On the on Going National Discourse

One thing we all as Nigerians can agree on is that the 2015 presidential campaign was largely characterised by intense on and off-line vitriol, based mainly on inanities with occasional specious, by-the way- side reference to substantive issues. While there were calls and counter-calls, from both sides of the political debate of an imminent apocalyptic cataclysm, if the opponent were to be elected, we can now safely say, we were not teleported to a dystopia. No earthquakes, the moon did not turn into blood, and no precipitates of fire and brimstone.
I will neither re-litigate the vacuous rhetoric of this political silly season nor attempt to pontificate on the myriads of problems bedevilling us as a nation. You need not look further than your Facebook and twitter timeline to learn from social network “pundits” that we have problems.
The core national debate we should now have is one that emphasises and proffers tenable solutions to the problems that ail us. We can all intuitively surmise that there are as many solutions as there are problems and that a one-size-fits-all approach is exactly the wrong prescription. So where do we start from? The starting point should be sorting out our political philosophies seeing that we still lack clearly delineated ideologies.
I know, the political parties are supposed to be the avant-gardes of innovative political thoughts, leading a national debate with the profundity of their coherent philosophies.
To observe that the two major parties are mirror images of each other is a banal analysis and needs no further deliberation.
We should begin to ask serious questions about the role of government in our national and individual lives and avoid the unthinking reaction of either expecting everything from government or inordinately giving them free passes. How much government do we want? What is our over-arching vision for Nigeria and its place in the comity of nations? What economic model is best for us? What is or not working in our current model and how do we fix it? How do we transform our educational system from bottom up? What about our healthcare delivery system? What ethical considerations must govern our conduct in the public and private space and how do we translate that to ethical requirements? These debates if engaged, keen, deliberative, nuanced and cerebral has the power to revolutionise and transform. These and many other questions should have been roundly litigated in the clichéd court of public opinion, in our private spaces, both online and offline, at the kitchen table, in the bars and classrooms.
I can only surmise intuitively that the disconnect stems from us having a debate heavily steeped in the analyses of the myriads of problems without proffering any real solutions and a general public apathy towards any government led initiative. That said, we should read the document and recommendations that emerged from the national conference, even though reading 10,335 pages and 600 resolutions may indeed feel like cruel and unusual punishment. I am strongly of the opinion that if ideas for solutions, which could be infusions of personal broodings and the recommendations from the National conference or other tangential views, take center stage in our national discuss, there will be, not to sound overly dramatic, a transformation in the way we are governed because leadership will emerge from pools of governing philosophies and ideas. This is not a novel idea neither is it ground breaking, many Nigerians, especially in the academia have spoken and written tomes about the importance of national discourse for years.
Our social evolution is going forward, full throttle, regardless of our feelings and our ultimate destination will be a derivative of how well we tweak and shape our national discourse. The freedom and relative peace we have, which we now almost take for granted are results of hard fought battles, first against imperial and colonial hegemony, then against military dictatorships. We can also glean from the history of other countries and cultures, vestiges of such effusive national dialogue that helped shape and cement their standing in the world; the antebellum era of the history of the United States being a good example. Similar intellectual debates and struggles also preceded the Bolshevik revolution and the fall of the Russian Czars.