Utomi: Nigeria Urgently Needs to Court Investors to Avoid Anarchy in Post-oil Era
Second headline: We Should Empower Subnational Governments to Drive Development, As Centralisation Strategy Has Failed, Pat Utomi is a professor of political economy and a management expert. He is a professor at the Lagos Business School, a Fellow of the
Ontheproblemwithinvestment inNigeria. The biggest problem with investment in Nigeria is the oil mentality. Since the beginning of the oil economy, we have developed a political culture, which my friend, Richard A. Joseph, described in his book (Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria) as prebendal politics – just sharing the cake. We have created a class of both civil servants and politicians who believe that government is doing everybody a favour on everything, that there are some kinds of lords that you must come to. Whereas, investment is something that is desirable and good for the community because it provides jobs. That is the first goal of a politician – to try and achieve a full employment economy. That is his primary goal. But the nature of our oil politics has not made the political mind-set to reason that way. So, because of that mind-set, being the typical mind-set of a politician elsewhere in the world, everything is done to court the investor – both foreign and local – to make him feel welcome. But if you look at how Nigerian civil servants and politicians behave towards investors, the attitude is that of a tollgate, bully or somebody saying, “We know you private sector people are thieves, what are you trying to cheat us out of?” A kind of protector, Praetorian Guard.
Onthedangersoftheratherunfriendly attitudetowardsinvestment? That mind-set needs to change dramatically, especially as we have come to the end of the oil age, which is the frightening thing about the current Nigerian condition – Nigerian politicians don’t actually know that we have reached the end of the oil age. Their mind-set is still the prebendal mind-set of sharing this cake that is there. I want to assure everybody that 12 years from now there would be no cake to share. The oil age is over. So we need to go back to the mind-set of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, when our politicians courted investors.
Let me give a very interesting background to this. The beginning of industrialisation in Nigeria came with self-government. The colonial government did not industrialise Nigeria, they didn’t even try it, because the purpose of colonialism was to export raw materials from here to the metropole. Perhaps, the only factories that came out of the proper colonial era were motor industries, just designed to put boards on imported chassis, molue and buses, then Nigerian Breweries, to mix water with imported stuffs. These are probably the only two factories I can think of in the real colonial era.
Onself-governmentandindustrialisation. But with self-government, Nigerian politicians coming into office in the 1950s were anxious to expand the economy and they began to think of industry. The first industrial estate in Nigeria was then set up by the government of the Western Region, what is today the Ikeja industrial estate. Of course, in the competition between the regions, the government of the Eastern Region responded with two, Aba and Port Harcourt, and the government of the Northern Region responded with the Kakuri industrial estate in Kaduna. Bonpai in Kano emerged out of Kano’s traditional trading role as a city. That was how industrialisation began really in Nigeria.
One of the things that come from the points I have just made is that development was bottom-up