…our need is for a rules-based system with an incentive structure that drives cutting edge performance. It is the only way we can promote and sustain productivity-enhancing reforms to the polity. It is, also, the only way that the structure which put out the police’s statement on the DSS/National Assembly imbroglio may be shamed out of prominence.
So macabre were the circumstances surrounding the invasion, last week, of the National Assembly complex by operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) — and this was not just because the phalanx of armed, balaclava-clad men lent additional mystique to the operation — that the nation wanted an urgent explanation. And an explanation we all got — by way of a leaked memo from the office of the inspector general of police (IGP) to the acting president.
In a way, the memo further muddied the waters. Okay, so the IGP may not have written the memo himself. Some ranking officer in the police force probably did. But when he reviewed, just before signing and despatching the memo, did the IGP not see the many malapropisms and errors of grammar with which the five pages were riddled? I took the bother to run the document by the Flesch reading ease measure, and it came out with an 80-70 score. I.e. it was fairly easy to read. Or better put, something which a child in the 7th grade (first year of the Junior Secondary School — JSS 1) would not have struggled to cobble together.
The first question, then, arising from how poorly put together the IGP’s memo was, is could this be the level of literacy at the highest echelons of our police force? Yes, we all know that national standards have fallen continuously (although there are a few extant objective measures for this). But this level of written English is decrepit, to put it mildly. I barely had enough time to make sense of this line of enquiry before my attention was drawn to the more worrisome fact that it was a full report on the extent of the police’s investigation of what may have been an assault on our constitutional order.
It was abecedarian. Any secondary school leaver with access to the spellcheck function of the Microsoft Office Suite, and who had the time to watch the drama unfold at the National Assembly, could have put the whole narrative together — and in far shorter time than it took the police to put their version together.
Culturally, the outcome of this way of thinking is to make nonsense of our usually censorious reading of supposedly “atomistic western cultures”. For our supposedly inclusive cultural constructs are the consequence of how we interrogate reality, completely oblivious of the “commons” as a construct worthy of being husbanded.
How, then, did this come about?
In a phone conversation with a friend on this, he argued that this focus on the grammar of the IGP’s memo, and the (lack of) rigour of the investigation process it spoke to was wrong. He remains convinced that of greater import is the thinking behind it. A worry that he believes should extend to any contemplation of the manifold mysteries that life in Nigeria now comprises. Obsessed by positive (personal) outcomes, we have come to be exercised neither by processes, nor by the institutions through which these processes come to life, but by an obsession with individuals. In macroeconomic terms, the prisms through which we refract reality means we are likelier to favour the nanny state over markets. Culturally, the outcome of this way of thinking is to make nonsense of our usually censorious reading of supposedly “atomistic western cultures”. For our supposedly inclusive cultural constructs are the consequence of how we interrogate reality, completely oblivious of the “commons” as a construct worthy of being husbanded.
An essential part of this failure of our thought processes is a carryover from our pedagogy. Concentrated on rote learning, and denying any space to the inquisitive, our preferred forms of imparting knowledge have made it very easy to transmit old wives’ tales as education. It does not help that close to the core of the main arguments that we make in defence of our culture is a barely concealed gerontocracy. But this has meant, along with the oral values that our elders are supposedly custodians of, that we are loth as a people to think independently. Nor are we given to reach conclusions on the basis of empirical observations of the outcomes from when our theorems encounter reality.
How do I mean?
The distortion to our thought processes that have allowed us to tolerate and occasionally justify the many incongruities that now define our quotidian experience may have become far too ingrained for truths to have any effect on our convictions, no matter how unhealthy the latter are.
We were willing, for example, in the first year of the Buhari presidency, to read his “body language” as Kremlinologists in the West used to read tea leaves from Moscow tea parties during the Cold War. It did not matter that we had no sense of what the retired General thought or knew about a lot of ideas, processes, and events that were and remain essential to good governance. It was okay that “the president’s body language” was “positive”. It didn’t take too long to realise that this did not mean much.
But, did it matter?
No! The distortion to our thought processes that have allowed us to tolerate and occasionally justify the many incongruities that now define our quotidian experience may have become far too ingrained for truths to have any effect on our convictions, no matter how unhealthy the latter are. In the end, ought we to worry that our new zeitgeist will promote the caudillo as an efficient counter-point to working institutions and leave the rest of us at the whims and caprices of god kings? One consequence of this distortion was obvious in the Goodluck Jonathan administration’s almost nursery rhyme repetition of the unusual insight that “stealing is not corruption”. As it is now obvious in the Buhari administration’s insistence that a petty forger in government might be an agreeable outcome so long as that person is invaluable.
Question is, invaluable to whom?
Not to the Nigerian people, of course! For our need is for a rules-based system with an incentive structure that drives cutting edge performance. It is the only way we can promote and sustain productivity-enhancing reforms to the polity. It is, also, the only way that the structure which put out the police’s statement on the DSS/National Assembly imbroglio may be shamed out of prominence. And it is the only way that we may successfully build a functioning economy.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
