The fourth estate as critical mass

When Edmund Burke coined the term Fourth Estate and wrote ‘yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all', little did he know that Nigerians would take the term so literally. Ours is a country where the Fourth Estate has become the Critical Mass that is needed for governance to occur.

Flip through the pages of our dailies and you are sure to come across full-page colour advertorials celebrating the ‘achievements' of state governors, local government chairmen and other public officials. The birthday of a governor, his wife, or re-burial of long deceased family members is an excuse for all manner of ingratiating messages. While this is good news for newspapers, it is a sad reflection on the state of governance that officials spend scarce resources to advertise the award of contracts, birthdays and other anniversaries.

Today, councillors use public funds to congratulate local government chairmen for awarding contracts; chairmen in turn congratulate governors' wives for using public funds to launch pet projects, and governors use scarce public funds to thank the wife of the President for visiting their states. In essence, governance is reduced to a nauseating charade of incompetence and sycophancy.

Governance should be concerned with the generation, aggregation and optimisation of resources to improve the lot of citizens, the facilitation of access to social infrastructure and the judicious use of public funds to invest in projects and programmes that would improve peoples' lives. The mere award of contracts (most of which are hardly completed) in no way represents any achievement. That they have to go to such lengths to convince the public that governance is taking place is troubling. But more troubling still is the fact that what we see in newspapers exist only in print. I am yet to understand how the award of contract for the supply of antiquated, second hand fire trucks can be rated as an achievement.

The Monthly Allocation Dependency (MAD) syndrome has reduced governance in Nigeria to the theatre of the absurd. State and local government areas simply do not have the energy or even desire to generate internal revenue. Why bother to generate a paltry million or so when billions are assured every month? And why concern yourself with transparency and accountability to the public when the money is not gotten from taxes? And why bother to execute projects in public interest when you were not elected to office in the first place? And indeed who says you are in office to work for the public good when you can steal and plunder with impunity without any form of sanction? These questions explain the terrible tragedy that is governance in Nigeria.

Apart from glibly advertising the award of contract as achievements in office, the saddest part is that the so-called contracts do not follow due process (forget the published ‘Invitations to Bid') and are hardly executed to professional standards. Thus the same contracts are awarded year after year with no tangible impact on the lives of citizens apart from ‘settling' political godfathers and providing food for the ‘boys'. With this approach to governance, we do not need to look far to understand why yesterday always seem better then today. We have been falling and yet to hit the bottom.

These days, most local government areas in Nigeria have budgets in billions of naira, yet at the end of the year, it would be difficult to see the evidence of where those billions have gone. School pupils still study under trees. Women and children still have to trudge for miles in search of water. Youth cannot gain admission to schools or find jobs. Public transport is pre-colonial. Farmers cannot get their produce to the markets. But you can be sure that Chairmen would take several newspaper pages to advertise his ‘achievements'. If you cannot verify them on ground, read the papers.

Nigeria does not need this kind of public exhibitionism. While government reserves to right advertise its ‘achievements', real or imagined, what the majority want to see are concrete achievements - clean water; good roads, proper schools, operational health care, etc. That way, rather than government wasting scarce public resources to convince us that it has indeed achieved something (which we cannot see), Nigerians would reciprocate the gesture by becoming model citizens, and congratulate government for a job well done. And this is done at the election booths, not by creating a critical mass out of the Fourth Estate.

For now, it is a case of the more you read, the less you see.