As 2003 winds down, we are all prone to reflecting on the past 12 months and taking stock of what we accomplished individually and as a nation. A number of notable things have taken place in Nigeria during the period. It has been a long uphill fight, and there had been very few real successes. At the end of 2003 millions of Nigerians did not earn the minimum required to sustain the most basic existence, because local and national efforts targeted toward taming the scourge of corruption in the society showed little or no result. This is simply because many of the political leaders, judges, police and customs officers who are corruption-fighters by the day are hypocrites by the night. Sadly, the nation has a shortage of honest and selfless leaders working for the benefit of everyone in the society. Workers are still being denied their salaries at the end of the month; this is a criminal, wicked, inhuman, and mean behavior to deny the workers the means to provide food and other basic necessities to their families. Thus, the civil and human rights of the people are being violated, as the war on poverty, which was expected to improve their living standard, has only succeeded in creating more poverty in the land.

Social infrastructure remains dilapidated and the nation’s educational institutions and hospitals are under funded. The environment in which teachers work remain depressing despite repeated strike actions by the teachers and support staff and riots by students intended to attract the attention of the authorities for rehabilitation. Good books are rare objects in schools in the nation; the fact remains that books, teaching materials, courses taught, examinations given, and curricula offered constitute the principal means for an intellectual growth. Thus the teachers are exhausted, defeated, and confused because they lack the resources and support to effectively perform their duties. The best are therefore leaving and the rest are burned out. The effects on the students have been profound as the nation’s standard of education keeps declining. The year could be rated as a bad one, if one could insert into the equation the massive electoral frauds and political assassinations that occurred during the run-up to the 2003 elections.

As the year ends, and as we prepare to step into 2004, there is a cause of concern of the huge problems facing the nation. The economy remains comatose; domestic inflation caused by periodic devaluation of the Naira keeps import expensive; and unemployment, violent crime, and prostitution seemed to have attained new heights. Nigeria shares a culture that taught egalitarian ideals, yet about 70 percent of the population are poor. The nation has a dehumanizing working condition that terrorizes the workforce and causes their low productivity. And the thieves masquerading as political leaders have often increase the cost of petroleum products without cognizant of the impacts on the masses. As a result, living conditions are better in some other Third World Countries that do not posses the amount of resources endowed in Nigeria. As a result, many people have given up on the politicians that seem to work only for their selfish interest. We must begin to think of how to restructure the nation and the old and dysfunctional ethos we created.

The Greek root of the word, ethos, as the World We Created at Hamilton High noted, ‘means the habits of the animals in a place.’ According to Gerald Grant (1988), ethos is the sharing of attitudes, values, and beliefs that bond disparate individuals into a community. And ethos, which varies greatly from one nation to another, has significant impact on the people and the condition of things in a particular society. Every nation exists within a particular policy matrix, which is the web of rule, regulation, proscription, and requirements that sets constraints on what the citizens may do and thus shapes the interaction of the people within the society. The policy matrix of a nation includes all those policies developed at federal, state, and local levels. Thus some nations have social policies that are favorable to socioeconomic development, and others do not. And this explains the variation in the ethos or character of nations. As mentioned earlier, the frequent increase in the price of petroleum products leads to increase in the price of other goods and services, causing undue hardship to the people. The ubiquitous bribery and corruption in the nation leads to policy ineffectiveness, poverty of the people, and crime. Also, the continuation of irrational and ancient practices in the system lead to abuse and favoritism. This is not to mention ignorance and absence of liberty of the masses, which leads to tyranny and the looting of the nation’s resources by the privileged few. Therefore, the domestic disorder and the complex economic problems facing the nation at the close of the year could be argued to have been created mainly by misguided government policies. And this has hindered the improvement of the living standard of the people and the general well being of the society.

As the world swings into 2004, important reforms are required in Nigeria in order to create the conditions necessary for the transformation and regeneration of the society. The civil and human rights of the citizens that have been trampled upon should be protected, and the frequent disregard of court orders by the political godfathers and the indiscriminate use of court injunctions by judges to pervert justice should be controlled. The government, in protecting particular individuals from the wrath of the law has, as Gunnar Myrdal noted in the fifties, created "tumours of partiality and corruption" in the Obasanjo regime. Thus, as we are headed into 2004, no policy should be made to restrict the free-speech rights or religious practices of citizens’ even when they may wish to oppose government policies. But the protection of free exercise of religion and freedom to criticize one’s government should not be construed as a right to topple a duly constituted government. There should also be an authentic local control of natural resources in their domain for the necessary revenue for community development programs. More importantly, the nation’s politics should be restructured into an issues-based politics, so that the people could hold the politicians responsible for their actions during elections. And educational institutions should be granted genuine autonomy and teachers motivated to perform their duties well. Towards this, teaching profession must be reformed so that the teachers could assume full responsibility for their actions. This means that stability and improved financial climate would improve the state of things in the nation’s citadel of learning.

To create and inculcate a way of life consistent with a democratic polity, and for the nation to make any meaningful progress in 2004, Nigeria’s retrogressive and ineffective policies must be discarded. This will enable the nation’s cultural currents to flow toward buttressing individual freedom, a healthy economy, and a true democratic society. This is because the culture and policies of a nation are critical determinants of the ethos of the society. It has been pointed out that a society with a positive ethos affirms the democratic ideals and imparts the intellectual and moral virtues necessary to the functioning of an educational community in a democracy. Therefore, the society attempts to commit its members to those ideals and virtues through the espousal of exemplary actions, practices, and observance of social norms. All this will not happen without strong sociopolitical institutions that will provide a safe and secure environment, and ensure the basic social order for meaningful educational and economic activities to take place. As we have seen, many of the policies of the past will not take the nation into a progressive and healthy future. Although the government does not (and should not) hold the key to all social problems, it should guide the economy through good policies and the privatization of inefficient and corruption-ridden public-sector corporations, so as to improve the living standard of the citizens. If the government fails to look into the authentic anguish of the hungry masses, and if the employers of labor continue with their mean and inhuman attitude of non-payment or late payment of workers, it is feared that 2004 may be greeted by the peoples’ revolution. Therefore, innovative ideas and a shift away from the dysfunctional ethos we created in the society would place the nation in a better and higher sociopolitical and economic pedestal in 2004.

Victor E. Dike, CEO of the Center for Social Justice and Human Development (CSJHD), in Sacramento, California, is the author of Nigeria and the Politics of Unreason: A Study of the Obasanjo Regime [London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, November 20, 2003].

Jan 2004