If Nigerian cities are unhealthy -- and indeed they are -- why is that? I submit that the anarchy of our bureaucracies -- federal, state, and local -- is the prime culprit. Their malpractices have robbed our cities of the infrastructure and social services which would have made them healthy and livable.
Consider the services and products for which our bureaucracies are officially responsible: sanitation, town planning, water supply, roads and streets, drains, sewage disposal, public transport, electricity, mail, telephone, petrol, kerosene, cooking gas, etc. When all of these malfunction, how can a city be a healthy and happy place for the sane?
In Nigeria, four decades of growing anarchy have produced a situation where, despite enormous, annual, budgetary announcements, no social service functions with any pretense at efficiency. The damage thereby caused to homes, factories, offices and persons each year must run into trillions of naira, making the state and its economic agencies the greatest destroyer of our society and the greatest contributor to the unhealthy condition of our cities.
The breakdown or total absence of basic infrastructures and social services means that the private citizen must provide most of what is needed to live in our cities. And that is not possible, not even for the very rich.
The rich man who wants to live and function in our cities must have his private borehole to avoid dry taps and infected water. In order to avoid erratic NEPA blackouts, he must generate his own electricity most of the time, and subject himself to constant noise pollution from his private generator. Because NITEL refuses to provide telephones that work, he must maintain a fleet of private cars and trucks for sending messengers all over town to do things that can be easier done by phone. And he must build his private petrol depot to supply his fleet whenever NNPC organizes a fuel crisis. To safeguard all of that investment, he must live behind high walls and electrified barbed wire fences, in a house whose doors, windows, air-condition vents, etc., are fitted with burglar-proof bar and grills. And he must employ his own private security squad, with police dogs and all. In other words, his home must become a glorified prison, and his bedroom a prison cell behind bars.
Whenever he ventures out from his glorified prison, he must contend with streets full of craters, with tarred roads that are half-eroded away, with stagnant and stinking gutters, with a pattern of streets that seems designed by the devil so as to clog up traffic rather than help it flow. A journey which would have taken ten minutes on well-planned and well-built roads, actually takes him a frustrating, bone-breaking hour or more -- when he is lucky.
Because of a disorganized environment, his body is subjected to needless wear and tear; his mind is in constant anxiety and stress; and he needs a diet of assorted pills to keep his blood pressure down, as well as gallons of alcoholic drinks to drown his worries. And living like that is the average Nigerian elite's notion of paradise!
When he falls ill from the fatigue of the pressures and worries of his life style, all is lost. Poor medical services and substandard medicines ensure that he can't get the medical relief his pocket can well afford. Unless he heads abroad for treatment, the next thing you hear is that he passed away, in vigorous mid-life stride, after a brief but unspecified illness. And so goes another victim of an unhealthy city.
Now, if a paradise like Lagos is so dangerous for the rich, how much more dangerous is it for the rest of us, and especially for the poor who can't buy their way out of these needless pressures and miseries?
But what has been responsible for the steady breakdown of infrastructure and social services over the last four decades? Who or what has made our cities unhygienic and stressful? Let us find out.
Who removed the sanitary inspectors and discontinued the practice of building neighborhood refuse dumps? Who but the bureaucrats? And who, after introducing the monthly environmental sanitation day, has refused to build neighborhood dumps where citizens can dispose of the refuse so that their sanitation work will result in clean streets? Who but the almighty bureaucrats?
Who planned our streets without side walks, and obliges people to walk where cars can splash water on them or even knock them down? Who but our bureaucrats? And who set the specifications for all our roads, and accepted and paid for the strips of painted laterite that the first rains wash away? Who but our almighty bureaucrats?
Who planned the NEPA system that plunges you into darkness in the middle of dinner; that inflicts on you a sweaty, restless sleep on a hot night due to immobilized fans, or subjects you to noisy sleep because of generators? Who but the bureaucrats? And who has turned NEPA into a vandal that destroys your appliances with reckless voltage surges; and who gave NEPA legal immunity from law suits by its victimized customers? Who but our almighty bureaucrats?
Who supervises NITEL and ensures that its phones hardly function? Who supervises a NIPOST that steals your mail or dumps it in the bush instead of delivering it to you? Who but our almighty bureaucrats?
Who owns and supervises NNPC, and prevents it from being an efficient supplier of petrol and kerosene and cooking gas? And who organizes fuel scarcity in a land that produces and refines oil? Who but our almighty bureaucrats?
I could go on and on, but let me stop with these key examples with which we are all familiar.
When judged by its delivery of goods and services, like any other economic actor, it is clear that the Nigerian bureaucracy is not just a white elephant, costly and useless; it actually is a menace, a locust plague raiding the populace. It eats up resources; concocts needless scarcities for the benefit of its league of associated profiteers; multiplies pressures, frustrations and anxieties for citizens; and spreads conflict, mayhem and death among the very citizens it is said, and is paid, to serve. It is, indeed, a miracle how the average Nigerian producer or consumer gets through each day's gauntlet of bureaucratic obstacles and tortures.
But why have our bureaucracies disorganized things for us? Are they stupid? Or is it that they have a devilishly clever and greedy interest in disorganizing the very things they are employed to organize?
Whatever the reasons, the plain and painful fact is that, despite our having a bloated bureaucracy, nobody is in charge of anything that is in the public interest. In Nigeria, the bureaucrats, whose job is to administer the public interest, have refused to be in charge of it. Indeed, even the idea that governing is about serving the public interest seems to have disappeared altogether. In their expert hands, nearly every government agency has become a racket for the private enrichment of its operators. In their expert hands, the colonial state which they took over in 1960 has been turned into an anarchist state.
Over the decades, Nigeria's form of government has been described in various ways: democracy, military rule, kleptocracy, lootocracy. But, in fact, it is bureaucratic anarchy, for that has been its consistent and decisive feature, regardless of whether our most visible rulers wear civilian or military camouflage, and regardless of which ritual they employ to seize high office: election or coup. For nearly forty years, our permanent government has been an anarchist bureaucracy which resists all political and social masters. Four decades of its lawlessness and greed have institutionalized anarchy in the state and spread anarchy into the rest of society. Indeed, Nigeria's principal disease is the lawless greed of its bureaucracy.
Nigeria today is proof that an anarchist, racketeering bureaucracy is a disaster for the public welfare. Greedy bureaucrats get rich quick by anarchy, and we, the public, pay the price in money, frustration and ill health, and even with our lives. The question we must therefore address is this: Shall we tame this anarchist bureaucracy, or allow it to kill us off and destroy Nigeria?
Let me put all of this in proper historical context. Our anarchist bureaucrats are behaving just like those black slave suppliers who disorganized and weakened Black Africa, and thereby made easy the 19th century conquest of Black Africa by European invaders. Our anarchist bureaucrats have disorganized and weakened Nigeria for the next European conquest -- that by recolonizers who are determined to exterminate Black Africans and permanently take over the continent and its vast resources. Our anarchist bureaucrats have turned Nigeria into a glorified Haiti by weakening the social and political fabric. They have weakened it to the point where Nigeria cannot survive any invasion by determined recolonizers, in as much as many citizens -- the long suffering victims of bureaucratic anarchy -- would now welcome an invading army of whites. If you doubt that, just recall that, in the last 15 years, an increasing number of Nigerians have publicly called for whites to recolonize us, if only to restore basic law and orderliness. That chorus is a symptom of a potentially terminal illness.
And believe it or not, the recolonizers are coming. The signs are there for those who do not bury their heads in the sand. If Nigeria is to avoid recolonization, if Nigeria is to survive and play its leadership role in the redemption of the Black World, it must put an end to bureaucratic anarchy, and do so quickly, thoroughly and permanently. For that to happen, the upcoming leadership generation, those under 30 today, must bring forth a crop of leaders of the caliber of Mussolini or Mao or Attack or Castor; a crop of leaders at the head of a nationalist movement that shall, at whatever cost, abolish anarchy, restore public orderliness and social cohesion, and then industrialize Nigeria and make it a major world power. Nigeria cannot survive unless that happens. And Nigeria cannot have healthy cities until its Mussolini’s or Amos or Attars or Castors have accomplished that mission.
But until such leaders arrive, what do we do to, at least, reduce this bureaucratic anarchy? Here are just four of the many things which we must do.
First of all, we must ensure that our units of local self-government are small communities, such as villages and city wards. These self-governing units must be small enough for participatory democracy, so that local officials can be selected and made accountable by their peers in the community, peers who know their character thoroughly and can weed out the greedy and lawless bandits.
Secondly, consumer associations must arise and demand value-for-money from governments and their agencies. NEPA, NITEL, NIPOST, NNPC etc., must become targets of a consumer movement. Victims of their incompetence and anarchy must sue them and their officials for punitive damages. Their monopoly status must be ended, and their immunities from consumer lawsuits must be removed.
Thirdly, private sector producer associations -- especially farmers, manufacturers, artisans, transporters and traders -- must extract quality service from government agencies. They must insist that taxes and levies without services are extortion and state robbery. They must use their economic muscle to get the bureaucracies to behave responsibly. They must press for, and obtain, a Failed Government Agencies Tribunal as a necessary counterpart to the Failed Banks Tribunal. For example, bureaucrats who demand or accept substandard roads from contractors should be prosecuted, and the cost of the project recovered from them. By such examples, the greedy and the lawless shall be taught to shun careers in bureaucracy.
If we accept that health is better than wealth, and that anarchy is dangerous for our health, we become obliged, by enlightened self-interest, to act to end this bureaucratic anarchy.
And if the survival of our descendants and of our race matters to us, as it should to sane people, then we must, out of enlightened social interest, help to inspire and spot and groom the potential Mussolinis and Maos who shall cure this land of anarchy at all costs, who shall and tame its lunatic elite of nation wasters, and bring an intelligent, nationalistic orderliness into the affairs of both the Nigerian State and society.
We must do so for our own sakes, and for the sake of a Black World that long has looked to Nigeria for leadership. For if Nigeria is the hope of the Black World, then the Black World has no hope until Nigeria reforms itself. And if we fail, recolonization will assuredly happen, and we shall lose all. Is it not, therefore, much better to remedy things for ourselves, starting now, and save the next generation from the agony of being exterminated like the Native Americans?
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© Chinweizu 2005
