees, always call money in

the millions, as if millions mean nothing. Mechanisms beyond the criminal courts need to be set up to call

these men to give account to the people for those millions in a stakeholder style justice system. Criminal

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justice has failed the people. The situation where a man found guilty of corruptly enriching himself and

stealing public funds worth three billion naira is given a fine of one million is a major joke, after paying the

fine, he walks free. These corrupt public officials, who steal by the billions, or even steal at all, need to be

brought to justice in full view of the public for deterrence and example. The development prospects of

Nigeria are being systematically worked down to the point of annihilation by present and would be future

nation drivers as they commit their secret corrupt behemothic atrocities. They make laws to burn the young

who on the parallel have stolen simple mobile phones. They strip women naked publicly for shoplifting food

for their hungry children. The petty pickpocket who steals fifty naira because he is hungry gets taken to the

courts and the police take pleasure in parading such, but the big bandits walk home scotch-free smiling and

celebrated. What a world! I am not excusing petty stealing because of hunger or for any reason, because

corruption is corruption no matter its weight, but we need to be more honest to also parade those who do

the big stealing for greed and avarice or whatever reason. We must desist from parading those who stole for

hunger, we should cry for them instead. Yes, they went about finding food the wrong way, but no excuse,

who among us wont, if he had no other way out. Let him that has no sin throw the first stone. The bigots

who rape the nation’s economy need to be paraded in public places where their pockets will be publicly

searched and all the billions they extorted from government resources recovered and refunded to the

treasury. This cannot happen with the present legal system. We need a legal system that is masses and

stakeholder driven, like the instrument of restorative justice. Even if the criminal courts had all the

independence and courage to call things the way they really are, they can never fulfil their mandate because

they are hopelessly part of the soiled system. However, restorative justice system allows the public to be

included in the judicial decision making table where decisions are to be made concerning those who stole

from them. Such determinations should never be left to the choice of one man or woman judge who may be

entirely corruptible, and employing a system that has proven itself to be notoriously inadequate, pliable and

subject to gross, dirty manipulation.

The public no more believes in the axiom of ‘dispensing justice no matter whose ox is gored.’ Because

justice has failed on the altar of trust in Nigeria and everything must therefore be verified by stakeholders.

Any claim to prosecution must be allowed to be scrutinized and proved by the public to have been processed

honestly appropriately, and really allowed to run the full legitimate legal course without manipulations. So

corruption cases that have been truly prosecuted must show verifiable procedures on how judgments were

reached to improve on public trust and confidence in the judiciary. Open justice should be applied to

corruptions that hurt and harm the nation. Nigerian stakeholders must be called, the elders from the villages

who were despised, the local people that suffered untold hardships due to lack of roads to their villages, lack

of portable water to drink, the school teachers whose salaries always came six months behind schedule, the

students who lost ten years of their lives because of incessant teacher’s strikes, the farmers who were

always promised fertilizers that never came, or came at crooked means and very high prizes, market women

who suffered under the tension of transporting their goods at an unreasonably high cost to sell in markets

that hated them for the unstable prices of food, these are the stakeholders that should seat in public

restorative justice court processes to determine the cases of corrupt public officers. Not the judges in their

smooth gowns and wigs, they have been made comfortable by the same public office cronies. How then can

they seat in judgement against them? No man is allowed to seat in judgement against himself or in his case.

The discredited criminal justice system that has no public legitimacy likes to make cases very complex and

bogus so they can manipulate the system and free their guests of political largess visiting their courts as

accused criminals. They tell you corruption and political cases are complex. How are they so complex that

true and honest straight judgement can’t be made against them speedily? Summon those corrupt officers

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before the Nigerian stakeholders, and see how simple it will be to settle their cases before the court of the

people. Nothing less than a radical enforced ethical revolution will help clean up Nigeria. It will take

systematizing, defending, sternly insisting, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct in

government to guide executives on communication, responsibility, accountability to the people and true

ethics. Responsibility is the internal self-motivation to do something right. If that is so, then realistically,

responsibility can’t be delegated; the person receiving the responsibility must have an internal connection ,

gravitation, clockwork and motivation to be responsible for the delegated power to be carried out

responsibly. Yes, power can be delegated, not responsibility. When leaders become responsible and

accountable in the fragmentary system, things will shift and the masses will see a major difference. For it is

the refusal to be responsible and accountable that fragments the system. If one wants to be responsible, he

must give something to make it happen, otherwise no change can occur. To encourage responsibility, honest

prosecution of known past and present cases of corruption through the restorative justice approach must be

seen done, to restore some sanity. Such activities should not end in books or papers like mine, but,

prosecutions, ethics, and anti-corruption should be strictly enforced and popularly advocated. No nation

ever developed without this essential warfare.

The apathetic population must understand that politicians will not bring the Nigerian nation to the

kind of sanity this paper is espousing, or indeed the kind the Nigerian people desire and rightfully deserve. It

will take the people rising up to make this happen. How can you tell an armed robber to sentence himself to

death? Everyone knows that will not happen anytime soon, so those who are sane must chase the livid

clique out. But to expect the maladjusted political elite to remove themselves from embarrassing the

celebratory merrymaking is a no, no. It’s when you have the courage to detach that you are able to

denounce and damage the ungodly merrymaking. The political elites cannot detach from the system

because they own it, it serves their purposes, it was made to answer to their designs, and so detachment will

be a dark impossible move. Do they even see the wrongs in the systems and structures? The first secret to

recovery from any condition is recognition and acceptance that the existing condition requires treatment

and radical change. Hardened hearts deny the reality of the systemic and structural failures. Cold hearts say

nothing is wrong, and keep on with their failed status. Those in power believe they and their broken systems

are doing well, so they may never find the willpower to sanitize the system they are enjoying and celebrating

as a ‘major success.’ The leaders are in denial, they live in a make belief world. Nothing is wrong in that

world, but in reality, they feel so because of the level of disconnect between them and their constituencies.

The walls they have built around their palatial homes keep them from seeing what is happening out there

with the ordinary people. They have become accustomed to the rich life that is so insulated from the pains

of the nation, therefore believe that there are no more desperately poor people in society who can’t help

themselves. But travel just ten kilometres from any state or local government headquarters or urban area in

the nation and you will be appalled by the degree of suffering, misery, pain, squalor and poverty the general

public endures daily. It is the survival of the fittest and the grind is truly base. This is most unholy and

ungodly in a nation that is supposed to be the richest in Africa. A virile national situation must provide and

protect the needs and interests of the rich and the poor equally at all levels, places and locations.

Economies world over have proved the theory that detachment isn’t in the interest of the operators

of any system, therefore it is undesirable. Political leaders should never force themselves on the people

leading to personal detachment from the international systems and the nation ends up in pariah status. Idi

Amin wouldn’t denounce and remove himself from government after shedding so much of his people’s

blood, he had to be driven out, the apartheid government of South Africa wouldn’t denounce and remove

itself, it had to be forced out by the action of the people with the help of external sanctions. Augusto José

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Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile wouldn’t denounce himself and give up power, he had to be forced out by

the people. In all these examples, except one, it was the people not the army that rose up. So I am not

calling for a coup or riot, because nations don’t need power to change hands between the same career

politicians. It’s one thing to take out a regime and another to build a civil, and appropriately fully structured

functioning socio-economic society. Soldiers are part of the reason why the Nigerian economy for example

never found expression and has remained fragmented, so I cannot be calling for a militarycracy. I am not

also calling for the present government to just be changed, far from that, because another crop of corrupt

elites or cliques are waiting to move in and probably do worse. I am calling for a total shaving and

rearrangement of the structures and systems and banking arrangements. It will require cutting off of anyone

who has held office or played party politics or was part of a militarycracy. This should be done exclusively

through nonviolent action by the people.

I am not one that believes that former leaders must be lined up and shot like Jerry Rawlings did in

Ghana in expectation that the nation will rise out of their blood and ashes. I will not like to be part of that

kind of nation. If everyone considered insane is killed, and only the ‘right thinking and seeing people’ are left

alive, what kind of nation will the people have? Consider, if politicians succeed in killing all opponents, who

will they rule over? Because in the nation everyone may have something in any political government

dispensation they may not agree with, they become enemies. Even God doesn’t immediately kill people that

He in His infinite, omniscient and infallible knowledge knows have done wrong but have not yet had the

opportunity to be evaluated by the people and allowed to make their defence. He allows all to state their

case and defend themselves – he called Cain after he killed Abel his brother, asking him, Cain where is your

brother? Cain defended himself and God gave the sentence, but Cain still had the space to negotiate his lot

with God before he was finally banished to the wild to be alive, but no more allowed in the place of power,

since he has abused his opportunity by shedding blood. God set a mark on him so no one could kill him. He

gave him space to live and fix the past by restorative reparation to nature. Sodom and Gomorrah was not

just wiped out, God sent angels to look and warn, but when they would not heed, he sent the fire and

brimstone. Nineveh repented after hearing the angry and jealous rebuke of Jonah, and God allowed them to

live for that season of repentance. Though they would later backslide and would not sustainably repent

therefore would subsequently be wiped out after the death of the king who knew and repented at Jonah’s

message. Nigeria needs a situation where anyone who has tasted politics in anyway must be banned from

politics of any kind for life, and an ethically sound system installed by those hungry for it. Anyone not willing

to follow the new ethical arrangement must stand down and not join the new journey. Let the old politicians

be banked or step aside into becoming silent witnesses or reflective observers of the new arrangement to

safeguard sound performance. Only a man who used to be crooked can tell when a sound person is

beginning to bend and go crooked. They will be quick to notice when things are not going right, but their

dissenting voice should never be given any form of advertisement. This is in keeping to the proverbial saying,

‘it takes a thief to catch a thief.’ If they are lined out and shot, it will be hard to find credible commentators

or analysts against the new crop of operators and the bank of corrective experiential knowledge will be lost.

When Nigerians become fed up with the failings of the present fragmentary systems, they can rise up

in mass numbers all over the nation’s cities and villages to call for sustainable and lasting change and

transformation, where they can agree to ban all the ruling brigade and elites, and install a system with a

clean, well-structured beginning, that will have stringent ethical requirement of all that must be in power. It

should be such that people will be afraid to take up public office because of the fear of failing the standards.

The situation where people who have raped the economy, and don’t even know why they need to be in

government are jostling for positions like is done blatantly, and openly in Nigeria today is a shame and a

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thing of terror for the posterity of any nation. The space for all to play equally from equal access opportunity

should be created so all would feel welcome and the imbalances of power between the people and the

systems operators must be removed. Let the customer always be right. Where the people serving as chief

servants to their electorates are more important and fare better than those who elected them to serve,

disaster is said to have occurred. The situation where the people cannot see their president, governor, and

leader at any level in person without a riot is not a democratic system, it’s a mockery or travesty and a

recklessly broken arrangement. Right now, the game is to the advantage of the militarycrats, and politicrats

who manage military and political power and control in the nation. If they give you a note to an office for an

opening to a job or a business contract, it will open doors, if they don’t give that all vital note, you are locked

out for ever no matter how much loudly your merits may be shouting for attention and employment. If a

new order that will support all will be created, then social equality based on the principles of social justice

theory must be the watch word, and partialities as they are known in the system must give way to sanity.

Creating a new Social Order

In the 1980’s through the early 2000’s, Nigeria took special pains to systematically develop her

football culture. Young football hopefuls were scouted out from all over the nation like gold. Scouts were

roaming the country sides and neighbourhoods for talents. Some of these talents went to European clubs to

play as part of the set up for excellence. National scouts collected these talents and began to build youth

teams with the eye of graduating them into the senior football team the Super Eagles. This process was

continued every year and sustained permanently. This paid off a lot because then they began to win big

games. Big games against big footballing nations like Brazil, Mexico, and European countries. The

government swung its weight behind this venture because they saw a glimmer of hope that given the

attention, Nigeria could do very well in the football arena.

How can this model be applied to the macro situation of nation building to take the broken country

to the repair shop for fixing and subsequent movement to the developed category of the people’s dreams?

Surely as it worked in football, it could work in nation building? I am not in any way asking that government

take over the running of people’s lives as in a socialist system but government invest in people as opposed to

structures and ideological games.

This model calls for spending sweat driving time, attention, care and hard core cash into local context

research for developing potentials in all the above discussed elements that make the nation’s systems

broken – like electricity, education, affordable housing, petroleum and gas, solid mineral mining and refining,

communication, sane public service, etc. research and development cannot be given just lip service where

development is seriously being wooed. It must take centre stage. Leaders must dream it, sleep it, walk it and

talk it. Public policy design must be informed only by research not hear say or political gimmick if

development, peace, safety and development must be achieved. To effectively harness the inherent

development values hidden in research, researchers must be celebrated, and paid well so they can have no

other earthly concern but the research concern before them. The existing research institutions must be

redesigned to conform to present day realities. A situation where research institutes are poorly equipped

except for tables, chairs and human beings only makes a mockery of human intelligence.

Dependence on generic research results for program planning must be immediately de-emphasized

in favour of local contextualized or specific research designs targeted at specific local development needs.

Yes, local research can be expensive, but it is the only way forward. Generic research results forced on

developing societies are meant by the foreign systems to keep emerging nations in perpetual slavery and

dependence. It is practically impossible in most fields of development that someone sitting in America who

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knows little or nothing about your context can help you out of the hole he hasn’t the foggiest idea what the

hole looks like, let alone know what the dynamics of the hole involve, or claim to understand the design and

intervention requirement for that specific local hole. Holes in America for whom the generic research

developing countries like to consume for driving their policies and economies were specifically designed for,

are very radically different from the ones in developing countries! It is true that we don’t need to keep re-

inventing the wheel; however, if the wheels America will give you are not the same rim size with your holes,

you then have a crisis in your hand after paying so much for the American wheel. The ideas developing

nations collect from America and elsewhere were designed for their situations, though transferable, can

never fit the local needs of any nation. Therefore every nation must always spend enough time and

resources to tweak such donated ideas to fit local situations. This must be however driven by local

contextualized research.

Operationable research must be authoritative, significantly relevant, accessible or easily understood,

and must respond coherently to local contexts. Research is the chief instrument for settling disputes on what

can work and what will not. All theories must be duly tested for their efficacy and validity before monies can

be poured out into any project. It is commonly feared that research takes so long and the outcome normally

disconnected to real world practice. This is the old view, but very relevant research methods are available

today that allow researchers to challenge that old defeatist assumption. However, if research will be

practically accessible, it must occur within the natural constraints of the policy implementation environment

and prove its worth by addressing the multiple confounding influences that exist in that environment.

To be relevant for public policy formulation, it must move from hypothetical grounds to real life

experiences in the local context. It must be aware of the emerging local meanings connected to the research

theory, and the specific ways that subjects and indeed the public is being shaped by these meaning makings.

Research outcomes must be placed within the practice reach of policy makers and implementers. There

must be connection between what the research tried to design and its results end use. Users must see

clearly how to apply it; otherwise it is just mambo jumbo and a waste of money. However, research must not

be treated as the god of policy formulation but rather a partner in progress. False expectations sometimes

result in false research results. Results tailored to meet the need of the user. This can have untold

consequences.

To cut out a new social order, developing countries must consider reduction in the use of coercion,

power and suppression. State violence, repression and the use of intolerant or reactionary relativity is a

major destroyer of innovation and inventiveness. The population must be allowed to express themselves

non-violently when they are in disagreement with anything happening in society or governance processes.

The fear of conflict and the so called break down of law and order is what necessitates some of the existent

official repression. But some positive, non-violent conflict is good, as it leads to exposure, revelation, growth

and improvement. These voicing of desires, dissent, and opinions by the masses can be used as action

research to move the society forward. But when people are shut down, they die with the opinions that could

have propelled the nation forward. Some coup d’état plotters are killed too quickly before they are able to

give to the world the motivation that so made them to risk endangering their lives in staging the coup. They

should be allowed to say what they are seeing, feeling and innovating that is worth the stress of a coup.

To create a new social order, nations and their building blocks will need to be reimagined. In the

reimagined nation, conflict sensitivity will mean that government must be willing to come under or be held

accountable for its inactions, actions and activities. It must make itself vulnerable to the people that elected

it. Regular stakeholder dialog, town hall meetings, stakeholders’ project monitoring and evaluation and must

allow accessibility to the scrutiny of civil society organizations. These are all parts of the accountability

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process to reduce of tension, mistrust and conflict. The three tiers of government – Executive, Legislature

and the judiciary at the federal, state and local government levels must follow this same accountability

pattern. This will give the reimagined nation’s government great legitimacy, acceptability, potency and

efficiency. Procedures, processes and laws must literally mean in practice what they say on paper in

government processes and activities. No one can or should be above the law and all forms of immunity must

be expunged from the constitution or any system of the nation or business entities to discourage impunity.

Hard-line and Soft-line Approaches

To address the issues of structural and systemic problems in a nation like Nigeria for instance, it will

be inadequate to depend on the anti-corruption efforts of the different organs of government and the anti-

corruption agencies alone. Apart from the inability of parastatals to purge themselves from within, the anti-

corruption agencies themselves are plagued with corrupt officials who collect bribes and let the guilty run

free without taking the responsibilities of the harms they caused society, thus empowering and hardening

corrupt practices. This is so because if one knows that the worst that can happen to him after he steals

public or private resource will be just the burden of sharing the stolen booty with the anti-corruption

agencies’ officials, he is very relaxed about doing evil. I love the admonition of the Bible in matters as these:

“Why do people commit crimes so readily? Because crime is not punished quickly enough.”

Ecc. 8:11 – Good News Bible

“Sometimes people are not immediately punished for the bad things they do. Their punishment is

slow to come, and that makes other people want to do bad things too.”

Easy-to-Read Bible

Conversely, “When the scorner is punished, the simple is made wise: and when the wise is instructed,

he receiveth knowledge.” Pro 21:11 - KJV

Besides the above, Nigerians are known to be experts at circumventing processes and procedures,

and finding short cuts. They always know how to devise or have their way of defeating any well-meaning

cleansing and purging effort advanced to sanitize the systems and structures providing services and

developmental activities.

It becomes extremely necessary to design and follow comprehensive multi-model soft-line

approaches to heal the systemic problems. Such frameworks must include compulsory trainings and

exercises. Everyone in society must take these trainings either in school, workplace or as a free citizen.

Without proof of having taken these trainings and exercises, jobs, education, government services etc.

cannot be accessed or made available to the individual. These soft-line multi-model approaches, trainings

and exercises may include:

i. Cultural frameworks for responsibility and restraint

ii. Value systems and shaming

iii. Principles of family and friends counter-mortification schemes

iv. Principles of public counter-corruption action (Strategies for public participation in the war against

corruption by creating structures that allow the public to take legitimate action against unsatisfactory

performances)

v. Accountability and responsibility countermeasures

vi. Principles of productive civic responsibility

vii. Principles of citizen awareness and human family sensitivity

viii. Principles of Ubuntu (I am because you are)

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ix. Corruption and Impunity preventive mentoring (everyone has someone in the system who has

speaking rights into his/her life processes)

x. Neighbour Keeper Theory (Principles of being one’s brother’s keeper)

Soft approaches must be 60% and hard approaches 40% of the measures to be used to combat

structural and systemic problems. If this mix is not achieved, the problems will persist intractably. It is always

necessary to balance the pillars of warfare against corruption and poor systemic performance by using both

political and coercive or hard-line means. National development is always a political effort, therefore it

follows that the political or soft-line approaches must be given the greater prominence. The hard-line means

include the identification and immediate prosecution and publication of the punishments meted to

corruption offenders to serve as deterrent.

Social Equality & impartiality

Equality as used in this paper is not making everyone the same nor have uniformity in all dimensions

of life but rather the creation of a level playing field where all can have a go at the pie. It is not everyone

driving the same car, living in the same kind of houses, wearing the same clothes and eating the same meals.

It means allowing everyone to run the race for greatness with his two legs unfettered. The situation where

some people on the same race have their feet shackled while others are free and asked to run the same race

makes life a regret. The situation where some are blindfolded and others given night vision glasses to

enhance their sight and asked to fight the same battle in the same night environment is disheartening.

Where some have their hands tied and others have hard gloves on their fists and asked to fight in the boxing

ring is so deadly, overwhelming and unfair.

True social equality allows everyone the opportunity to become what he can be without structural,

cultural or relational blockages. If admission to higher education is by passing an entrance examination,

equality would not screen any candidates out based on birth advantage, connection and ties, instead, merit

becomes the reason why and the how students will be admitted and given placement in the institution. To

get anywhere, everyone must be stripped of who he thinks he is, so that all may be normal human beings

like everyone else. Dignity must be restored to every citizen. No one can be more equal than the other. All

lives must be sacred and none made cheap and disposable. The humanness in one must also be given to all

others. No one deserves to be despised no matter his birth, status and level in the society. When change

happens and dignity is restored, everyone becomes somebody deserving honour, self-worth and credit.

When this happens, no one jumps the queue at public or private places. Sirens that harass road users in

developing nations will disappear from every road and only used by ambulances and fire trucks or personnel

on emergency duty. The situation where governors and other government personnel use siren to push the

citizens who put them in office off the road is so disgraceful, dishonouring, traumatizing and abusive. It tells

everyone that they are nobodies and so should get off the street for that somebody as he approaches.

Usually citizens lose their appeal, and have no rights after elections. Why do the elected leaders blow siren

on high ways? Why do they want to pass so quickly? What are they afraid of? Is it the issue of security? Do

the citizens not need the same security? When a man is elected or is it selected to office, he is sent there to

watch out for the security of the people, not use the power to ride over them. If the roads are unsafe, then

the power broker should be there on the road like everyone and sweat it out or do something to make the

roads safer, freer, congestion free and usable. If it is because of the hurry to attend to state matters, are the

other road users not equally state matter and of great concern to the leaders? Why crush one state matter

to attend to another? Or is he trying to jump the queue of the annoying go-slow traffics common on city

roads? Then use the office to redesign roads to reduce on congestions. The people must refuse to give way

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to such errant nonsense. Why are developing nations always led by elected and appointed ingrates and

injudicious people? Unfortunate the poor army or police private is the one being oppressed with a whip to

beat up anyone who delays or refuses to give way to the important man after hearing the siren.

In a new nation, dignity will be the hallmark of rulers and governance. People will walk with their

heads up and have reason to smile and feel confident. When sanity and rationality will return to the nation,

leaders will fear the people and not the other way round.

Impartiality

Impartiality is when the referee has no direct personal involvement or personal interest and not

favouring one person or side more than another. Known also as even-handedness or fair-mindedness, it is a

judicial term holding that decisions should be based on objective criteria, rather than on the basis of bias,

prejudice, or preferring the benefit to one person over another for improper reasons on account of

something personal - like his wealth, rank, function, and influence by personal friendship, or by the fear of

the person. In the leader’s capacity as a Judge he will not be influenced in awarding retributions, in actually

pronouncing and executing sentence, by any partiality, or by regard to the wealth, function, rank, or

appearance of any person. He must always make honourable decisions, he will judge things and people as

they ought to be judged; according to their character and deserts and not contrary to their character, or by

partiality. In sighting projects, allocating positions and resource distribution, he cannot be personal in his

choices and decisions but more-inclusive and open minded. People say life is not fair so why insist on

equality, but if you look well at the way things happen in life, one notices that God does not exhibit any bias,

and therefore reasonable and very impartial. When He looks unreasonable, it is not because of a partial

stance but for personal qualification reasons that people just can’t see as humans. To be generous, things

must be done according to the rule. Impartiality means holding elections without bending the rules of the

game to favour any. The goal post is not moved or changed at the last minute or during the vote counting

processes. If the enemy is winning the count, the numbers are given the favoured no matter the cost so he

beat the competition.

When we say life isn’t fair, we say so because we want to justify bending the law in our ways to

favour someone or a process. We say so to give our conscience room to ventilate, become insensitive to

weakness or wickedness and eliminate deserved guilt.

Social Equality

Social equality allows all people in every society or community to have the same status in many

respects. At the very minimum, it embraces equivalent rights for all under the law, access to security,

ownership of voting rights, freedom of speech and association, property rights, and equal access to social

goods and services. Equally, it also takes into account concepts of economic equity or impartiality, i.e. access

to education, health care and other social securities. As mentioned already it embraces equal opportunities

and obligations, in so doing, it implicates the whole of society. No one therefore can say he is there to be

served because he also has the obligations to give equal opportunities to others in the areas of his dominion

of control!

In the new nation of social equality, legally enforced social class or caste boundaries will be scrapped

and discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of a person's identity will become history. So, sex,

gender, race, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion,

convictions, opinions, health or disability cannot be used as reasons for unequal treatment under the law

and should therefore not reduce opportunities unjustifiably.

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Social equality in the reimagined nation refers to both social and economic, or income equality where

two people with the same qualification are not paid differently based on sex, age, religion or ethnicity.

"Equal opportunity" is not interpreted as being judged by ability but by equal space to act for oneself in any

given advantage. This may be incompatible with a free-market economy but it gives all that open space to be

who everyone wants to be. The problem of horizontal inequality, that is the inequality of two persons of

same origin and ability is thereby eradicate. This is not the demand for perfect social equality which is an

ideal situation but the demand for balanced breathing space for all to make their attempt at their desired

goals. Judgement of ability can be flawed, some abilities are growing and are being incubated. So giving

everyone good space allows those individuals whose abilities are undergoing incubation to get better as they

find space to express themselves. In complexity economics, it has been found that horizontal inequality

arises in complex systems, but the new nation sees a situation where blockages are eradicated and equalized

for all.

Someone might be quick to argue that the issues of inequality are the same everywhere in the world.

We all have to challenge that erroneous perception. Deficiencies prevalent worldwide have been challenged

and dealt with by determined experts and committed nations. Practiced inequalities must therefore be

challenged and not just overlooked or tolerated because they exist prevalently world over. Diseases of

pandemic proportions have been eradicated beginning from one person or a nation till the good work

spread to all other nations. So it must start from someone and somewhere. Why should that somewhere not

be this nation? Is it true that because inequality exists everywhere, it must exist in this particular nation? The

fact that people have obesity everywhere in the world does not mean a health conscious nation shouldn’t

take precautionary action to keep its people from joining the league of obese societies. What needs to be

done must be fully engaged or should be done with the resources at one’s disposal. That another man’s

beard is on fire doesn’t mean one should set his aflame! Or better still, go near him and join him to catch

fire! Nations must evaluate where they are on the ladder of inequality, they must audit themselves and be

honest with the suffering, classless masses, and move in the direction of changing the balance and shifting

the effects. As long as the nation is seeing correctly what is ailing it in this area, they may find the energy to

take the next steps of correcting the existent shortages. But if they are covering their faces and saying they

can’t see inequality in their midst or they plain don’t want to see it there because there is nothing they can

do about it, the situation will implode and cave in on all and the class divide will fail everyone. When your

brother suffers, you suffer in more ways than one. That inequality exists all over the world doesn’t make it

justifiable for the Nigerian context for instance. Serious attempts must be made at understanding and

meeting the felt needs of individuals, communities, ethnic and religious groups. Enough of the Sheraton

Hotel conferences, arm chair diplomacy and fair speeches, these must end and give way to people needs

fulfilling action. The situation where politicians take little ideas and turn them into big words to confuse the

people leaves developing nations in the jungle of underdevelopment. People have real issues and all they

see leaders, legislators and government managers do is hold conferences about governance in hotels and fill

people with noise, promises and more fair speeches. The oppressed masses don’t live in hotels , they care

less about your great Newton discoveries, fair Ghandi speeches or Martin Luther King Jr. talks, they are in

forsaken, broken and disregarded villages. How do you meet them? Go to them, creatively and

therapeutically listen to and understand them. They know what they want. So don’t design for them what

you perceive they need! Do something real from what they say; something substantial about what they feel

for most. Stop tokenistic eye service pet programs and propaganda and move on to the people’s side.

Security is gained by more inclusive governance that equitably and genuinely distributes resources and

power. When politicians take it all after elections, then the people go home to groan, out of the groaning will

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arise a monster of violence that will hunt all. The winner take all attitudes exacerbate tensions and

complicate security situations in villages that erupt like volcanos in cities and throw the nation in panic,

violent frenzy and socio-economic disarray.

All the poverty alleviation programs tooted by leaders fail because the enterprises fail to connect

with the perceptions, needs and opinions of the people. Leaders wake up one day with their vision and think

they have discovered what the people want. So they proceed with their pet project with all fanfare. They

anoint the vision with all kinds of activities and resources. They pull the media and carry on with wasting

resources in campaigns meant to convince the oppressed masses that they need the program. They expend

all the energy the whole civil service system can muster. At the end of the day everything crashes, and then

they say I’ve done my best. If their best doesn’t cut it, then they’ve done nothing. Everything times nothing

equals to nothing, right – that’s your school maths (Everything X 0 = 0). A zillion dollars multiplied by zero

equals to zero. Zero here means, you did not consult the people to know what they needed but you went

ahead to do your thing and multiplied your thing by nobody, so you got nothing. No poor man who is feeling

the heat was on the table of thoughts with the system’s operators, except your advisers who think all the

people need is a just another token of the dividend of democracy. People are not looking for hand-outs.

Leaders assume the people, this therefore leads to waste. People need honest engagement not

enchantment. Is it not Nelson Mandela who said – overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of

justice and truth. Where is justice in our programs when the benefactors and owners of the program are not

consulted before spending their resources? Where is truth when leaders have lost touch with reality and the

people they pretend to serve? Yes, it is true that more people die of poverty and hunger than disease but if

people are not on the agenda setting table, and their voices heard, leaders can’t be successful no matter the

programs they spin. People need to be surveyed, interviewed, discussed with in focus groups to determine

needs and engage thoughts. The oppressed masses may have no power but hey are sure of one thing – they

know the elected officials do not know and never speak the people’s mind. So they can’t trust them, no

matter how the politicians try. Yes elected or is it selected officials represent a constituency, but the people

know it is not their interest they represent! When they hardly can eat a meal a day, they watch the elected

officials in a matter of weeks after elections building sky scrapers in their villages and cities, in USA, UK, etc.,

how can they then trust such to represent them? Where did the leaders confer with the masses to

understand their minds? When did they show up to engage with the people to know their minds? And if they

confer at all, do they really take what people say and not just try to convince the people that they have no

brains because they haven’t been to school or to the national assembly or the villa to know what is politically

correct? So the people receive the lectures and keep quiet and allow business to flow as usual. But the

youths are saying, “Enough is enough, we will make our voice heard through kidnaping and get ransom

payments, you will hear us one way or another!”

THE NATION NIGERIA

Social Inequalities

Social inequality is exhibited through relational processes in society that block or limit and impair a

person’s or community’s shared status, collective class, and communal engagement. This can be structured

to include access to voting rights, freedom of speech and association, the extent of property rights and

access to education, health care, quality housing, traveling, transportation, vacationing and other social

goods and services. According to Cohen Lawrence et al (1981), from the above limitations social inequality

can also be seen in the quality of family and neighbourhood life, occupation, job satisfaction, and access to

productive credit. If these economic divisions harden, they can lead to social inequality.

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The motives and explanations for inequality may vary, but are often broad and far reaching.

Inequality can arise from a people’s meaning making of right gender roles, or through the pervasiveness of

social stereotyping. Discriminatory legislation can also engender and establish social inequalities. It is

commonly seen between ethnic or religious assemblies, classes and nations thereby making inequality a

global spectacle. There however is a link between social inequality and economic inequality, though

fundamentally different. Social inequality refers to disparities in the distribution of economic assets and

income, while economic inequality is caused by the unequal accumulation of wealth. Social inequality exists

because the lack of wealth in certain areas prohibits the people from obtaining the same housing, health

care, etc. as the wealthy in societies where access to these social goods depends on wealth. This is relative

deprivation.

Racial inequality is also linked to social, gender, and wealth inequality. The way people behave

socially, through racist or sexist practices and other forms of discrimination tends to trickle down and affect

the opportunities and wealth individuals can generate for themselves. Thomas M. Shapiro (2004) presents a

hypothetical example of this in his book, The Hidden Cost of Being African American, in which he tries to

demonstrate the level of inequality on the "playing field for blacks and whites". One example he presents

reports how a black family was denied a bank loan to use for housing, while a white family was approved. As

being a homeowner is an important method in acquiring wealth, this situation created fewer opportunities

for the black family to acquire wealth, thus promoting social inequality.

Gender Inequality

Devor (1997), defines gender identity as a persons’ internal “acceptance of sex, gender, or sexual

categorizations as descriptive of themselves.” This defines how one expresses their gender through

appearance, speech and way of communication, and the official documents they present. Gender most

times than not defines how society views and assigns roles to people as men and women. This creates deep

division among the sexes particularly in the economic, political and educational domains. Women are

perceived as weak and feeble resulting in their underrepresentation in political happenings and decision

making processes in most states in both the Global North and Global South (UNEGEEW, 2003).

Governmental agencies and international bodies such as the United Nations, academic and activist

communities, have seriously contemplated issues of gender discrimination especially concerning the status

of women seeking to identify and remedy widespread, institutionalized barriers to access for women in their

societies. Gender studies and analysis have been undertaken to try to understand the social expectations,

responsibilities, resources and priorities of women and men within a specific context, examining the social,

economic and environmental factors which influence their roles and decision-making capacity. Sex based

discrimination between the social and economic roles of men and women negatively affects and impacts the

lives of women and girls limiting their social and economic development (Acheampong et al 2010).

The Hunger project in their article “Empowering Women as Key Change Agents” observed that global

issues like HIV/AIDS, illiteracy, and poverty are experienced far more often by women than by men. In many

countries, women and girls face problems such as access to education, which limits their opportunities to

succeed, and further limits their ability to contribute economically to their society (United Nations Fourth

World Conference on Women, 1995). Women are underrepresented in political activities and decision

making processes throughout most of the world (UNEGEEW, 2003). Structural impediments to women's

ability to pursue and advance in their chosen professions often result in a phenomenon referred to by Mrs

Clinton in her election campaign known as the glass ceiling, (Cotter el al, 2001) which refers to unseen - and

often unacknowledged barriers that prevent minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the

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corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. This effect can be seen in the corporate

and bureaucratic environments of many countries, lowering the chances of women to excel. It prevents

women from succeeding and making the maximum use of their potential, which is at a cost for women as

well as the society’s development (Momsen, 2004). Ensuring that women's rights are protected and

endorsed can promote a sense of belonging that motivates women to contribute to their society. Once able

to work, women should be entitled to the same job security and safe working environments as men (The

Millenium goals report, 2010). Without these kinds of support and security, women and girls will continue to

experience not only barriers to work and opportunities to earn, but will continue to be the primary victims of

discrimination, oppression, and gender based violence (ILO 2011). Patriarchal normative must be tampered

with acceptance of role equality with women and the girl youngster. This process ensures that women don’t

encounter resistance into meaningful positions of power in institutions, administrations, and political

systems and communities.

Ethnic Inequality

In Nigeria today talk is common about three major ethnicities reducing and marginalizing the

minority groups to oblivion. The smaller ethnicities receive only passing mention, resulting in unequal

treatment and opportunities ending with the three major ethnic groupings being considered as preferred to

the others. This mentality is reduced to the same situation in local politics. Majorities in states and local

governments totally control the political power base of the community without due concession to minority

groups. Thus a tribe that has the voting majoritarian advantage takes the governorship position and refuses

to share the seat with anyone else from a minority group. This then manifests in disenfranchisement,

discriminatory employment practices and job placement. In most cases employment is based on who you

know and what linkages or connections you have; the bigger the tribe, the longer and wider the net of

connections to jobs and market opportunities. Determinations of the ethnicity of a candidate are easily

deduced from given names and place of birth or even explicitly required in transaction, employment and

admission forms. Candidates with identical qualifications are filtered out for employment the content of

resumes notwithstanding. Part of these sorts of discriminatory practices stem from Stereotyping which is

when people form assumptions about the tendencies and characteristics of certain social groups, often

including ethnic groups, and typically rooted in assumptions about biology, cognitive capabilities, or even

inherent, moral failings (Alvarez et al, 2008). These negative attributions are then disseminated through a

society through a number of different mediums, including television, newspapers and the internet, all of

which play a role in promoting preconceived notions of race that disadvantage and marginalize groups of

people. This along with xenophobia and other forms of discrimination continue to occur in societies with the

rise of globalization (WCAR, 2001).

Racial inequality results in diminished opportunities for members of marginalized groups, which in

turn can lead to cycles of chronic poverty, political marginalization and ultimately ethnic violence. For

example, during the run-up to the 2012 federal elections in the United States, legislation in certain

“battleground states” that claimed to target voter fraud had the effect of disenfranchising tens of thousands

of primarily African American voters (Alvarez et al, 2008). These types of institutional barriers to full and

equal social participation have far-reaching effects within marginalized communities, including reduced

economic opportunity and output, reduced educational outcomes and opportunities and reduced levels of

overall health (Thompson,2012).

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Age inequality

Nigerian cultural and traditional practices and inadvertently governance structure have through the

generations discriminated on youths based on age. Age discrimination is defined as the unfair treatment of

people with respect to advancements, employment, resources, or privileges because of their age. It is also

known as ageism: the stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals or groups based upon their age.

It is a set of beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values used to justify age-based prejudice, discrimination and

subordination (Kirkpatrick et al, 1987). One form of ageism is adultism, which is the discrimination against

children and people under the legal adult age (Lauter, 1970). Treating people differently based upon their

age may not necessarily be discrimination. Virtually every society has age-stratification, meaning that there

are different allocated social roles for people of different ages to perform. Every society manages people’s

aging by allocating certain roles for different age groups. Age discrimination primarily occurs when age is

used as an unfair criterion for allocating more or less rewarding roles and resources. In some Nigerian

societies it is/used to be traditional or customary to deny younger people eggs because this may make them

steal. There are societies however where the elderly are treated badly and allocated lower resources due to

their diminished productivity capacity. In this way, Scholars of age inequality have suggested that certain

social organizations favour particular age inequalities.

Class inequality

Class measurement and stratification is a major issue in the world. In Nigeria as elsewhere in the

world one is measured by the type of schools one attended, type of job one does, type of car one rides, the

clothes one wears, the food one eats, the type of house one lives in; the size of one’s pay cheque and bank

statement. The measure of inequality between social classes depends on the definition used. For Karl Marx,

two major social classes with significant inequalities existed: the working class (proletariat) and the

capitalists (bourgeoisie). This simple division represents opposing social interests of its members, capital gain

for the capitalists and survival for the labourers, creating inequality and social conflict. Marx associates

oppression and exploitation with it. Max Weber, on the other hand, uses social classes as a stratification tool

based on wealth and status. For him social class is strongly associated with prestige and privileges. It may

explain social reproduction, the tendency of social classes to remain stable across generations maintaining

most of their inequalities as well. Such inequalities include differences in income, wealth, access to

education, pension levels, social status, socio-economic safety-net (Stiglitz, 2012). In general, social class can

be defined as a large category of similarly ranked people located in a hierarchy and distinguished from other

large categories in the hierarchy by such traits as occupation, education, income, and wealth (Gilbert, 2011).

A common understanding of social classes today includes upper class, middle class, and lower class – top,

middle and bottom. Members of different classes have varied access to capital resources, affecting their

placement in the social-stratification system (Doob, 2013). In terms of education, middle-class families have

more money to spend on schooling, using it for such costs as private schooling, tutoring, or college payments

(Doob, 2013).

Unlike the United states where social class is controversial because of the belief in individual choices

and equal opportunities. Under the assumption that social mobility exist in the United States, individuals are

responsible for their own social attainments (Lazzarato , 2009), in Nigeria, where collective living is common

and the individual choice is diminished, class inequalities can be seen openly operational at all levels of

society. Though the ideology of equal opportunity is not shared by most sociologists because they say it is

unrealistic, (Nelson, 1990) preferring rather to hold that opportunities are determined by individual’s

financial and social means which are related to wealth, status, and availability of public support for low

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income groups. The factors behind the unequal distribution of wealth are the concern of this paper. The

roots must be found, understood and engaged to create equal opportunities. Their unequal distribution

provides more opportunities to the ones that already have a higher socio-economic status. In the Nigerian

setting, a family's cultural capital can affect children's schooling in different ways. Cultural Capital is a set of

broadly shared outlooks, knowledge, skills, and behaviour passed from one generation to the next (Doob,

2013). While cultural capital, social capital, and human capital influence many aspects of one’s life, it also

influences people’s access to jobs and thus financial capital.

Another effect of inequality is limited access to quality health care and therefore by implication life

expectancy or longevity (Coburn, 2000) compared to the middle and upper class. Members of the lower class

are exposed to more health hazards (Rauh et al, 2008). Disadvantaged people are more likely to live in areas

where they are exposed to harm such as air-pollution and damp housing. Lower-status socioeconomic

groups generally have poorer health (Elo, et al, 2009; Stephen & Hatzenbuehler, 2013; John-Henderson et al,

2013), and higher rates of chronic illness including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. The same applies to

people of lower occupational classes.

Inequality before the Law

Equality under the law means all people are subject to the same laws of justice (due process).

Anatole France said in 1894, "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under

bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread" (France, The Red Lily, Chapter VII). Article 7 of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states that, "All are equal before the law and are entitled without

any discrimination to equal protection of the law." (Description of the UN declaration article 7). According to

the United Nations, this principle is particularly important to the minorities and to the poor. Thus, the law

and the judges must treat everyone equally before the law regardless of their race, gender, gender identity,

national origin, colour, ethnicity, religion, disability, or other characteristics, without privilege,

discrimination, or bias. Equality before the law is one of the basic principles of liberalism (Kukathas, 2003;

Evans, 2001).

Justice in most cases in Nigeria is for the highest bidder. It is not evidence but money in hand and

probably capacity to make great argument that makes the difference. To get the best, clear, distinctive

argument, one needs money not just evidence to hire the best lawyer in town who can frame and twist

things. The more respected the lawyer, the higher one’s winning chances. So the poor man is left out in the

cold. He endures and just tolerates and stomach’s injustices and maltreatments because it doesn’t pay to go

to the law. In this light, the laws that apply to the poor may not necessarily apply to the rich because the rich

can buy their way out of anything without repercussions. Therefore the culture of impunity prevails.

The police can drum up charges, frame and incriminate poor innocent souls for whatever reasons or

advantages their paymasters may desire. Just to be seen as doing their work well sometimes police could

arraign a man who was picked from the road side and looks like he has no powers that can fight for him and

frame him with bogus offenses and attach evidences the poor man knows nothing about, and because the

accused is guilty before proven innocent in the courts of Nigeria, the poor man may get jailed for no

personal fault. I have personally been involved with individuals in such cases who were set up with trumped

up charges. They were consequently almost swept away to damaged eternity for fabricated police and court

claims they knew absolutely nothing about.

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Changing Governance Lenses

Politicians diagonally through the political divides must start to contemplate practically about what

needs to change. Awareness among policymakers concerning the systemic defects in the civil service, and

the concerns that the remedies always proposed by government officials are insufficient to move the bar of

change to the next level are good indications of change in the right direction. But they are not sufficient in

themselves, joint action must be formulated by the civil service, private sector and the public towards a

comprehensive defeat of systemic and structural deficiencies. For most developing nations, systemic

weaknesses have built up over the years and have now reached critical proportions. Undertaking a series of

capability reviews of government institutions and services will provide evidence and impetus needed for

radical change.

Productivity is hindered by such systemic failures like, inability to prioritise work and personnel, poor

leadership, poorly planning and performing management, inadequate skills development, weak human

resources, and a gross lack of effective financial planning and management. When poor prioritizing is

suspect, the structures and processes will not give workers sufficient opportunity to make decisions

requiring the need to leverage power and improvement in leadership quality. Poor performance

management and people management hinder effective line management thereby reducing staff and the

public’s confidence that the skills and systems required to manage performance effectively are in place.

Frameworks like better routine and clearer accountability will help effective management. When inadequate

skills development bedevils the system, departments and institutions lack clear skills baseline to build on and

an understanding of the future workforce and its skill needs. Skills development must be made robust,

focused on technical skills such as programme management and finance.

Weak human resources hinder institutional capacities for making strategic input to change or the

design of the future workforce. Such capacities must provide the support required by the institutions and

not just merely transactional support. Leadership must feel and take responsibility for its daily actions and

activities that may lead to productive outcomes rather than just time and space occupation in offices. The

absence of financial management is shown in a major lack of effective financial organization and

accountability in the civil service. Such management is often characterized by poor financial planning,

inability to determine value for money due to lack of basic information, or such facts are bluntly ignored in

practice by senior management.

After my research on “preventive counterterrorism for peacebuilding, Nigeria: Boko Haram case

study” (DandauraSamu, 2012) it downed on me that this conflict, the Niger Delta Militancy, Maitatsine crisis,

and many other of their magnitude were wake up calls for the blind fragmentary democracy of the Nigerian

nation to change its lenses. Lenses help us focus light passing through the eye so as to allow better vision,

and to see things in their most real nature so as to find applicable, and appropriate direction to

advancement. The lenses used so far, only give distorted views and damaged forecasts; new lenses must be

won by the nation’s operators, and the people to begin a new kind of attitude to nation building work, and

new lines of expectations. A system of lenses will be required. The infinite diversities of the consequences

rather than the facile similarity of the problems of fragmentary democracy must be stressed. Shallow

consideration result in emphasis on individual approaches to meet the needs of the nation, instead of the

nationwide intervention being based on comprehensive objective or pointed systematic growth of all sectors

of the economy to meet the prescribed unitary outcome so as to bring the nation to a place of concentrated,

multifaceted, multidisciplinary, well-coordinated full circle development. Behavioural styles must be aimed

at these ends rather than just individual activities to achieve small successes for present day glory and self-

aggrandisement, which are meant to just be campaign material for second term re-election purposes or

Page 37 of 39

political party promotion. Leaders must be more than just concerned with gratitude for their efforts, instead

they must be caught up in the grind of forging a meaningful development pathway for the purpose of

reaching that well-coordinated full circle growth for the nation. They will confront their responsibilities then

with the doggedness that produces full circle systemic conclusions. Leaders must be persons of great

goodwill, accounting the value of nation building over and above its tangible assets. The whole drive is to

produce systems that reduce on friction, and conflict, and encourage security and assurance in the public.

BAD GOVERNANCE,

BROKEN SYSTEMS

Page 38 of 39

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