BY IDUH ONAH
THE RECENT behind-the-scene concession of King’s College, Lagos, is an ordinary administrative decision that opens a small window through which one may glimpse into the larger architecture of organised deception of Nigeria’s ruling elite, a deception that continues to undo our collective development. It is not because the school is merely a famous institution, but more a symbol of a nation and a people becoming so accustomed to the stealing of institutions of public value.
While successive governments, both military and civilians, had been engaged in concessions and privatisation of public assets, and this had at some point been vehemently opposed by organised labour; it is indeed disturbing that the rest of civil society often receive these announcements with the emotional temperature of people being informed of a change in the weather.
This is where King’s College becomes larger than King’s College. Why does another concession, another privatisation, another withdrawal of public support that will ultimately orchestrate a cascade of a wider concession of the entire Unity School system that has been so valuable produce so little sustained collective resistance beyond the trade unions in the Ministry of Education and the PTA of King’s College? Have we become accustomed to deprivation?
Rather than the seeming calmness, there ought to be, somewhere in the Nigerian civic space, a threshold beyond which citizens can rise and say: No, it is enough, this one touches our very nerve. Not a partisan ‘no’, or the ritual opposition of politicians who discover their principles whenever they are in opposition, nor the noisome outrage of social media that burns brightly for forty-eight hours and then moves on to the next scandal.
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I mean a broad, stubborn, civic disobedience by a coalition of grandparents, parents, workers, artisans, teachers, students, professionals, traders, pensioners and ordinary citizens who recognise that some things are too consequential to be left to the arithmetic of procurement committees and concession agreements.
King’s College, Lagos should therefore not be discussed merely as a school, rather, it should provoke a deeper conversation about what a society believes government must stand for.
For my generation, we were told stories about a Nigeria that once was, when narrated to younger Nigerians today, will definitely sound suspiciously like a fairy-tale.
There was a time when children in public secondary schools were comfortably accommodated in boarding houses, well-fed and educated under a system that conceived of education as a public investment rather than a private transaction. There were institutions in which the state accepted that the child of a civil servant, a farmer, a trader or a railway worker had a legitimate claim to an education of dignity.
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Stories of university education were similarly enchanting. Tales of public universities where meals were literally free, laundry of students were done free; there were cafeterias operating almost 24/7, and dining halls or restaurants that served meals determined by students.
When I heard these stories when I entered the university in the early ’90s, I thought they were false because they sounded fictional; but they happened. This is one of the cruellest ironies of our national history: many of those who passed through this era of comparatively robust public provision are today among the most enthusiastic apostles of dismantling it.
The beneficiaries of public education became the salesmen of these assets. The graduates of subsidised education became the philosophers of concession and privatisation. The contradiction would be amusing if its consequences were not so severe.
We are repeatedly told that subsidy is an aberration; whether on petroleum products, agriculture, education or other essential goods and services; because subsidy, they argue, is ridden with corruption. There is truth in the observation that poorly designed subsidies can be captured, distorted or abused. But there is also an astonishing duplicity in the argument.
The ordinary citizen’s subsidy is called waste while the elite’s subsidy is called entitlement. While the ordinary citizen is told to pay the market price for fuel, electricity, education, transportation and healthcare, the ruling elites are surrounded by elaborate systems of public provision and publicly-financed privileges: medical care (abroad), accommodation, transport, security, wardrobe allowance, official hospitality and other conveniences. Even corruption itself, in some quarters, appears to have acquired constitutional clothing. Immunity can sometimes seem like a particularly elegant subsidy for political impunity.
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The question, therefore, is not simply whether subsidy is good or bad. The more fundamental question is: who gets subsidised, for what purpose, and under whose supervision?
A modern welfare or developmental state does not apologise for using public resources to expand human capability but asks whether public expenditure produces public value. The answer should not automatically be to withdraw the state and leave citizens at the mercy of the market to drawn as Nigerians are currently undergoing.
Take for instance this scenario. For decades, Nigerian parents have performed an extraordinary act of faith. They feed their children, pay school fees (buy uniforms, books, shoes and examination forms); endure university expenses amidst unending strikes, sacrifices in the effort so that the child might one day stand independently. The child will graduate only to enter an adulthood in which he/she remains economically dependent on their parents because there are insufficient productive jobs.
This is a grave indictment of ruling elite for constructing a political economy totally detached from the realities in saner, civilised societies. A society cannot educate millions of young people and then congratulate itself for producing graduates when it has not constructed an economy capable of absorbing their labour, creativity and ambition.
A country does not become impoverished only when its treasury is empty. It becomes impoverished when its citizens cease to believe that they are entitled to demand better. The great Nigerian task, therefore, may begin with recovering something more fundamental than money: the civic imagination to recognise unacceptable conditions as unacceptable, the courage to organise around that recognition, and the persistence to insist that government once again become an instrument for building a society rather than merely managing its decline. That is where consciousness becomes citizenship, and where citizenship, properly organised, becomes power.
Then there is the peculiar Nigerian achievement of converting citizenship itself into a do-it-yourself enterprise. We provide our own water, alternative electricity, private security, repair roads and drainage around our homes, pay for low standard private schools because public schools have deteriorated, seek private healthcare or medical tourism for those who can afford it because public hospitals have deteriorated, from Abacha’s “mere consulting clinics” to the prevailing reality of where people go to die.
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After paying for all of this individually, we still pay taxes to a government that is obligated to provide these essential needs and services. We are therefore trapped in a political economy in which the basic functions of government are increasingly treated as opportunities for private enterprise. The market is invited to perform tasks that citizens once reasonably expected the state to perform.
Perhaps, the only function left for government will be to issue press releases explaining why government cannot perform government. If the logic is further pursued, one might expect our ruling class to ultimately summon the colonial administrators back. It is a sarcasm that has an uncomfortable ring to it.
Of course, colonialism may not have returned in its old administrative apparel, but its economic logic has found new clothing in neoliberal prescriptions, frequently implemented by successive generation of our ruling class who enthusiastically embraced the language of markets while leaving citizens to absorb the pains.
This is where King’s College becomes larger than King’s College. Why does another concession, another privatisation, another withdrawal of public support that will ultimately orchestrate a cascade of a wider concession of the entire Unity School system that has been so valuable produce so little sustained collective resistance beyond the trade unions in the Ministry of Education and the PTA of King’s College? Have we become accustomed to deprivation?
Perhaps Nigerians have developed an astonishing survival mechanism: we privately condemn almost everything and collectively challenge almost nothing. We complain in taxis, at dinner tables, in offices, in WhatsApp groups and other social media platforms; then we go home, switch on the generator and continue. From history, we know that societies are not transformed by the intensity of private complaints but when private dissatisfaction metamorphosed into organised civic action.
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There are enough historical accounts to remind us that societies do not improve merely because citizens suffer patiently but when they organise, articulate demands and insist that political authority remains answerable to them.
The point is not to romanticise upheaval, for revolutions are not romantic affairs when viewed from the ground. France, Russia and other societies experienced upheavals that brought immense suffering alongside profound political transformation. Though their histories are complicated and cannot simply be transplanted onto Nigeria, the fact however remains that these histories demonstrate a basic historical truth that political orders that become profoundly disconnected from the interests and aspirations of the populations they govern do not remain permanently immune to popular pressure.
There is an old biblical wisdom that darkness may endure for a night, but light eventually comes. While there is the inevitable danger that Nigerians might begin to mistake the night for the natural condition of the country; however, the truth, as Achebe clearly stated in his essay, “The Trouble With Nigeria”, is: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”
Achebe also stated in the same essay that “Nigerians are what they are only because their leaders are not what they should be.”
There is nothing inherently Nigerian about bad roads, unreliable electricity, collapsing schools, unemployment, insecurity or a government that repeatedly asks citizens to make sacrifices while public officials remain insulated from the consequences of their egregious failures.
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Other societies have built functional public institutions, constructed welfare systems, discovered that capitalism does not require the wholesale abandonment of the public realm, and learned that markets can be useful servants but dangerous substitutes for citizenship and government. The relevant question, then, is not whether Nigeria can afford a humane society but whether Nigerians will insist upon one.
Perhaps the concession of King’s College should become one of those occasions when we pause and ask what we are doing, not merely to one school, but to the idea that some institutions belong to the public realm because they embody a public purpose. A public school is not simply land, buildings, teachers and students, but a declaration that the children of the society, of both the poor and the rich, are a common responsibility.
The choice before Nigeria is therefore larger than concession versus no concession but between two conceptions of society with one voice saying: “You are on your own; purchase what you can afford”, while the other is bellowing: We are citizens of the same republic; there are things we must provide together.”
King’s College, then, is not the whole argument, it is a signpost. Perhaps what should trouble us most is not that another public institution is lined up for concessioning but rather that we may have become so inured to the gradual liquidation of the public realm that we barely notice when another piece disappears.
A country does not become impoverished only when its treasury is empty. It becomes impoverished when its citizens cease to believe that they are entitled to demand better. The great Nigerian task, therefore, may begin with recovering something more fundamental than money: the civic imagination to recognise unacceptable conditions as unacceptable, the courage to organise around that recognition, and the persistence to insist that government once again become an instrument for building a society rather than merely managing its decline. That is where consciousness becomes citizenship, and where citizenship, properly organised, becomes power.
Onah is the Editor-in-Chief of NATIONAL RECORD and writes this column every Wednesday. Send reactions via email to: nationalrecordng@gmail.com, onahiduh@yahoo.co.uk. WhatsApp: +234 8033209749
