Hilltops and political power, By Jibrin Ibrahim

This article was first published in Next newspaper, 12th September, 2010

I have spent the last week reflecting on hill top palaces and misrule in my dear country Nigeria. I could not help it; my thoughts were imposed by the surroundings. The last week found me on the six-acre Neemrana Fort Palace in Rajasthan, India, about 122 Kilometres from Delhi. This palace of the Maharaja was the site from which the Chauhans dynasty ruled Rajasthan from the 15th century to 1947. The palace of 55 rooms is carved into eleven storeys on the hilltop.

Located in a site of exquisite beauty, it allows occupants on the hilltop to oversee the vast rolling countryside with tiny looking peasants tilling the land or coming up the hill to serve the lords of the palace. Following the end of princely rule in India in 1947, the palace was sold off as a heritage hotel and yours faithfully could live like a Raj for one week and participate in a conference on citizenship, democracy and development.

The conference signalled the end of a ten-year international partnership of the Citizenship Development Research Centre of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex and scholars in the United Kingdom, India, Bangladesh, Angola, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Jamaica.

Over the period, we carried out 150 case studies of citizens struggling to improve their lives, livelihoods and liberties. The conclusion of the studies is starkly clear. Nobody gives you development; nobody gives you human rights and democracy. You get what you struggle for. The state is not a repository of entitlements, it’s an interlocutor you combat, cajole, contest, infiltrate and subvert to improve your lives and livelihoods.

As we reflected on the thought-provoking results of our studies, the site compelled me to reflect on what the accoutrements and palaces of rule does to occupants. By the end of the week, after enjoying sumptuous meals served by a bevy of well-dressed servants in beautifully decorated halls overlooking spectacular landscape, I began to feel like a Raj and found it normal that the world should serve me.

I began to understand why after eight years of misrule, General Ibrahim Babangida believed he needed a fifty-room palace, carved out of a Minna hill top where people would have to climb up to continue to pay him homage. Even our dearly believed General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who ruled for only eleven months needed to build himself a hilltop palace to keep his distance from the people.

The latest of the hilltop palaces is of course that of General Olusegun Obasanjo carved out of the largest hill of Abeokuta. It is maybe befitting that this General who has ruled and ruined our country longer than anybody else should have the largest and most magnificent palace from which he can continue to plot and scheme on ways and means of ruling and ruining us forever. Clearly, these palaces fabricate illusions of grandeur that encourage our rulers to believe that they have a right, and indeed, an obligation to continue in power.
How else can we understand General Babangida’s determination to return to power? Was he not the one who introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which sank Nigeria into the deepest economic crises in her history? Although during the 1985-86 national debate, Nigerian citizens had overwhelmingly voted against SAP, was it not the same General Babangida who said he must implement it because the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had given him clear instructions to do so.

Nigerian citizens fought against SAP. Workers and students and ordinary people organised massive street demonstrations in many towns. However, the Babangida dictatorship went ahead to implement unpopular policies, which had negative consequences for the country and its people. SAP in practice meant the dominant role of market forces in the economy, liberalisation and deregulation, devaluation of the Naira, retrenchment, privatisation of public property (that was mainly cornered by the rulers), withdrawal of subsidies, and government retreat in the area of social provisioning and welfare services.
The result of the Babangida policy framework was the intensification of suffering of the people. Our health system collapsed, rural poverty grew as peasants could no longer afford to pay for agricultural inputs and the era of graduate unemployment arrived at the national scene while the middle class was pauperised.

It was under the Babangida regime that institutions of governance, and official positions, were used for unbridled primitive accumulation. In was an era in which governance was transformed into a question of unlimited power without responsibility. It was above all the regime that brazenly organised elections and refused to hand over power to the winner of the elections. The history of General Babangida is a bold statement that citizens do not matter. The time has come for Nigerian citizens to make an even more bold response to those who live on hilltop palaces and say we have memories, which we shall use to sanction those who have ruled and ruined our dear nation.