“If I was president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, what would I do (differently)?

The way anyone answers this question gives a clue to the discerning interlocutor what sort of national
leader, good or bad, such a one would make. It’s the simplest of all the questions we may ask an
aspirant for office (and we do ask it, in a variety of ways). Yet, I fear we aren’t very discerning as an
electorate to appropriately weigh the answers given to us by candidates over the years. Nor, I consider,
are we sufficiently committed to our own welfare to act on our discernment, or one vouchsafed to us. If
we can get rid of these twin kinks in our socio-political psyche, we would be ready to advance into true
nationhood.

I remember I once gave a "radio talk" on this same topic while I was much younger (I was in Primary
Six). Of course, I merely went to the studio to deliver a crammed piece which was prepared by my
class teacher. I can't quite remember the actual details of what I said now (it'd be a miracle if I did!) but
I do remember that the gist of my talk was this: a super-welfarist state would be created by me and
sustained with public funds. It was really much the same kind of thing my peers and I were coached to
recite at diverse fora. But anyone who supposes this type of content to be mere childish thinking got up
for children (by their teachers) and aimed at other children by producers of children media would be
dead wrong! Such persons might, in fact, be surprised to learn that this sort of thinking has, mutatis
mutandis, informed public sector management (especially that variety of it regarded as "progressive")
right from independence (and even for some time before independence).

Shocking, isn't it?

Of course, it could hardly be otherwise, given the dialectic contrast between the contemporaneous
nationalist political desiderata (of rapid technological development, economic independence/autonomy,
and international relevance/impact etc) and the stark reality of the pervasive poverty in the geopolity at
the time (which state of affairs has managed to linger over the years even to the present-day).

To trace how this came to be, we will indulge in a bit of mathematic exploration:

Step 1 – Let us term the “nationalist political desiderata” A, and the pervasive poverty in the geopolity
B.

Step 2 – The acceptable "solution of the hour" (for the serious nationalist politician, that is; many
others rather just concentrated on rabble-rousing activities for the populist acclaim) was to somehow
wangle a Hegelian dialectic that addressed B whilst moving the geopolity towards A.

Solution – Enter the Welfarist State.

It must be noted here, before, I go on to talk about the Welfarist State proper, that this "solution" was
not actively sought within all the existent strands of Nigerian political expression (sNPE), for the
simple reason that not all the strands sought (seek still) A nor were (are) all strands were bothered by
B.

A 2x2 matrix may be drawn, then, based on the attitudes to A and B within the all available sNPEs to
yield an elementary fourfold sNPE taxonomy (other classifying arrangements of sNPES are possible
using a variety of characteristics, e.g. attitude to human rights or attitude to organised religion, but
those are quite beyond the scope of this piece; I’m not attempting a broad survey of sNPEs as it were,
but only the section of it that coincides with my purpose).

The broad positions resulting from the above are:

a) sNPEs in pursuit of A (let’s term these sNPE-A);
b) sNPEs not in pursuit of A (let’s term these sNPE-X);
c) sNPEs bothered by and with B (let’s term these SNPE-B);
d) sNPEs neither bothered by nor with B (let’s term these SNPE-Y).

If we imagine the above positions to be mathematical sets, they can interact to yield the following
taxons:
sNPE-AY
sNPE-BX
sNPE-Z
sNPE-AB.

Of course, sNPE-B becomes the set formed by sNPE-BX ∪ sNPE-AB whilst sNPE-A becomes the set
formed by sNPE-AY ∪ sNPE-AB. It is, thus, easy to see that sNPE-AB is an intersection of the sets
sNPE-A and sNPE-B (i.e. sNPE-A ∩ sNPE-B).

This particular representation of sNPE-AB has profound ontological implications for the Nigerian body
politic, particularly if we consider that a widely prevalent socio-political misreading has been to
(mis)represent sNPE-AB as a union of the sets sNPE-A and sNPE-B. The misreading goes further to
not identify both sNPE-A and sNPE-B as subsets of a larger set which we may term valid and useful
NPE (or VAU-NPE) which now has sNPE-Z as its complement (within the larger set of Nigeria). The
misreading then tops itself by making the sets VAU-NPE and sNPE-Z equivalent to each other (and
thus to Nigeria!), thereby facilitating a great deal of mischief in the ensuing confusion. The exact
mechanism of this will be elucidated later on.

It must be pointed out that sNPE-Z representing strands neither in pursuit of A nor bothered by or with
B describes strands of political expressions that are inimical to the survival of the Nigerian state;
abortifacient, in fact, of the emergence of the Nigerian nation-state. These strands have not really
featured in political steering in Nigeria (being pure prototypes of the worst kakistocracies, and we
probably have experienced two of these since independence – more will be said about this later) but
they are more visible and palpable in the widespread landscape of pressure group politics (PGP) in the
country, even though PGP on the whole have been a force for good in the Nigerian geopolity, but that
has been a coincidental effect, not an intended one.
The expressions circumscribed by sNPE-A are split between those projecting sNPE-AB and those
projecting sNPE-AY, as already described, but with the additional qualification that the tendency of the
split is usually sharp, and the two aspects of the broad taxon are usually on opposing sides. The
essential characterisation of sNPE-AB will be treated in the paragraph after the next. The expressions
projecting sNPE-AY have tended to be technocratic or oligarchic, or both, in character, and as such
have scarcely been borne for long before they were suppressed. These tendencies have arisen now and
again (like the mythical àbiku, these expressions go into abeyance, only to re-emerge again after a
period, usually in times of grave existential national emergency) in the Nigerian socio-political
discourse, with mostly unsalutary effects for the governed masses (the breakaway Biafra state was,
perhaps, the only time a segment of the Nigerian state was arranged almost exclusively along the lines
of sNPE-AX; this kind of fundamental contradiction in its socio-political organisation contributed to its
early demise among other factors, but I digress).

The expressions subtended by sNPE-B have tended to be more plentiful in the Nigerian sociopolitical
experience, and there isn’t as sharp a jump-off within it between sNPE-BX and sNPE-AB (as exists
between sNPE-AY and sNPE-AB). It’s for this reason that the sNPE-B is the expression that will
primarily be examined in this piece).

In political parties and movements based on sNPE-B, the overarching political objective aims at
evolving and operating some sort of a welfarist state, although the sNPE-BX segment of the broad
expression has tended to be local rather than national in character, and thus necessarily parochial in its
expression. These expressions that project sNPE-BX range from town and clan improvement unions to
tribe- or ethnic-based political parties. Their importance in the nationally organised parties was the
pressure they brought to bear on public policy-making to extract some form of sectional “welfare”
from the larger state. These types of expressions also include many a trade/occupational association as
well as other social mutual assistance. These latter strands in the broad expression taxon circumscribed
by sNPE-BX skirt the border between the sets VAU-NPE and sNPE-Z. A few of such strands do, in
fact, transmute existentially to form sets that are an intersection between VAU-NPE and sNPE-Z, thus
abolishing the complementary relationship between these two supersets, and substituting a set of very
dangerous national characters in its place (it’s my opinion this sort of existential subversion has, in
fact, occurred in the nation’s higher education sector, for instance, but I digress).

The strands which lie within the set sNPE-AB generally fit into the mould of the serious nationalist
political entity (it’s a bit of a serendipitous accident that this characterisation has the same acronym as
the entire characterisation of the attribute under review, to wit Nigerian Political Expression! Let’s call
it SNPE). This taxon may be further divided into those who see A and B as mutually contrasting
pursuits (which, to be candid, they somewhat are) and deal with them as such – let’s call these sNPE-
AB1, or SNPE-A; those who not see A and B as contrasting, and thus pursue both with equal vigour –
let’s call these sNPE-AB2, or SNPE-B; and those who correctly see the existential position of the
contradiction between A and B, but intuit a true path of synthesis between them – let’s call these sNPE-
AB3, or SNPE-C.

Thus we end up with six sNPE groupings, based on the attitude to A and B seen in each strand, but it
must be noted that those groupings are neither equivalent in topology nor equally valid for the state
project of the Nigerian geopolity. As long as we utilise concepts from set theory to conceptualise the
various strands of Nigerian political expression, and to distinguish between them, we won’t go far
wrong in diagnosing our ills and selecting as remedy the appropriate strand of political expression –
which I consider to be sNPE-AB3.

The sort of view I’ve been describing forms, then, the first thing I’d do IF I WERE THE
PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA: I’D CONCEPTUALISE MY COUNTRY RIGHT! Of course, this isn’t
a uniquely presidential task or obligation; it’s the minimum patriotic thing to do, as well as the baseline
of civic common sense in the Nigerian context.

I will end today’s piece on this note, as I invite every reader to join me in this conceptualisation
journey, particularly as we will apply this conceptualisation to interrogating the myth of the Nigerian
nation-state (the thing we supposedly celebrate every National Independence Day), wherein we may
discover the validity of sNPE-AB3 as most appropriate for the geopolity at present.

Thanks for reading.

Cheerio!