It is a long time ago that Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa raised what one would consider a key dimension but which has not been explored to the required depth. He once asked where the fuel would come from if Nigeria were rapidly industrialising. That sort of question has not been posed in recent times by any other Nigerian, perhaps because, at the moment, the more urgent challenge for majority of Nigerians is a peculiarly Nigerian dimension of energy security – spending so much time on the queue just to be able to get fuel. Unfortunately, it has become a routine reality of Nigerian national life, a problem no one can solve – whether military or civilian leadership, considering that this has been the same story under IBB, Shonekan, Abacha, Abdulsalami, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and now Buhari.

But, in that single question, one member of the establishment was, in a way, domesticating Timothy Mitchel’s idea of Carbon Democracy – the Columbian University Professor’s idea that fossil fuel made mass democracy possible but is making it impossible. Mitchel’s is a grand idea for global level discourse of oil. However, its canons are, in many ways, applicable to a domestic arena like Nigeria in that it connects to some of the more familiar notions of how oil complicates democracy: oil revenue enables the oil exporting state to reify itself over and above the people in a way that neither democracy nor development is possible. And, by the nature of the oil economy, it must always have a dictatorship.

These are no confidential analogies but well circulated across the world in academic papers, books and sundry publications. The issue is why Balarabe Musa’s question, for instance, is not part of the debate in this country? Or why might Audu Ogbeh’s recent alarm about lukewarm attitude to agrarian transformation not a subject of popular debate? Beyond Daily Trust, I am not sure I have read any comments on that. It is also absolutely difficult to understand why President Muhammadu Buhari’s pronouncement that Nigeria would go against the IMF if it is in the national interest to do so did not tickle the nation. The point in that pronouncement ought not to be lost to an anti-government mood in the country because something that has implications for progress has been said by an incumbent president and it is important to turn it around. Now, Atiku Abubakar, a former VP and one who has defended a particular standpoint, is amending that position in favour of some variant of statism but, in all likelihood, it might be a quiet reception for him. Statism would not solve every problems overnight but if all the countries that made it from poverty to plenty in this century made it through one variant of statism or another, then there must be something to think about in statism. Could it be that our more fundamental crisis is the epistemic infrastructure to even locate our bearing? No part of the tragedy might be worse than that. No nation can make it that cannot engage with ideas, irrespective of the quarter it came from.

It is against this background that this piece is put together on former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Kaduna State Governor Nair el-Rufai’s statements. By the authority of John Danfulani, the Kaduna-based one-man watchdog, it can be asserted that Nair el-Rufai has embraced statism, eventually. Danfulani wrote a piece recently in which the Kaduna State governor advocated for popular capitalism. Yes, what people say and what they do could vary very vastly but it is also the case that saying is doing.

Before anyone could say el-Rufai, Atiku Abubakar went to the London School of Economics (LSE), a major centre of intellectualism in the world, not only to unfold a massive defence of moral socialism (philanthropy) but also to make two important statements. All of them will be reported in his own words so that no one says they have been sexed up. The first of his statements is this: “Let me also say that economic growth, and employment and wealth creation are not just socially important. They are also critical for the national security of African states. High levels of illiteracy, unemployment and social alienation of the populace, especially young people, are linked to widespread discontent, criminal behaviour and indeed militant insurgency.”

The second is this: “Let me say, however, that while philanthropy and entrepreneurship have an important role to play in promoting human capital development in Africa, African states, like states everywhere, have the primary responsibility for security, education, healthcare and environmental protection and the provision of good governance. Private efforts, including philanthropy, are not a substitute for carefully targeted and efficiently managed public investments in these vital areas.”

Whoever says that these are no more than informed neo-liberalism would be correct but as every judgment must stand on comparison, we must also note who is making these statements. Someone like the former Vice-President has been an unrepentant practitioner of de-statisation. The phrase for that is ‘rolling back the state’. To do this, he got someone like el-Rufai and for years, they were busy rolling back the state. They took it to the level where the police authorities told the National Assembly that the crime wave in Abuja, in particular, was the direct outcome of the excesses of the so-called Abuja Master Plan restoration which el-Rufai presided over ruthlessly. Although el-Rufai had acquired autonomy by then and was, in one of those twists of public life, no longer with Atiku, it was still Atiku who nominated him for the FCT ministerial slot and thus remained implicated in el-Rufai’s project of readying Abuja for so-called private investors. It cannot be said more bluntly.

If the same people come back to speak a different language today in favour of anything more humane, then something positive is happening. It is not about whether they mean what they say or have said what they mean. It is about their coming to the point that what they thought they understood had produced consequences unacceptable even to them. Atiku’s frank list of such consequences in the first quotation above is a very eloquent testimony. They are simply acknowledging that when your economy is agrarian and all that over 85% of your people produce are just grains, tomatoes, vegetable, garri, palm oil, kpomo and yam tubers is not the time for you to speak the language of foreign direct investment as if it works in a mechanical manner. They have accepted that such is the time for the state to also play the role of the investor in a way that harmonises the selfishness of private profit with public interest. When there has been a transformation from that agrarian dynamics to a proper exchange economy, then the business model also changes automatically. The class balance of forces will force the change as happened in India and Mexico where political parties that ruled for decades found themselves losing elections because the new investing class incubated in the old order would not accept the terms of that order anymore.

In other words, it is important the governor and the former Vice-President are making those statements they have made and unless they retract tomorrow, they have acted in the same positive light as Senator Ken Nnamani did recently when he publicly decided that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as presently constituted is too hollow to be his field of play. The interesting thing is that people are taking note of these shifts and when the moment presents itself, there will be reckoning with those who looked back and acknowledged, in words or in action, that they were part of something that went wrong between 2010 and 2015. Those who see no point in acknowledging that they have been part of that moment in power and leadership will confront history’s own inscrutable way of rolling out the dynamics.

The point in all of this is that those who publicly take positions on issues like the strategic direction of society, the question of economic model, the matter of what should be the leading force in any society, etc, should be noted and commended, particularly where such standpoint coincides with a more progressive direction. This is because it is from those standpoints that the shape of society emerges.

This was tradition up to the 1990s before nihilism took over. And the classic of such thoughtful and society focused self-review might be Alison Ayida’s standpoints in an interview in the Daily Times (March 8 and 9^th, 1993). If I follow the captions which bears the mark of the quality of journalism in those days, three points are striking: If Yakubu Gowon and Emeka Ojukwu were politicians, there would not have been the Nigerian Civil War; it was a mistake on his part to have been one of those who pushed Murtala Muhammed into the presidential system of government; democracy is about excellence and merit and it is creditors, not the debtor nation, that should be losing sleep over national debt imbroglio. These are contentious claims but are experientially informed and analytically interrogated in the interview and those who might disagree with him would have to do their own research. It turned out that the few minutes that Adamu Fika spoke as Chairperson of the recent Media Trust Dialogue, he was saying basically the same things, demonstrating very coherently the fallacy of ‘government has no business in business’ or the magic wand approach to social change that de-statisation was represented. And when one reads Philip Asiodu’s biography, one finds the same standpoints, the epistemic coherence and the skills to initiate, supervise and secure concrete national gains. The story of how that set of permanent secretaries fought to establish the Nigerian National Oil Company (NNOC) which is now Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is a classic one. And then you begin to wonder, what happened that Nigeria didn’t make it?

Not only that Nigeria didn’t make it, it is descending rather than ascending. Nobody appears to be happy with that but nobody seems to know why. Sometimes we ‘solve’ the problem by abusing the government of the day or isolating one past leader or the other and heaping expletives on him or we organise one bogus conference. That is when we do not resort to violence which we then label as ethno-religious conflicts. But when issues are raised, we don’t care to engage them.

•Adagbo Onoja, a journalist and public affairs analyst whose photo appears alongside this piece, writes from Abuja. He can be reached via adagboonoja@gmail.com

Update news