Babangida’s proposal: A dangerous one By Idang Alibi

Given the less- than- pleasant experience which two states of this federation have had in the hands of two self-confessed ‘”digital” governors, I consider the recent advocacy by the former military President Ibrahim Babangida that President Muhammadu Buhari should voluntarily and patriotically allow a digital person, possibly of a much younger generation, to succeed him in 2019, a very frightening, if not out rightly, a dangerous proposition for the nation.  IBB considers PMB too analogue to provide leadership for a complex country like Nigeria at this time. Who am I to have an opinion to volunteer when one General expresses an opinion on another fellow General and comrade- in –arms?

My own simple and patriotic task here is to draw attention to the performance of two digital governors and to warn that if their imprint on governance is what digitalization means, we should better stick to analogue leaders. Let us take a look at the two digital governors; one, a Muslim from the Northern state of Jigawa and the other, a Christian, drawn from the southern state of Cross River. One provided a non-too distant experience that cannot be easily forgotten; the other is still on the throne, providing an awful experience that many perceptive citizens want banished like yesterday.

Governor Saminu Turaki was in-charge of Jigawa from 1999-2007. One notable legacy of governance we remember him for is that, armed with a computer and a mobile phone, this man was always on the move: Dubai today, Hong Kong tomorrow and the UK the next day in perennial and, ultimately, futile search for the elusive “foreign investors.” When some citizens complained that he was a “mobile” governor and that he should learn to stay more at home to provide leadership to the young and grossly underdeveloped state, he answered that  with his two vital digital objects, he could govern Jigawa from any part of the world! Wherever a Governor is, that place becomes Government House and with his two governing devices, time and space shrank for him to accomplish his goals.

It was said at the time that Turaki used to carry about three to four flight tickets on his person at any point in time. He could arrive the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos or the Nnamdi Azikiwe in Abuja and remember that he needed to have traveled to Australia next before arriving Nigeria and right at the airport the man will not touch base with home; he will take off on any available flight to Australia. He was always landing from and taking off to, some far flung corners of the earth.

When his digital era was coming to an end in Jigawa, he remembered to build an ICT school somewhere in his state which awards a diploma as a fitting legacy to his reign. I cannot now remember whether he named this school after himself as was, and still is, the fashion among some of our leaders. When our man eventually left, he had ‘depopulated’ the Jigawa treasury by several billions, some of which EFCC accused him of illegally appropriating to himself. I think he still has some EFCC cases against him pending in court. Please note that this digital governor ascended the throne in his late 30s or early 40s and not in his years of dotage.

We now come to another governor, a 40-something year old young youth who is currently on the seat and spares no opportunity to advertise himself as the original digital governor, the real deal. He calls himself a labour-friendly governor and as a man is bound to treat his friends more favourably, this guy, with borrowed and not earned money, pays the state public service workers sometimes on the first day of the month even before they have had a chance to offer any service to the people of the state! Meet Professor, Senator, Governor Benedict Ayade, the one and only digital governor south of the Niger and Benue and current helmsman of Cross River State. Ayade is the true archetype of a digital governor indeed.

Like his mentor in digitalization governance, Ayade is always on the move to foreign countries in search of foreign investors. At one point in his governorship the man was abroad for over a month, prompting calls that he had gone AWOL and should be impeached! Ayade is slightly better than Turaki in that while he is away, his senior brother governs in his stead. At one point when Ayade traveled to (was it Mexico, Venezuela or Nicaragua?), he was in the full elements of his digitalisation. He was furiously snapping away pictures of large hectares of pineapple farms he visited and posting them on facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other social media platforms. I felt very sorry for him for his failure to realise that pineapple has been grown, and is still being grown, by his citizens in almost every part of his state!

When some disgusted citizens and human rights people were counting days and saying audibly that he had overstayed his foreign sojourn taking pictures of what others conceived and implemented, and so needed to be impeached, he realized the folly of his meaningless adventure and rushed back and took back the reins of government from his beloved brother.

The icing on Ayade’s great digitalization governance cake was witnessed last year when he announced with media fanfare a N1. 3 trillion budget for CRS, a state whose budget for the year should realistically be in the neighbourhood of about N100b at the most, and christened it a budget of ‘kinetic crystallization’. If my retained knowledge of physics and chemistry serves me right, this Ayade mega budget, intended essentially to impress poor and hungry folks, will neither move the state nor crystallize into anything, whether it be a sugar solution or a salt solution or any alkaline alchemy! It will be what it was intended to be- a buzz word meant to dazzle, hoodwink and bamboozle simple folks.

But who can honestly blame Babangida for his proposition? He has always been in love with political experimentation. It is this same man who once decreed a two-party system for the country. More notably, he decreed that a new breed of leadership should happen on the country. No one, therefore, can rightly accuse him of malice against Buhari. He told the new breed leaders we had in his time not to be passionately ideological but that they should tilt a little to the right and a little to the left. But those guys did not heed his counsel. They did not tilt anywhere to the left or right.

Rather, they overwhelming tilted too much to the wrong. Many new breed local government chairmen of the time will take the entire monthly allocation of their councils in the boot of their official cars, escape with a few key officials of their local government and an impressive-looking comfort lady for the chairman to cool off with, to a neighboring state, share whatever they got among themselves and then everybody goes home; to re- surface at the council the next month for a new allocation.

Everyone seems to agree that the problem with Nigeria lies squarely in her lack of competent leadership. IBB and some other commentators think it lies on the age and technological skills set of its leaders. I am saying here that IBB and others of like-mind are wrong. My own thinking, based partly on the examples of only two digital and young governors we have been given above, is that what matters is, first of all, the ability and then, the character or Godly disposition of whoever we want to recruit for leadership.

Age and computer competence are not as important as physical and mental strength, a good character and the courage to do the right thing. Computer literacy is a skill that can aid good governance. If you lack the ability to use your mind’s eyes to see a vision and have a plan, no amount of digital competence can result to good governance. Is it not even said of the computer that ‘’garbage in, garbage out’’?

Idang Alibi is an Abuja-based journalist and can be reached through idangalibi@yahoo.com and alibiidang@gmail.com.