National Empowerment Programmes And Public Governance

Society is not built by individual morality but by the institutionalization of our collective morality and values. Our political culture must shift at an individual level from those that seem to subjugate or demean the people as paupers to those values that see them as humans deserving of human dignity. That we shouldn’t view them as deserving of our pity but of their share of quality life offered by the potential of our common wealth that should be centrally pooled and deployed for their good.”

Quite often, we are inundated with the terms “empowerment programmes or initiatives” from our political officeholders, public servants, or would-be political aspirants. These range from governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, State Houses of Assembly, as well as chairmen of LGAs, ministers, or commissioners.

We would often hear empowerment as if that’s a core government policy approach that fixes any deeply rooted socio-economic problem.

A cursory intellectual look at what these initiatives often project as solutions to the people’s challenges is nothing but quick fixes to the underlying economic realities that make our people so needy to the point of empowerment in the first place. We distribute food items, sowing machines, wrappers, wheelbarrows, electrical equipment, appliances, motorcycles, and tricycles. And sometimes, albeit rarely, motor/ vehicles are seen as very loyal and sometimes dangerous. Not that these items do not have their place of importance in the daily lives of the people who receive them, nor does it ease their pains and those of their children in some ways. The question is, do these approaches actually solve anything or fix the real economic challenges that require systematic government thinking, approach, and intelligent economic policy planning, implementation, and deployment of resources?

A market survey of these items often runs into millions and sometimes billions of naira. Money that could have been better deployed intelligently across the board to achieve results that align with the central policy directions of the government of the day or national developmental plans is not prioritized.

How our public servants, political or aspiring leaders, come to command such a level of resources in the first place should be a question that intrigues our minds. How come we have devolved public resources hitherto supposed to be centrally available for deployment, after comprehensive plans of human capital development and capital projects that bear more impact on the economic realities and upward social mobility of the people?

Beyond statutory emoluments and allowances of public servants or public officeholders, which comprise basic salaries and allowances, we have devised ways and means to divert public resources in the name of other allowances and constituency projects.

Others include contracts converting and third-party bidding via proxies and cronies. This system, where lawmakers and non-executive public officeholders command such humongous resources, is a threat to both governance and national security. One needs to question these issues critically to understand the relationship between them.

For governance to be effective, coherence in policy planning, accumulation, and intelligent deployment of resources is key. Ours is a situation where the common pull of resources is so divested into the pockets of diverse political actors who are not guided as to what and how these monies should be spent. Even the supposed empowerment programmes often pointed to achieving nothing, as these are only political patronage seen by the beneficiaries as spoils from their loyalties to the leaders. There must be a centralized pull and deployment of resources at the executive levels of the federal, state, and local governments for cogent achievement of developmental agendas and plans. These are the constitutional tiers mandated to plan and deploy resources effectively for both economic and political emancipation and advancement of the nation and citizenry. For individuals who have no function in these constitutional capacities to distribute cash and materials to the people in public in some Robin Hood-style of politics is a demeaning way of the concept of bringing the dividends of democracy to our people.

These public dances of distribution of items have come to subjugate our people to the proverbial levels of “picking the crumbs from the king’s table.” To all intents and purposes, that isn’t the main aim of governance or democracy. It is demeaning and dehumanizing to the human dignity of our people. Interestingly, while these leaders understand the meaning and power of this demeaning subjugation, the poor citizens often have no understanding of this power dynamic at play. They are like pets and chickens being thrown crumbs; a classical Stalin-Chicken postulation. Democracy and egalitarian governance seek and demand better for the dignity of the people.

It is no longer news that democracy allows combative or bitter vocal contestation of power. The reason these have been the bane of our democratic experiment is the basis of this piece. Those in non-executive positions have cornered so many resources to the extent that they have the capacity to threaten the common peace of the majority or the common interest of those currently in power through violence orchestrated by violent groups or via media subterfuge or other fifth columnists embedded deep in government and the security architecture. This is because they have mobilized huge resources through a stint at public office, either as legislators or executors of delegated authority as ministers, commissioners, or heads of agencies.

They soon wield enormous resources and power to the extent that they sometimes threaten our common security as a people and society. There is no gainsaying the fact that we can trace our current insecurity realities partly to this causative factor – the unhealthy accumulation of state resources by persons who are bent on contesting power by all means, even if it means making the nation ungovernable.

It all points to one reason; they command enormous resources they’ve cornered while in certain offices or positions. This, in particular, threatens our fragile communities and national security.

We grew up knowing empowerment to be synonymous with philanthropy and private commitments, but it is today more ascribed to politicians currently in office or out of office who have intentions to run for office than the philanthropists who popularized the very word “empowerment.”

Beyond the analysis, it is a basic economic constant that resources are infinitely scarce, even where they are enormous. Hence, every society, wealthy or poor, must orchestrate a system that collects resources into a common administrative pool, does intelligent planning and deployment of these resources to ensure planned policies and programme implementation, which guarantees trickle-down effects with positive impacts on the short, medium, and long-term economic advancement of the people and society. The continued unorganized and haphazard dissipation of the commonwealth as empowerment, which leads to cult-followership of a leader, creating power centers that actually do little or nothing to improve the quality of life, only reduces governance of a state and nation to a huge joke. These are monies that should be used to plan qualitative education, expanding greater teachers’ capabilities and skills advancement for the youthful demography of our population. These are monies that should be used to build better-looking hospitals, with greater capacities and equipment, as well as better skills training for personnel and their needs being met to ensure that they remain within the nation without labour strikes or the urge to seek greener pastures abroad with their exceptional skills. Mind you, these are critical resources for our infrastructural renewal drive that should top our policy discussions as we head to reach the 250 million population growth mark in the next 5 to 10 years. We should be worried, and deeply so, as a people.

Society is not built by individual morality but by the institutionalization of our collective morality and values. This is the essence of governance. While the Communist or Chinese/Russian or even the Arabian monarchical models inherently allow the planning and administration of governance and resources from the centre downwards, it is slightly diverse and pluralistic in the classical democratic experiment. But variants have evolved for us to copy. We must begin by brokering this conversation which this piece seeks. We must question the constitutional roles of our public officeholders and demand that they function within that scope. For those whose constitutional mandate doesn’t include executive powers for projects and programmes, we must abide by these laws and status stricto senso. We must build a legislative culture that respects the functional separation of powers in this regard.

We must then proceed to reduce or prevent the devolution or dissipation of money to such public offices that have no executive powers. If need be, we should pursue constitutional interpretations in this regard in the courts of the land for the interest of public law and good governance.

Beyond these, our political culture must shift at an individual level from those that seem to subjugate or demean the people as paupers to those values that see them as humans deserving of human dignity. That we shouldn’t view them as deserving of our pity but of their share of quality life offered by the potential of our common wealth that should be centrally pooled and deployed for their good.

And to the people, beyond the wanton poverty and building they have been consigned to, we must begin to demand better deals from our political and public leaders not just in terms of empowerment in tangible plans that transcend our immediate stomach infrastructure to the medium and long-term issues that border on our collective existence and those of our children.

To the elites and educated among the citizenry, we must be the guides to the masses in developing this probing culture. It’s the only way to build a governance culture that serves the people and doesn’t turn leaders into cult-personalities that the people are tied to their aprons for perpetual usage.