President Tinubu and Nigerian Governors.
Tinubu should not treat this as a one-off outburst of frustration. He should institutionalise it. He should do more in town halls with language a trader in Bodija and Agege market can understand. It should not be limited to an election period. Transparency offered once, in a moment of pique, is theatre. Transparency offered as policy is accountability.
It is, on its face, a complaint about concrete and cost overruns. It is, underneath, an invitation to interrogate power. When a sitting president stands in front of traditional rulers, men whose authority predates the republic itself, and essentially says watch your governors, ask them where the money went, he is doing something Nigerian democracy is starved of: inviting scrutiny downward, past the federal capital, into the state houses where financial strengthening of the governors’ grip on the states require citizens audits, thereby placing citizens above politics.
In Abuja on Thursday, while receiving traditional rulers from Oyo state led by Oba Rashidi Ladoja, the Olubadan of Ibadanland, President Bola Tinubu switched into his pro-democracy activist mode. He asked citizens across the country to evaluate their governors’ performance. He hinted at which states were effectively utilising the federal funds allocated to them versus which states were bottlenecking it. He asked the governors to “stop building flyovers where there is no numeric traffic.”
