Five Monsters Nigeria Must Tame
It bears emphasis that the people of this land are going through very stressful times, accentuated by recent economic reforms packaged as subsidy removal and foreign exchange rates unification. But the truth is that a lot had been wrong for far too long. Reference policy frameworks like the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), currency devaluation, premature de-industrialization, deepening poverty, unemployment. These are all by-products of neo-liberalism, and a compliant national leadership that has straddled our public space for so long. It is also trite that our problems date back further than this modern era of neoliberal triumphalism. A proper dimensioning of all of this would therefore touch on issues of our mental state as a people, the structure of the state structure bequeathed us by the colonialists, as well as the agency of leadership.
Four hundred years of slavery, more than a century of colonialism and enduring neo-colonialism have definitely taken their toll, not only on our physical development, but also our mentality and our mind set. As Nathan Nunn, Harvard University Professor of Economics, put it, the evidence accumulated ‘suggests that this historic event (i.e., colonialism) played an important part in the shaping of the continent, in terms of not only economic outcomes, but cultural and social outcomes as well'. Thus, to move forward, we must liberate our minds from ‘mental slavery.' We must go through what I referred to in my Chairman's remarks at the Elizade University Convocation lecture in 2022 as a ‘risorgimento of mental dignity and confidence.'
We must reject tokenism in development. We must reject metrics of development delusion. We must seek the cure for irresponsible illegal acquisition by our leaders, and their unbridled elite greed. If we agree that we are not sub-human, we must strive to equal other humans, other races in endeavours and accomplishments. We must sing a new song for a new generation.
African nations were carved out for the economic exploitation convenience of our colonial overlords. This was a major accomplishment of the Berlin Conference of 1884/1885. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at its debut in 1963, in its wisdom, endorsed the sanctity of the colonial boundaries. Anything short of that would have been a harbinger of sustained conflicts among the newly independent entities.
Even so, it is true that the arbitrariness of these physical boundaries is doubtlessly one of the drivers of multiplicity of conflicts in Africa since independence, in the form of perennial unrest, military coups, genocidal conflicts, civil wars, spilling across national boundaries. As Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley), the iconic Jamaican reggae singer, guitarist, and songwriter sang, we have come to epitomise a state of: War in the east! War in the west!! War up north!!! War down south !!!! War, war … !!!!! Yes, war in the Horn of Africa; war in the Great Lakes region; war in the Sahel. It's war, war, everywhere!
The ‘Silencing the Guns in Africa' by 2030 is a flagship initiative of the African Union (AU), as encapsulated in Agenda 2063. It aspires to ending all wars and conflicts, preventing genocide, and stopping gender-based violence. Unfortunately, the guns have since been increasingly louder, giving scant hope of respite! For a moment, think of the resources Africa has expended in conflicts; add to it illicit financial flows facilitated by neo-colonial economic arrangements, vampirism, and arrant lack of imagination by our leaders, then you behold the exit passage of our development.
Let's look at Nigeria's structure, for specifics. The Yoruba are comfortably spread across national boundaries in the West African sub-region. Ditto for the Fulani, and Hausa, etc. So, in the case of Nigeria, as in most other African nations, we have cobbled together a nation of various ethnic nationalities with different histories, different life values and perspectives. After a brief period, post-independence, Nigeria has been running essentially as a unitary government, with profound implications for diversity (mis)management and economic development. We are by nomenclature a Federal Republic, but to all intents and purposes, a unitary republic. Well, we are, for instance, the only federal republic of this status, with a centralized Police Force; with implications that are now too obvious in the dysfunctionality of our policing charge.
It has been argued by pundits that the Asian Tigers, which have developed in the past five decades or so, each is essentially ethnically homogeneous. South Korea is 90% ethnic Koreans, Taiwan and Hong Kong are 90% ethnic Chinese, and Singapore is 70% Chinese. So, if we cannot create new nation-states out of our country, RESTRUCTURING, with ethnically
homogenous sub-nationals with reasonable degree of autonomy, within a broader federal structure, is not just imperative; it is an act which time has come!
One thing that is so obvious from all of these is that these times call for new vision. They call for creative thinking out of the neo-liberal paradigm box, and out of the box of international organizations structured to continue to hold us down. The good news is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. The Asian Tigers that have broken out of this box and enacted impressive development in recent times hold out lessons for us. A look at Japan and China also tells the same tale.
We have to look inwards and leverage on our strength. We must be disciplined and creative. Through leveraging on initial demographic advantage, cheap labour and aggressive export with creative Import Substitution, subsidy administration, general protection of local industries, sequenced financial liberalization, reverse engineering (even at times, breaching intellectual property regulations), Japan, China, the Asian Tigers and the emerging Asian Cubs have been able to post phenomenal developmental strides.
It bears repetition again, that creative, locally driven economic development paradigms with massive investment in relevant education and skill sets, is the way to go. Think of it for a moment. After so many years of producing world class engineers, we can't deploy indigenous know-how to build the second Niger bridge, or any of our major motorways for that matter. After so many petroleum engineers, we can neither build refineries nor maintain existing ones built for us by foreigners. In spite of all year-round sunshine, so many engineers and abundant natural resources, we import solar panels from countries with just three months of sunshine.
After so many doctors, and midwives, we have the trophy of the second highest number of pregnant women dying in pregnancy. Our top professionals are voting against our dysfunctionality by ‘JAPAing,' and we seem to be helpless.
US President J.F Kennedy, in 1960, gave vent to a vision of landing human beings on the moon. In 1969, a year short of his target, the mission was accomplished. But beyond landing humans on the moon, the Apollo programme sparked innovation in aeronautics, nutrition, material science, electronics, software and other areas. We can make do with our own moon-shot vision now!
Still on leadership; one thing that has become obvious over the years is the convoluted leadership recruitment pattern that our country seems wedded to. The outcome has been the crises of governance, which has defined the Nigerian state in the past few decades. We, therefore, need to encourage a conversation on this, with a view to engendering a leadership recruitment process imbued with the support base requisite for legitimacy, without which government cannot be effective. It is trite to aver that this cannot be achieved unless we clean up our electoral process in such a holistic manner as to inspire confidence at home and respect abroad.
I like to take a look at our fetish of ‘market forces,' ‘government has no business in business,' ‘subsidy distorts market,' ‘ease of doing business,' sacrosanctity of foreign direct investment (FDI), and other neo-liberal jargons, packaged and delivered as drivers of development. These must be properly interrogated and creatively applied to our current situation. We must think like the children of Issachar, ‘that have understanding of the time.' The high priests of neo-liberalism and globalization are gradually moving in the direction of Industrial Policy and protectionism. As noted earlier, the USICA, Chips for America Act, Buy America policy, etc., are some of the initiatives speaking to this new thinking among former patron saints of neoliberalism. And so, the question, what are we waiting for?
In conclusion, I argue that for us to get out of our present miserable level of underdevelopment, we must tame the monsters of the crisis in a holistic and composite manner.
Tame our Psyche. I have spoken earlier of a risorgimento of mental dignity and confidence, a deconstruction of mental slavery, a can-do spirit. Need I emphasize that this must percolate from top down, in a manner that is encapsulated by the popular maxim, that a nation rises and falls on leadership?
Tame our Palate for imported goods and elite greed. So, the popular saying goes, we should consume what we produce, and produce what we consume. This will not come about through admonitions. In today's interconnected liberal economy, with the rules skewed against us, through international institutions like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), we need deliberate financial, industrial and trade policies to accomplish the goal of creating the necessary nexus between local production and consumption.
Tame our Procreative Proclivity. The growth of our population continues to outstrip our economic growth. We have grown from 45 million in 1960 to about 230 million in 2023 (more than 500% growth). For context, UK, which was 53 million in 1960 (bigger population than Nigeria), has only grown to 67 million today, a meagre 126% increase. Depending on our development paradigm choices, this large and youthful (more than 60%) population of ours can benefit from what demographers refer to as demographic dividend or demographic bomb! With the present level of youth dependency and restiveness, manifesting in the widespread agitations of #EndSars, and recent sporadic protests against rising cost of living, time seems to be ticking. The choices we make today will prevent the coming explosion. In a development milieu of creative Industrial Policy, financial targeting and aggressive investment in education and skills-set, and vastly increased governance integrity quotient, we may yet escape the bomb detonating.
Tame our Penchant for Corruption. Need I say anything further on the monster of corruption, how it fundamentally constrains development possibilities on all fronts, and the need to deal with it in a decisive and sustained manner? Conceived as ‘abuse of entrusted power for private gains,' by Transparency International (2023), ‘corruption erodes trust, weakens democracy, hampers economic development and further exacerbates inequality, poverty, social division and the environmental crisis' (Ibid). There is the commonality of opinion among the citizens of Nigerian, civil society, and development partners – practically everyone that the country has zero chance of development as long as the State continues to be the platform for primitive accumulation and rent seeking in the hands of its privileged elites. The need to deploy more of technology than admonitions in attacking corruption from the roots cannot be overemphasized. This, indeed, should rank high among the priorities of all governments, going forward.
Tame our Political Structure. We have mentioned our defective structural birth, our defective 1999 Constitution (as amended), which are some of the drivers of economic mismanagement, underdevelopment, and insecurity. Now, a national consensus has more or less been developed on the need for multi-layered policing architecture to tackle insecurity. All that government has to do is emplace actionable RESTRUCTURING PLAN, short to long time; say, from Executive Orders and legislation on security, up to a new constitution. To my mind, this is the main challenge before the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration; and I shouldn't have any doubt that going by his political antecedent and trajectory, Mr. President should have the clarity of vision, courage of conviction and determination to move our most tortured country to this desirable and rational end-state. My admonition is, let's get started while there is still time! *The full text is available online. *Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, CON, Governor, Ondo State, 2009 – 2017 delivered this lecture at the 70th anniversary of Gboluji Anglican Grammar School, Ile-Oluji, Ondo State.