denitro:

Donald Duke, You have my VOTE

[size=18pt]Designing for self-destruction[/size]
People & Politics Jul 26, 2010 Share | By Ochereome Nnanna

No matter from what angle you look, what you see of Nigeria is a bleak future unless something drastic is done and pronto. Because of greed and corruption, we are, as former Governor of Cross River State, Mr Donald Duke, put it in a talk he gave at a Save Nigeria Group forum in Abuja recently, “designing a system that would destroy us in the end”.

In that heart-felt talk given ex-tempore and published in the Sunday July 18, 2010 edition of The Guardian, Duke gave an insider’s account of how state governors collude with the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) to rig elections. That angle of his disclosure is a subject for another day. I am more concerned with an issue he raised about how the elite are preparing this country for the failure that has been predicted several times for it.

You will recall that in his 2007 edition of the global threat assessment deposed before the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, former Director of the US National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte noted inter alia: “Nigeria’s fragile democratic transition is in danger of collapsing in the coming months.

The government’s institutional foundations are hollow from decades of neglect and corruption and will continue to make the country susceptible to recurring crises in the coming years.

Abuja has been unable to stem rising lawlessness and insecurity in its oil-producing region, and the Nigerian population is increasingly demoralized from worsening living conditions in the face of much publicized improvements in the country’s macroeconomic indicators. Major political unrest in Nigeria would threaten other countries in the region”.

In addition to institutional weakness, Duke drew our attention to another way by which we are preparing the grounds for the demise of Nigeria. According to him, the elite send their children to the best schools in the world, and when they return to Nigeria they find they cannot fit in. This is in sharp contrast to what obtained in the early days when our first group of educated elite left these shores to school abroad. When they returned they were able to lead their people to independence from colonial rule. They did not come back to as social misfits. So, why do the children of today’s leaders return only to find out they cannot function here?

The answer is very easy. The social ethics of these countries harbouring the best academic institutions in the world are startlingly different from what these children come back to Nigeria to meet. A person travelling out of this country has to make a number of ethical adjustments to avoid getting into trouble as soon as he arrives there. And when he comes back, he also has to readjust or he would seem odd here.

In any case, what are these spoilt children coming back to Nigeria to do? Their greedy, thieving parents have already stashed away enough to take care of them and their children. As Duke pointed out, their parents have already bought mansions for them in major cities around the globe. Why would they come back here only to fall into the hands of kidnappers – children of the downtrodden who seem to be biting back?

Already, the mistakes that the elites of Somalia made, which led their country to implode into the grips of tribal and religious warlords, with its central government at a time functioning from a foreign capital, are exactly the mistakes our own elite are repeating as Duke noted. Somali leaders stole from their countries and bought up choice property abroad and sent their children to the best schools abroad. But when Siad Barre, the last dictator and central ruler of the country died he was buried in Lagos.

The Americans have been warning us to put our house in order quickly and avoid the doom that awaits us because when it hits, we will have nowhere to run, unlike the Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, Ghanaians, Chadians, Nigerienes and Togolese who had a place to run to: Nigeria.

We do not seem to realise the danger we are courting by sending our children to expensive private schools because the public schools have collapsed, rather than join hands to restore the public schooling system to their past glories to enable our children to grow up together. We have abandoned the decrepit public schools to the children of the poor so that when they complete their educational pursuits our well-educated private-schooled children will corner all the juicy opportunities, while the unemployable children of the poor will be their gatemen.

We are only sowing the seeds for a social revolution. If poorly educated children of the poor lead such a revolution, we will wind up with what happened in post-Samuel Doe Liberia, Siad Barre’s Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – failed states controlled by murderous factional warlords.

Sometimes, it is the children of the privileged class that kick over the terraces and lead social revolutions, as we saw in Marxist Russia, Cuba and non-Marxist Ghana. It is a bloody and long-drawn stable-cleansing process, and no one knows who will come out intact. Social revolutions have not worked in Nigeria. They ended up getting mixed up in the ethnic, religious and regional quagmire of Nigeria. Therefore, the revolution, when it comes, is likely to result in the Somalia/Congo/Liberia model due to ethnic and religious complications.

There is no better time than now for Nigerians to search for the right political candidates to repair this country by iron-fisting corruption and re-engineering the system back to normalcy. Let us close our ears to candidates whose agenda is to ride on ethnic and sectional platforms to continue business as usual after 2011. Nigeria will not survive another eight years if drastic change does not come.

There is no better time than now for Nigerians to search for the right political candidates to repair this country by iron-fisting corruption and re-engineering the system back to normalcy. Let us close our ears to candidates whose agenda is to ride on ethnic and sectional platforms to continue business as usual after 2011. Nigeria will not survive another eight years if drastic change does not come.

Beaf:

Donald Duke is in danger of burning himself out by becoming a perpertual presidential candidate.
The simple truth is that, his timing is totally wrong, he will face an impossible struggle to appeal across the country. How will he cope with "zoning" for example? It all seems too vague, where is his party machinery?

mikeansy:

Donald Duke will never be the product of PDP's horsetrading. That horsetrading never produce competent candidates. The Kingmakers will only produce fools they can teleguide.

His taking the bull by the horn and running on another platform is in itself a demonstration of real leadership. All this candidates they keep springing up from PDP none can compare Donald.

He should run, if he fails so be it. It is better for him to run and fail than to look himself in the mirror every morning saying "I refused to do something about Nigeria out of cowardice".

monkeyleg:

His timing is not wrong, infact it is very right. what is lacking in Nigeria is the collective desire for change. That is why we have all become perpertual siddon lookers, every good at phycoanalysing others and coming up with the usual prediction, that they would not win.

I wouldnt say duke is my prefered candidate, but he remains one of the best of the awful lot. If Nigerian really seek and desire change, they will awake from their slumber and ignite the necessary momentum that we need to effect that change

monkeyleg:

His timing is not wrong, infact it is very right. what is lacking in Nigeria is the collective desire for change. That is why we have all become perpertual siddon lookers, every good at phycoanalysing others and coming up with the usual prediction, that they would not win.

I wouldnt say duke is my prefered candidate, but he remains one of the best of the awful lot. If Nigerian really seek and desire change, they will awake from their slumber and ignite the necessary momentum that we need to effect that change

Kobojunkie:

Why did Donald Duke only recently quit the PDP party? I mean this is a party that is guilty of so many of the attrocities he claims to speak up against. Why did he continue to fraternize with the very same till only a couple of weeks ago? Was it because he thought the party that helped propel and sustain him all this while would not pick him as the next presidential candidate on the PDP ticket?

Kobojunkie:

Why did Donald Duke only recently quit the PDP party? Was it because he thought the party that helped propel and sustain him all this while would not pick him as the next presidential candidate on the PDP ticket?

My sentiments exactly. On what platform did he run for governor TWICE and won by a milestone?

mikeansy:

Beaf

I am not some wild-eyed idealist. Most of what I do is rooted in reality albeit leaving a little room for Hope and Change. I prefer to describe myself as a Centrist with left leaning sentiments. Donald Duke can be decribed in this way and this is why I agree with him most of the time.
There is a fine line of demarcation between "cold hard reality" and "Cynicism". That fine line has "Hope" written all over it, when that line begins to get blurred people begin to confuse "cynicism" and "realism". When people get cynical in the name of being real the result becomes stagnation and no progress because they simply refuse to hope.

Jonathan has been given the stage to prove his worth, but he has failed to own the stage. I am not convinced on his leadership abilities and same goes for many Nigerians.

Jonathan Goodluck will not win PDP primaries (He does not have enough Governors in the bag). If he does win PDP primaries by hook or crook; PDP will become a weaker and fractured party and the North will move massively in the opposite direction. That will mean Jonathan will either loose the general election or will need to rig massively in other to win. If he does win by rigging he will be a very weak and ineffective leader. While and Obj or Yar'adua can run this country with a stolen mandate, Jonathan will have difficulties with a stolen mandate.

In essence Jonathan will turn out to be a liability to the Progressives and the South in general.

The best Scenario for Nigeria to be honest is for Jonathan to fail at PDP primaries so that the South and most progressives in Nigeria can focus on Duke. Duke can win the election all together by strong showings in most of the State Capitals in Nigeria and then winning massiviely in Southern and Middle-belt villages.

Most elections since 1999 have been decided by 1/5 to 1/3 of the population. If Duke's plan to build a movement around Labour, Students, Youth etc works we can get more voters to the poll to topple PDP. But Jonathan does not have the charisma to execute this.

Elections in true demcracies are won by those who can tap the passion of voters.

mikeansy:

Kobojunkie

Donald Duke clearly said that the attrocities he speaks up against are a Nigerian thing not just PDP. except you want to ask him why he remained a Nigerian while those attrocities where committed then let us move on to something else.

spikedcylinder:

My sentiments exactly. On what platform did he run for governor TWICE and won by a milestone?