The Nigerian political space remains an ideological battlefield where three kinds of competing political ideologies (if there are) vie for the hearts and minds of Nigerian audience.
Three ‘Neoliberalists’ with broad and general economic models or ‘paradigm’ have risen to prominence in the recent time: Atiku Abubakar, Bola Ahmed Tinubu & Peter Obi
Obi believes in neoliberalism as ideology of pro-market model or laisse faire. That is the classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market.
Tinubu an egalitarian liberal, believes in neoliberalism as mode of governance, or governmentalities.
The third, Atiku Abukar embraces policy package version of neoliberalism.
Let's take a look at the strands of these variations and carefully unpack their fundamental dimensions:
(1) an ideology - obism
(2) a mode of governance - Jabanism
(3) a policy package - Akitulation
If you cast vote in favour of OBIDIENT - the codifier of ideologies to legitimize certain political interests and to defend or challenge dominant power structures - will work with the powerful elites that include managers and executives of large transnational-corporations, corporate lobbyists, influential journalists and public- relations specialists, intellectuals writing for a large public audience, celebrities and top entertainers, state bureaucrats, and politicians. He will focus on market-friendly political agenda. But those elites will use him for their own advantages.
This is because his ideological claims are laced with references to economic interdependence rooted in the principles of free-market capitalism: global trade and financial markets, worldwide flows of goods, services, and labour, transnational corporations, offshore financial centres, and so on.
His ideas make sense to his audience to think of neoliberalism as a rather economistic ideology, which, not unlike its archrival Marxism, puts the production and exchange of material goods at the heart of the human experience.
If Jagaban wins: He will embrace the second dimension of neoliberalism called ‘governmentalities’ – certain modes of governance based on particular premises, logics, and power relations.
His neoliberal governmentality will be rooted in entrepreneurial values such as competitiveness, self-interest, and decentralization.
He will celebrate individual empowerment and the devolution of central state power to smaller localized units. He will create more government departments, eliminate some, dismantle unemployment etc.
Such neoliberal mode of governance will adopt the self-regulating free market as the model for proper government, as well.
Rather than operating along more traditional lines of pursuing the public good (rather than profits) by enhancing civil society and social justice, he will call for the employment of governmental technologies that are taken from the world of business and commerce: mandatory development of ‘strategic plans’ and ‘risk-management’ schemes oriented toward the creation of ‘surpluses’; cost–benefit analyses and other efficiency calculations; the shrinking of political governance (so-called ‘best-practice governance’); the setting of quantitative targets; the close monitoring of outcomes; the creation of highly individualized, performance-based work plans; and the introduction of ‘rational choice’ models that internalize and thus normalize market-oriented behaviour.
His Neoliberal modes of governance will encourage the transformation of bureaucratic mentalities into entrepreneurial identities where government workers see themselves no longer as public servants and guardians of a qualitatively defined ‘public good’ but as self-interested actors
If Atiku is "atikulated", his neoliberalism will manifest itself as a concrete set of public policies expressed in ‘D-L-P Formula’:
(1) Deregulation (of the economy
(2) Liberalization (of trade and industry)
(3) Privatization (of state-owned enterprises).
His related policy measures will include massive tax cuts (especially for businesses and high-income earners); reduction of social services and welfare programmes; replacing welfare with ‘workfare’; use of interest rates by independent central bank to keep inflation in check (even at the risk of increasing unemployment); the downsizing of government; tax havens for domestic and foreign corporations willing to invest in designated economic zones; new commercial urban spaces shaped by market imperatives; anti-unionization drives in the name of enhancing productivity and ‘labour flexibility’; removal of controls on global financial and trade flows; regional and global integration of national economies; and the creation of new political institutions, think tanks, and practices designed to reproduce the neoliberal paradigm.
Vote wisely. Vote from your mind!
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