OpinionFROM ABURI TO A LITANY OF BROKEN AGREEMENTS

FROM ABURI TO A LITANY OF BROKEN AGREEMENTS

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Nigeria is a mishmash of bad leadership and a history of broken promises. Nigerian leaders seem to have something in common- they can hardly keep to their word. It has a pretty long history. It started in Aburi – that little but symbolic town in the old Gold Coast, now Ghana, which hosted that historic meeting that could have changed Nigeria’s destiny. It was after the conscience of the world had been jolted and her indignation aroused by the pogrom and near systematic annihilation of Ndigbo. Remember that it was after the coup of January 15th 1966 allegedly led by one Major Kaduna Nzeogwu where many politicians were killed including the then Prime Minister of the country, Sir. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the then Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and Deputy-Premier of the Western region, Sir Ladoke Akintola.

The number of people who died ostensibly gave an ethnic colouration to the coup, which angered a segment of the military from Northern Nigeria. Almost six months later then Captain Theophilus Danjuma, specifically on the 29th of July 1966, led his kinsmen to a retaliatory counter-coup where the then Head of State Gen. J.T.U Aguiyi Ironsi and his host Lt. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi were murdered. That event triggered a process of targeted elimination of top military officers and bureaucrats from the then Eastern Nigeria.

The nationwide impact of the July 29 1966 retaliatory coup so heightened tension and misunderstanding among the top military brass and political class in Nigeria and, indeed Africa that a meeting was scheduled to discuss options open to avert a nationwide conflict. The Aburi Meeting would later determine the fate of several millions of Nigerian lives mostly of Ndigbo extraction. It took place on the 4th and 5th of January 1967 and all sides came to some five-point agreement now historically known as the Aburi Accord.

However the leader of the Nigeria delegation at that time, Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon, returned to Lagos, Nigeria with the Aburi Accord in hand and instead of implementing his own side of the agreement, reneged on it. Gowon and his kinsmen Working with his kinsmen simply saw many reasons why they should not implement an agreement that they freely and wilfully reached at Aburi under the full glare of other world leaders.

And so commenced the Nigerian culture of disdain for agreements, whether written or unwritten, political or domestic, public or private, which has become, to date, the bane of the Nigerian Nation and its people. Our inability to implement the Aburi agreement plunged our nation into an avoidable civil war that eventually claimed the lives of more than one million people with about 500,000 others, mostly children, severely malnourished and maimed, physically and psychologically, for life. After Aburi, the nation and its people were led from one broken agreement to another. Many military rulers that led Nigeria kept shifting goal posts of their hand over dates even when they have made promises to the citizenry. Gowon, the chief culprit in the broken Aburi Accord, continued to wobble over hand over date until his government was overthrown. Thereafter, the nation has seen several other breaches of social contracts. June 12 remains the most brazen and yet classic illustration of the Nigerian’s, leaders disrespect for the sanctity of agreements. Having broken faith with several exit date promises to the people, the IBB-led Federal Government, in classic show of impunity refused to respect the outcome of what is today acknowledged to be the most freely and fairly conducted elections in the history of Nigeria. The rest, they say, is history.

The virulent national culture of not keeping agreements, of course, naturally found its way into our other every day endeavours including our public and private commercial transactions with fellow Nigerians and foreign investors alike. A case in point was the investment agreement the Federal Government reached with Virgin Atlantic Airways to revive the defunct Nigerian Airways via the operation of national carrier operating as a hub from the International Airport. I cannot comment on the propriety or otherwise of the arrangement but suffice it to say that a full-fledged a government negotiated and entered into that agreement with an international airline operator. Then an order emerged from above for the immediate relocation of the airline’s operations from the earlier agreed location at the international wing to a newly built but privately managed domestic wing of the Airport. The foreign investor protested this as a violation of the terms of the investment agreement executed between it and the federal government. The foreign investor, resorted to our courts for a proper interpretation of the agreement executed between all parties and the enforcement of its rights under same, if any. But even while the case was still being heard in FGovernment once again displayed its lack of respect for even its own judicial system, drafted soldiers and other security personnel to forcefully and brutally vandalise the offices of the investor in the international wing of the airport and so forcefully throw them out into the elements. We all know what has become of the Virgin Nigeria project – dead and buried.

Perhaps one would say Virgin Atlantic was a foreign interest and that was why it was treated like that. The truth is that Nigerian investors have not been treated any better too. We all recall when the CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi gave a 90-day ultimatum to some banks, adjudged rightly or wrongly, as being on the brink of collapse, to recapitalise or face consequences. The executive management of those banks left the venue of the meeting believing that they had 90 days to remedy their shortfalls to avoid the regulator’s sledge-hammer. Alas, they woke up one morning, two or three weeks thereafter, only to go to work to see that the regulators had moved in and taken over their businesses and changed the locks of their premises with heavily armed security operatives to prevent them from even going into the offices to move even their personal effects. This is despite the words of Mr. Sanusi himself just some weeks earlier. Now, if you cannot take the words of the Governor of the CBN to the banks, whose words will you take? Yet the CBN governor was expecting strong foreign banks to come and invest in these banks!

The current face-off between the Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Federal Government which has resulted on the nation-wide university lecturers strike and has kept our children at home indefinitely has its roots in yet another broken agreement. A government that freely entered into a welfare/developmental agreement with the ASUU some years back only to turn around to declare her inability to honour the agreement.

One can go on endlessly on Nigeria’s litany of broken promises. Today many investors treat Nigeria almost as a no-go area. The private sector remains an engine for pro-poor growth. Nigeria currently needs private sector investment and complimentary stimulus to leverage opportunities for her numerous unemployed and often restive youth population. For the power sector for instance an annual investment target of 10 billion US dollars (1.5 trillion naira) has been set for the next ten years. How can this be achieved unless we learn to respect the sanctity of the commercial agreement we enter into? Many major players in the oil and gas industry who had eyes on Nigeria have started systematically shifting their interest to Angola, Ghana and Uganda because of the uncertainties in the Nigerian operation environment because no one trusts us to keep our word.

There are insinuations that the current political crisis rocking the ruling party and the nation has its origin in yet another attempt to renege on a silent political agreement willing reached. So if any leader has no plans of honouring an agreement, why enter into it in the first place? That is deceit! A leader’s word, whether written or unwritten, must be his bond of honour. That is what we must take away from our counter-parts in advanced democracies that we sometimes seek to emulate. Today, we are all living witnesses to the promise the US President Barack Obama made to the Syrian people on what the United States would do if the Syrian Government crosses the “red line” of inflicting chemical weapons on its people. Everything he is doing is, therefore, geared towards keeping that promise. And I have the fear that if Obama fails to keep faith with that pledge to the Syrian people in such a manner that he loses face and erode the authority of the American presidency, he may just honourably resign. That is exemplary statesmanship.

The foundation of a new Nigeria that we are all clamouring for will be built of a national effort that cuts across both the leadership and the led to begin to honour our agreements among leaders, with citizens, investors and even to the international community. That is what good governance is all about.

Written By Uche Igwe
ucheigwe@gmail.com

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