In the first part, I began on an emotional basis with a racially-motivated article that states that if anyone wants to hide anything from Africans or black, the best place is in a book. Why? The conclusion is that Africans do not read. The said article, however, pinpointed three elements of self-containment—selfishness, ignorance and greed—which are said to be necessary for keeping Africans in perpetual slavery. I agree. And the basis of my agreement is essentially that these three sociological elements are significant to our understanding of how far we have gone in terms of development.
The first part was meant to shock us into awareness. It was meant to remove the local log in our collective eyes before we can legitimately and clearly see the speck in the eyes of our traducers. In essence, I am saying, in the first part, that we are not taking ourselves and our predicament serious enough. We have a whole lot of ‘others’ to blame for our woes: God, colonialism, the West. It is now time to take the blame for our own failures. But, I doubt whether we have been shocked enough. It is as if the curse Noah placed on Ham actually afflicts us!
I am taking the underlying principle for this second part from a cultural wisdom of the Yoruba: Arun tin se ogoji ni nse oodunrun; ohun tin se Aboyade, gbogbo oloya ninse (the sickness that afflicts forty also affects three hundred; what affects the head of the Oya cult affects all the Oya worshippers). It may be assumed that this cultural wisdom suffers from the fallacy of composition which infers that something is true of the whole because it is true of its parts. In the relationship between Africa and its states, there is actually no fallacy either of division or of composition: what is true of the whole is equally true of its parts, and vice versa. The essence of the first part of this reflection is to signpost Nigeria as the African state par excellence. Nigeria participates fully in what we can call the absence of fundamentals and the pandemic of negatives.
In this part, I am going to focus on Nigeria. And I have good reasons for this. Apart from being the country I am familiar with, Nigeria is actually a microcosm of Africa itself. When we asked whether there is anything fundamentally wrong with Africa, this question seems also more appropriate to Nigeria being the singularly most populous black nation in the world. Consciously or unconsciously, the world looks toward Nigeria for leadership in Africa. Unfortunately, however, Nigeria has been leading by negative examples—corruption, bad governance, ambivalent democracy, etc. It is also more intellectually interesting to outline the specifics of a problem rather than staying at the level of general analysis. And Nigeria provides a good point of analysis.
People have been genuinely perturbed about the lack of progress that has bedevilled Africa for ages. The same anxiety applies to the Nigerian nation. In terms of unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, greed, and elite myopia, Nigeria participates actively in the African predicament. And this is definitely not for lack of governmental efforts to transform the living condition of Nigerians. Beginning from the immediate post-independence period, succeeding Nigerian governments, including the military administrations, have been concerned with translating the euphoria of independence into solid developmental architecture that answers to the aspirations of the citizens.
The grandiosity of the first five development plans (between 1960 and 1985) internalised the desires of the government to entrench a democratic governance culture that would make Nigeria a reference on the continent. It is an unfortunate but obvious fact that these development planning have not impacted significantly on Nigeria’s governance trajectory.
Our failure to make progress may actually be the result of not appreciating the depth of our collective predicament. In other words, we seem to spend inordinate time confronting the superficialities rather than the substantives. The trouble with Nigeria goes beyond electricity, corruption, ethnicity and all those other issues we have signposted all the time in our attempt at making sense of what ails us as a people.
For instance, I consider as one of our fundamental problems our inability to channel our social and national capital into a veritable framework for confronting our collective predicament. By ‘national capital,’ I reference two dynamics: first, I am concerned about the national ethno-cultural diversity—Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, Kanuri, Igala, Tiv, etc.—and what their harnessed potentials means for Nigeria. And second, as a correlate of the first, I am equally bothered about Nigeria’s failure to engage with its heroes and heroines who constitute the social capital all nations require to move forward. On the contrary, Nigeria hounds, harries and persecutes them relentlessly, until they either die or are sent on exile. And we then wonder about brain drain? Our brain loss has become the brain gain of USA, UK, and Europe where Nigerians are making waves in business, government and the academics.
One of the best and fundamental books I have read recently is Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012).This book is significant because it mounts a consistent attack on the bogeyman of culture, geography, ignorance of the right policies or even weather in order to make the singular claim that it is institutions, political and economic, that really make the difference between progress and poverty, between development and underdevelopment. And this is essentially the source of our predicament as Nigerians: We lack democratic institutions which are established to cater for the well-being of the citizens. But we have in abundance structures of expropriation that corruptly enrich minority politicians, business people and other powerful elites at the expense of the majority which wallows in deep impoverishment.
Note the fundamental difference between institutions and structures.
I take institutions as the frameworks, physical or otherwise, that represents our ideas as a nation. And these ideas derived from our collective experience and vision of where we are going and how we intend to get there. Unfortunately, however, this is the one thing we have consistently failed to do since independence. Our political and intellectual laziness to deconstruct what Professor Peter Ekeh calls ‘migrated structures’ has remained a tragic national shame. Take three significant examples. The first is the inability of our scientific and health systems to deal with the scourge of malaria. The malaria parasite has kept mutating beyond the reach of our anti-malaria drugs, and we are barely keeping up.
And yet we still keep our arrogant trust in orthodox medicine while disregarding the possibilities presented by the herbal or the traditional. What happens if and when the malaria parasites break through our last medical firewall? Now consider the larger cases of misdiagnoses and the number of needless deaths that have resulted therefrom; our hospitals as death centres; the many cases of inefficient and ignorant doctors; the total absence of what we can properly call ‘healthcare system,’ etc. The message here is: institutions matter.
The second example is political, and it concerns our bloated, exorbitant and unsustainable presidentialism. A presidential system of government that generates more redundancies and less efficiency is a fundamental symptom of Nigeria’s lack of the critical sense of institutional reengineering. When HRH Lamido Sanusi blew the lid on the overheads at the National Assembly alone, that was only the tip of the iceberg. If you add the bloatedness of the civil service, you begin to understand where our infrastructural deficit is coming from. Again, institutions matter.
The third example arises from the economy, and it concerns our leadership failure manifested in the fixation with foreign economic paradigm represented by the Washington Consensus. Nigeria, as well as many other African states, is tied to the apron string of the World Bank and IMF. We all dance to their macroeconomic tunes. And the consequences: Our continuing morbid fascination with oil and economic monoculture, our vulnerability to the fluctuations in the global economy, and the lack of insights into how to turn around the socioeconomic fortunes of Nigerians and, as if we can ever get tired of saying it: institutions matter!
So, to reiterate Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? ‘The season of failure,’ says Paramabansa Yogananda, the Indian yogi, ‘is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.’ But unlike the sower in the Bible, how best do we sow without wasting the precious seeds on the rock or among the thorns?
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