Jideofor Adibe
\nIn this reflection I am using the phrase welcoming a \u2018new decade\u2019 very cautiously as I am
\nmindful of the controversy over whether January 1 2020 should be regarded as the beginning of a
\nnew decade or the end of the last decade. For those who argue that 2020 is the last year of the
\ncurrent decade, not the beginning of a new one, their argument is that because there was no Year
\nZero when the current era began more than 2,000 years ago, all decades, centuries and millennia
\nbegin with Year 1 such as 1-10, 11 to 20, 1991 to 2000, 2011 to 2020, meaning that 2020 is only
\nthe end of the last decade. However in a recent YouGov survey, 64 per cent of Americans said
\nJanuary 2020 is the beginning of a new decade, not the end of the last one. Many of the
\nrespondents argued that because people use the term \u2018decade\u2019 to discuss culture and chunks of
\nhistory, it should run from 0 to 9, not 0-10. They also argue that the definition of a decade is just
\nany 10-year span, and that where the first count begins is fairly arbitrary. I align myself with this
\n\u2018non-professional\u2019 view.
\nMy aim in this piece is to reflect on a few issues that impacted heavily on national discourse in
\nthe last ten years.
\nOne of the remarkable debates during this period is on the nature and trajectory of the current
\nwave of the country\u2019s democracy, which formally started on May 29 1999. Though democracy is
\na journey, not a destination, it has rather been a bumpy ride for the country. Luckily the
\ndemocratic train has kept moving and has not fallen off its tracks. In what may perhaps be
\nregarded as a consolation, some have made a distinction between mature democracies and
\nsocieties in transition. The argument is that for societies in transition such as ours, democracy
\nwill actually aggravate the structures of conflicts in the short to medium terms because the free
\nspeech guarantees of liberal democracy will unleash many bottled up feelings from the era of
\nauthoritarianism. Following from this, it could be argued that some of the hiccups from our
\ncurrent democracy journey such as the rise of separatist groups and the widening of social
\ndistance among Nigerians, are \u2018normal\u2019 in this period of transition.
\nIn transition societies, the chances of democratic reversals are quite high. This largely explains
\nwhy each of the governments we have had since 1999 made efforts to constrict the democratic
\nspace. For instance, under Obasanjo politics was literarily defined as a do-or-die affair, with a
\nsitting governor kidnapped and some high-profile politicians like Bola Ige murdered. Obasanjo
\nalso used state agencies like the EFCC as attack dogs on his political opponents including
\ninstigating a Kangaroo impeachment of Governors he fell out with. Under Yaradua, the killing
\nof hundreds of members of the Boko Haram in Bauchi and Yobe in 2009, including the extra
\njudicial killing of the sect\u2019s leader Mohamed Yusuf, helped to radicalize the group. Though the
\nBuhari government claims it has degraded the terrorist group, the government seems unwilling<\/p>\n
acknowledge the capacity of the group to re-invent itself. For instance from initially attacking
\nsoft targets through suicide bombing, it now takes the fight to hard targets such as military bases.
\nUnder the \u2018amiable\u2019 Jonathan government, the police orderlies of Aminu Tambuwaal, then
\nSpeaker of House of Representatives, were suddenly withdrawn after he decamped from the
\nruling PDP to the then opposition APC. Under Buhari not only are court orders being flagrantly
\ndisobeyed and regime critics detained, the government is mulling policing the internet and
\nregulating the social media.
\nThe good thing however is that Nigerians are not easily cowed. Nigerians and the Nigerian
\nmedia remain boisterous and critical of government policies they are unhappy with. In essence,
\nwhile our democratic journey may be moving in a zigzag fashion, the journey seems to be
\nprogressing all the same \u2013 despite the bumps and the snail pace of the ride.
\nOn the economic front, quite a number of bold steps were taken over the years. While some
\nsuccesses were recorded such as in the telecoms sector (most Nigerians in urban centres now
\nown mobile phones compared to the situation ten years ago) and in the internet sector (the
\ncountry has one of the highest internet penetration rates in Africa), there seem to have been
\nreversals in other areas. For instance following the rebasing of the country\u2019s GDP in 2013, the
\ncountry not only became the largest economy in Africa but the 26th largest in the world. It was
\nalso at that time said to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In fact in 2014,
\nNigeria was included in the MINT emerging economies. MINT is a neologism referring to the
\neconomies of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. The term was originally coined by the
\nBoston-based asset management firm Fidelity and popularized by the British economist Jim
\nO\u2019Neil, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, who had in 2011, coined the acronym BRIC to refer to
\nthe economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC was later turned to BRICS when South
\nAfrica was bracketed into the group).
\nThe inclusion of Nigeria among the MINT economies raised hopes that it could spur the
\ncountry to struggle to become a member of the G20 \u2013 as other MINT economies were. In the
\nsame 2014, Filipino billionaire, Enrique Razon, was quoted as declaring during the closing
\nactivities of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2014, that Nigeria was the best
\nplace in the world to invest that year.
\nRemarkably just like our democracy journey, the trajectory of our economic progress has been
\nup and down \u2013 to put it mildly. For instance a report by the World Poverty Clock in 2018
\nshowed that Nigeria has overtaken India (which has seven times its population) as the poverty
\ncapital of the world, with 86.9 million Nigerians said to be living in extreme poverty. Also
\nthough the Obasanjo government paid off Nigeria\u2019s external debts to the London and Paris clubs
\nin 2005 (when it paid off about $30 billion in accumulated debt to the London and Paris clubs for
\nabout $12 billion – an overall discount of about 60 per cent), Nigeria has once again turned into
\na heavily indebted country. For instance while Nigeria\u2019s total public debt stock in 2015 was<\/p>\n
$63.80bn, (comprising $10.31bn of external debt and $53.49bn domestic debt), by June 2019,
\nthe total debt stock was $83.883bn, (made up of $27.163bn of external debt and $56.720bn of
\ndomestic debt). Despite this debt profile and the increasing depletion of our foreign reserves, the
\nBuhari government still wants to borrow another $30bn (equivalent to our total debt to the Paris
\nand London clubs by 2005 when phrases like \u2018Debt burden\u2019 and \u2018Debt Overhang\u2019 spurred
\nvarious global movements for debt forgiveness or cancellation of the indebtedness of African
\ncountries). While the Buhari government says it is borrowing to invest in infrastructure, many
\nhave wondered whether it was not precisely similar excuses that previous governments used to
\naccumulate the debts that Obasanjo\u2019s government paid off on a discounted rate in 2005. People
\nalso wonder what happens to the billions of dollars the various anti-corruption agencies such as
\nthe EFCC and the ICPC often claim they have recovered.
\nAnother major issue in the last decade is the farmers-herders conflicts across country. Though
\nthe issue predated the Buhari government, it became more generalized across the Southern parts
\nof the country (rather than confined largely to Benue and Plateau states that used to be the
\nepicentres of the conflict). While the primary cause of the conflict is struggle over environmental
\nresources such as water and grazing land, the issue also conflates with the religious and ethnic
\ndivides in the country. For instance because Buhari, a Muslim Fulani, has not been able to show
\n\u2018tough love\u2019 to the Fulani herdsmen (as Obasanjo did with the OPC for example), there have
\nbeen suggestions that he treats them with kids\u2019 gloves only because he shares the same ethnic
\nand religious identities with them. In essence, while the primary cause of the conflict is
\neconomic and environmental, the mismanagement of the optics of the conflict means it now has
\nconflated with ethnicity and religion.
\nIn general, in the last ten years, there has been sharp contestations over the bases of the
\ncountry\u2019s statehood \u2013 with words like \u2018restructuring\u2019, \u2018power shift\u2019, \u2018true federalism\u2019 and
\n\u2018resource control\u2019 used as arrows in the contests. Remarkably, under Obasanjo and Jonathan,
\n(both presidents from the Southern part of the country), the contestations came mostly from the
\nNorth while under the Buhari, a Northern Muslim, the challenge comes predominantly from the
\nSouth and from Christians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jideofor Adibe In this reflection I am using the phrase welcoming a \u2018new decade\u2019 very cautiously as I am mindful of the controversy over whether January 1 2020 should be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\n