Setting agenda often seems an easy task. We look around us, see anomie, scream at evil, squirm from poverty, howl at ignorance. We conclude and reel out the agenda. If we want to stop ignorance, fix education. If we want peace, abolish crime. To get rid of poverty, embrace prosperity.
Suddenly, paradise is not so far and difficult after all. We know at our fingertips the way out of the quagmire. We know the answer. So, we wonder, why is it that election cycle after election cycle, we still say the same thing, and then we come here again and say the same thing?
World peace is unattainable? Some of us say, it is because the leaders are bad. Other says it is because the bad is too much for the leaders. In other words, they are naïve and incompetent. But naïve and incompetent were heroes in the past. Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkramah, Jomo Kenyatta, Jerry Rawlings. Africa looks like a graveyard of the naïve and incompetent. Nor is the rest of the world without them. In the west, a raft of big names dwarfs the failures of the dwarfs like Trump, Boris Johnson, et al. In their pantheons are names like Disraeli, Churchill, Washington, Napoleon, De Gaulle. With these, the societies indulge the brats. We don’t have great geniuses on the throne whose virtues cover the sins of men of little faith.
Hence we crave idealists, and idealists fail not like regular leaders. In his memoirs, Richard Nixon – himself an incompetent – railed at some African nationalists like Nkrumah. He said they exhausted their revolutionary juices in the heady days of struggle. When they mounted the throne, they were like dancers who danced themselves lame at rehearsals before the main dance.
Yet we can say that, in spite of the woes of agenda setting, it is an important business. We can say it is not as simple as saying we want to fix the classrooms or get good teachers as cure for an age of darkness. Some will say, feed the poor kids in the class to fuel their brains. Others propagate new technology, a brave new world of software and artificial intelligence. Let’s forget the dark age and step into the light.
Not so easy, say others. Forget education. Build the infrastructure first. Roads, bridges. The first light is power. Get the DisCos working and the light that imitates the God’s illumination will explode in our minds.
A few theorists want good men. Just good men and women, and all the problems go away. It is not about things. They quote Burke and John Stuart Mill about the good men as guarantee against the triumph of evil. Where are the good men? Who are they? Square pegs in square holes. Yet who has ever seen a square hole that another person has not defined as round? There we go.
What then will work? It becomes not a matter of what we want but what comes first. Development becomes a matter of scales of preference. Shall we eat before we school? Or shall we have good roads before electric power. Or shall we have all at once? We suddenly face a puzzle. How do we marshal resources? Agenda setting is not just about what we want, since we know them. It is not about how we want them. It becomes where we want them and what comes first.
Nor are we always satisfied with that. In the end, we do not even agree about education even when we say it is priority. We do not agree on electoral process as tempers flare when ballots arrive our precincts.
Even in a matter as fraught as insecurity, we never are at one. First, we have to agree that it is a problem of faith. Is it my faith against yours, or is it a denial that it is even violence. Some call it pure criminality, others call it religious criminality. One thinks it is clear. The opposite thinks it is even clearer. They are looking at the same thing with the same eyes God gave them. But they don’t think it is the same God. So, there. Where one sees purity, another screams sacrilege. Clarity is one of the banes of society. Some ambiguity would humble us.
So, we might see, as we saw in the last election, that food on the table, brilliance in the classroom, hunger on the streets, the jailbird of innocence, were important, but they took back seat to the issue of whose tribe we gripe at and whose God you revile.
Francis Fukuyama lamented that 20th century politics looked at the wailings of the working class who wanted equality and the conservatives who craved liberty unlike today where identity politics takes the cudgel so one fellow can whip the other. Jean Paul Sartre said hell is other people. The French novelist and existential philosopher anticipated this age. In the west, it is about God and race. Here it is about God and tribe. No one is talking God and grace.
Marxists will disagree. They will say such issues are a smokescreen. They are masking humanity’s materialist yearnings and frustrations. Take, for instance, the Boko Haram scourge. Some have said it is all about a group of zealots who seek to clean the earth for Allah. But we know of their founder Mohammed Yusuf, who knew the bread-and-butter origins of any mass movement. He gave them bread when they were hungry. He gave them shelter against the fury of the northern sun and the flogging rains. To sate their loins and solitude, he gave them wives. Jesus even said that of his good disciples in Matthew 25.
There is a materialist underpinning to religious pining. But not so fast. The liberal theorist would say such materialist claims are not genuine. We have seen poor societies hold off fanaticism with aplomb. In ancient societies, they raided other societies like the Jukuns of present-day Taraba, or they begged their gods for better harvests. Today, God is the harvest. We saw churches and a candidate turn the last election into Armageddon.
Setting an agenda does not seem always easy, but it is a ritual we love. It is an affirmation of life, a new way to begin again. If things fell apart, it is time to put them together. We are happy for a new turn because hope beats despair.
We hope because when new leaders come, we dredge up the hidden impulse to believe again, to trust that one of us can rise to the occasion and lead, like Churchill when Hitler hectored, or Lincoln when brothers fumed, or Roosevelt when poverty drove men off skyscrapers in suicide jumps.
The same way many look to Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as history beckons at the door of the angst in the land.
