Showhorses v Workhorses

This is an unfiltered version of my column in BusinessDay yesterday…

Last month, the US Supreme Court did what had been expected for quite a bit and overturned the Roe v Wade ruling which had made abortion a constitutional right. The right to abortion will now revert to the states in the country, and almost immediately, 13 states that lean conservative, had “trigger laws” that made abortion illegal upon receipt of the Supreme Court decision.

This was no accident. The Supreme Court gave the Roe v Wade ruling on 22 January 1973, and in response to that, a few weeks later on 16 February 1973, three conservatives, Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner and Joseph Coors came together to form the Heritage Foundation. Of the three, only Feulner is still alive. Coors died at age 85 in 2003, and Weyrich followed in 2008. Feulner, who will be 81 in August, will have the news of a great victory to report to his seniors when he joins them in the afterlife. This great victory is the result of patient, plodding work. They effectively spent half a century taking over the Republican party, and the judiciary, all the way to the Supreme Court, and I am willing to bet my house that all three, and most of their followers, were more than willing to make it a multi-generational fight. A fight that they would not be around, like Coors and Weyrich, to see the end of. The first question I’d like to ask many of those celebrating yesterday’s judgement is this: how many of you have ever heard of Coors, Weyrich and Feulner? None?

In January 2021, the brilliant American comedian/political commentator, Bill Maher, ran a sketch about Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman who according to Thomas Scully, a Republican congressman that opposed Waxman for years, created 50% of America’s social safety net when no one was looking. And that is the thing about being a workhorse rather than a showhorse. No one notices a workhorse, so it gets things done. A showhorse on the other hand…

Nigeria expects to have its 2023 general elections starting with the Presidential and National Assembly vote on 25 February, and then the Governorship and State Assembly elections on 11 March. As expected, the campaign season has had a devastating impact on governance as political appointees and members of the executive and the legislature have ignored their duties and focused on politicking to retain their seats or win new ones.

For a lot of the political class though, the dereliction of duty hasn’t required a significant shift in mindset because a commitment to quality work wasn’t there, to begin with. Even the politicking and campaign processes have been largely bereft of adequate depth and while we would be correct in blaming the political class for the mediocrity, we would be quite remiss if we failed to place appropriate blame on the general public itself for its unwillingness to insist on productive political conversation and action.

Leaders should be visionaries or at least experienced map-readers with a clear idea of the destination but what we have are reactionary followers of the crowd who lead the people backwards by playing on their base desires and the outcome has been our ruinous lack of progress.

We have blamed our political class but the truth is that the political class Nigerians have is the political class that Nigerians have negotiated for by virtue of what they reward with attention, votes, and loyalty.

It is one thing to verbally ask for a productive and principled political class but the actual actions of the people show the political class what actually sells in the political market. The tragic situations in Sokoto, Owo, Orlu, are fresh reminders.

Sokoto, for example, has had to deal with significant levels of economic failure, underdevelopment, and insecurity, watered by the stream of religious extremism. Ideally, one would expect that the campaign season would be an opportunity for the people to focus on the changes needed to improve the outcomes related to these problems but instead what we had was the brutal murder of a student over accusations of blasphemy and riots in response to the arrest of suspects, meaning that politicians in the state now have a clear idea of what is needed to get an equilibrium price in the local political marketplace. The same goes for the political conversation and trading processes in other regions.

The South and Middle-Belt regions have expressed a desire for devolution of powers and restructuring for quite a while and one would expect that after the experience of the Buhari era, much of the discussion around the campaign would revolve around practical ways to get devolution and use the freedom to improve regional governance outcomes especially those related to economic and security goals but this hasn’t been the case.

What we have had instead have largely been debates about the ethnicity of the next president rather than the goals of devolution and restructuring that would provide an institutional foundation for governors, LGA chairpersons, and legislators in the 17 Southern states and those in the Middle Belt.

In March this year, the National Assembly passed bills that seek to take responsibility for airports, electricity generation, and distribution, prisons, and railways from the Exclusive list and place them on the Concurrent List. Presidential assent has not been added yet but it is a huge step forward because at least it means that the legislative resistance that has been a factor for decades is melting away.

One would expect that Southern and Middle-Belt political conversations would strongly factor this position into discussions on the goals that should be agreed on in the light of this development and those who would be strategically useful presidential candidates and governorship candidates that could help achieve these goals.

But sadly enough, nothing of the sort has happened. Candidates are being discussed for different reasons and some are better than others but no particular region has had a significant portion of its political conversation and candidate consideration influenced by the Devolution and Restructuring angles.

The Southern and Northern legislators who have been responsible for driving this development have not been identified and singled out for acknowledgement and praise as the instance might require.

We have paid barely any attention to this development.

We have not started a campaign demanding presidential assent to make it Law. It is sensible to believe that if the legislators responsible for this were highlighted and praised, further action on institutionally useful developments would become more of a target for the political class to deliver on.

The actions that we reward are the steps that the political class is going to become more likely to get done.

This is why we are always going to have a much higher supply of showhorses who focus on pandering to the audience and don’t buckle down to do the hard, unglamorous work needed to deliver quality governance and a negligible number of workhorses committed to getting the real job done. Nigeria’s political marketplace is very clear on what it rewards and the politicians are going to keep trading as they are until we offer mature political followership.

We should build the ability to receive uncomfortable truths and accept the policies that take proper cognisance of them. We will keep getting mediocre shortsighted political leaders for as long as we keep rewarding mediocrity.

This openness to devolution should also leave us with heightened interest in the elections associated with the legislative positions in the Senate, House of Representatives, and State Houses of Assembly. It is important that we set clear national, regional, and state goals for legislators and ensure that the people we entrust with the responsibility have the legislative competence needed for success.

Legislative competence comprises the knowledge, capacity, skill, qualification, and authority to get the constitutional amendments and oversight over the executive. The technical and character quality of candidates we put forward for this task is very important.

The failure to appreciate Workhorses and reward Showhorses is not a uniquely Nigerian failing to be honest, which is why I started with the American examples. The human inclination to exciting spectacle over what is productive but not very entertaining is a factor everywhere in the world albeit in varying degrees dependent on the level of political maturity of the society at the moment. But for our survival in Nigeria, we need to start identifying the workhorses and advancing them quickly.