By Pini Jason
In recent times, we have been lamenting the dismal results released by the West African Examination Council, WAEC and the National Examination Council, NECO. Members of the House of Representatives considered the matter of grave national importance that it tabled it for debate on the floor of the House.

There is no doubt that Nigerians are concerned, especially those, whose children or wards are still sitting for these examinations. But one thing that amuses me is that we are lamenting as if it is a calamity inflicted on us by someone else or by aliens from outer space!

We may not all remember when we did it, because it took a long time, but we brought this plague on ourselves! There was a time when the rule of the School certificate examination was that if you failed English language, you failed the entire examination even if you scored seven straight “A”s! There were compulsory subjects for particular courses. So your combination must be right.

It was tough and you may even say unfair, but it produced solid and quality students and graduates. Nobody complained about the quality of graduates of our Universities. Then some “mad men and specialists” said why should English be compulsory? After all, it is not our mother tongue, they opined. Why should our children read Charles Dickens and William Shakespear?

Rocket scientist

Let them read Amos Tutuola and Ireke Onibudo! Suddenly there was no rule anymore! And whether you passed English or not you can have a certificate. If you have three or four credits in Religion, Igbo, Yoruba and cookery, that is okay! It can make you a rocket scientist!

After all Chinese read in Chinese and Indians study in Urdu! In fact a brother tried to help us out by inventing an indigenous lingua franca called the Ghousa language! I thought the guy was in line for a Nobel prize!

The seed we sowed years back has germinated and its fruit is what we are reaping today! We killed merit and elevated mediocrity as a national ethos. We did not just lower the bar, we removed the bar! And once we did that everything collapsed around our ears! Education collapsed.

Our politics collapsed. Our infrastructures collapsed. Our public sector enterprises collapsed (because they were manned by the mediocre). Our economy collapsed (because it was managed by incompetent people with certificates bought from the internet).

How did we allow this to happen to us, you may ask? Why did we watch this insidious decay go so bad? The reason is that we evaded merit, removed the bar and conferred on some people an (undue) advantage. No rules or standards meant that some people were elevated to positions of privilege where, nevertheless, they used Nigeria as a cadaver!

When I say some people, it is not meant to suggest that they belong strictly to a particular place or religion. Those who led us down this perilous path and took advantage of us cut across regions and religions. They come from all parts of Nigeria, from all religions and all walks of life, but they belong to one tiny ethnic group of greedy elite. Removal of the bar is just one of the strategies they contrive in order to promote their interest.

At the other end of the removal of the bar is the political construct known as godfatherism. Godfatherism is simply the cartelization of politics and the cabalization of power.

Those who are not part of the cabal or do not control the cartels are said not to be “on ground”. The cartel operators deploy thugs and violence to capture power as against the democratic norms that ought to produce the best to serve the society.

At the end of elections each godfather rewards his thugs, those who “delivered” him or his vassals, by dumping them in the state legislatures or nominating them for other public offices. The time it takes a Governor or President to knock together a cabinet out of an agglomeration of nominees from godfathers is what we regard as “delay in forming his cabinet”.

It happens that a Governor or President, conscious of the fact that the buck stops at his desk, may try to bypass the godfathers and appoint credible people. This is often not taken lying low. The godfathers often mobilize to fight nominees they feel will not do their biddings and try to use their minions in the legislature for rear guard battle. We all saw that recently.

It is not a surprise that in most cases, nothing works. Governance slows down and drags to a halt. In that state of inertia, billions of Naira is “spent” on power yet we don’t get power. Billions are budgeted for Federal Roads annually yet for twelve years the nation just hees and haws over Benin-Ore, Apapa-Oshodi, Lagos-Ibadan, Port Harcourt-Enugu, Enugu-Onitsha and other “expressways”!

The more we spend on health the more Nigerians flee abroad with our foreign exchange on medical tourism to countries where merit works!

I have heard many commentators, and I have even heard myself, prescribe how to easily deal with this political terrorism called godfatherism. But after four years as a witness to power, I now know better. It is not easy! The tentacles of godfathers spread deeply everywhere right into the media!

Thus one man’s political terrorist is another man’s hero! Godfathers are like the Salamander: “harmless but long dreaded as poisonous, once supposed to be able to live in fire or put out fire”. Cut the tail it quickly regenerates. The only defeated godfather is a dead one!

Other strategies used in defeating merit are ethnicity and religion. Because these are very strong and emotive contrivances, we are all caught unawares as we engage one another in needless wars along these divisive lines, while the vultures feast on our bullet-riddled carrions.

We may pooh-pooh the idea of merit, deride it or pretend that it is really possible to side-step it and survive simply because it bestows on us an undeserved advantage. But in the end such advantage turns out short-lived for us and disastrous for Nigeria.

Look at what merit is doing in the private sector today. It creates pockets of excellence even in a preponderant incompetence. It is producing the best entrepreneurs whose expertise is creating jobs, values and wealth for all of us, no matter our tribe or their religion. Without merit in the private sector, we would have finished as a country.

In contrast, look at the huge national assets that were sold off, even in controversial manner that ignored merit; these assets failed to serve our national interest because of the choices we made and the managerial incompetence such choices ordained.

Ask yourself, how did the mediocre managers get there? You may say that corruption is at the root of all these failures. But I see corruption as the logical product of our romance with mediocrity.

To aspire to be one of the 20 largest economies in the world in the year 2020 is a direct and unequivocal challenge to our attitude to merit. Every part of this country, every religious group and every vested interest has had its fair share of the proceeds of the decay.

We can now move on without any group feeling left out of the “federal character” of the rot! The nations we aspire to join were propelled to their prime positions by merit. Anything less cannot get us there or even anywhere! The choice is clearly ours!