By Rev. Fr. Paul Irikefe
Nigeria is not new to socio-economic policies
aiming to transform the nation. There was “Low Profile” of Murtala Mohammed to
cut down government waste; the “Operation Feed the Nation” of Obasanjo in 1979
to drive food sufficiency and reduce imports; the “Green Revolution” of Shagari
to boost agricultural productivity; the “Counter Trade” and the “War Against
Indiscipline” of Buhari to roll back unbridled importation and social anomie;
the “Structural Adjustment Programme” of Babangida to introduce fiscal
stringency into the economy, the “National Economic Empowerment and Development
Strategy” (NEEDS) of Obasanjo to create wealth, employment opportunities, value
reorientation and poverty reduction; the “Seven-Point Agenda” of Yar’Adua to transform the wheels of the Nigerian
economy; and now the “Transformation Agenda” of Jonathan which seeks a new
approach in addressing the welfare of
the Nigerian people based on Nigeria’s Vision 20:2020 and the First
National Implementation Plan (NIP).
What is clear, however, is the abysmal failure of
all these programmes to lift Nigeria out of its quagmire. While the various
economic teams have celebrated figures and statistics beholden to Western
Institutions—IMF and the World Bank primarily, our country continues to slide
into poverty (relative and absolute) and dysfunction (social, political and
cultural). We are faced with first order problems of nation-building, the
various economic teams have glorified macroeconomic achievements aligned to
Western malaise such as interest rates and inflation.
The danger of defining our problem as basically
economic or social is that narrow definition is a mismatch to the reality of
the Nigerian crisis. The result is that what little macroeconomic gains are
achieved in one administration, are easily rolled back in the next, less
serious, maybe less committed government. For instance, many of the economic
gains of the Obasanjo’s reforms were lost in the Yar’Adua-Jonathan administration—foreign
reserve was depleted, debt was reacquired and the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission was muzzled as recounted in the explosive book by Olusegun Adeniyi: Power, Politics and Death: A Front-row
Account of Nigeria under the late President
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
The second danger is that it gives the impression
that Nigeria runs a productive economy. Once it is shown that the gross
domestic product is growing at 6.5 per cent, inflation rate is down to single
digit, total foreign reserve is $48 billion and growing, and exchange rate is
relatively stable, then the rest is papered over—the fact that growth is
jobless, and that of out 167 million people, about 100 million live on less
than $1 per day, that there are no
middle class, a person is either extremely rich or extremely poor, that
recurrent expenditure of federal budget gulps 70% of the total budget and that
corruption has become “the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
To be truly transformative, a reform agenda must
break with the past by overhauling the system and by addressing the core issue
of why Nigeria runs a feeding bottle federalism, a point Davidson (1973) made
of Nkrumah’s Ghana: “The economic policies of 1964 and after were, in fact,
another version of the old ‘policy of growth’ which argued that a mere adding
to what already exists must in due course change what already exists.
But
countries without modern industry do not become industrialized countries merely
by ‘growing’. Far from that, the process has always demanded more or less
complete break with what ‘already exists,’ just as during the industrial
revolutions of England, France or other technologically advanced countries….
Merely adding to what already existed, in this situation, was only a way of
piling frustration on confusion” (Davidson, 1973, pp.96-97).
The core issue is the structure of the political
economy that crushes every incentive of the states and the various state
Governors to work hard, to save, to invest—in education, in talent and skills,
and to shun criminal actions and venal practices because doing so never goes
unpunished—either in a court of law that is functional or in the electoral
system that weeds out the less competent, less committed, and less able
candidate.
In a word, we need the right institutions, formal
and informal, that would guarantee a self-correcting process, a Darwinian
society that people are motivated to do the right thing because they will get
rewarded, and avoid the wrong things, because they will get punished. That
would be the greatest legacy of any government in power—not Seven-Point Agenda,
and not any Transformation Agenda that is hollow. We need strong institutions
not strong men, or benevolent authoritarian leadership.
The American system that Nigeria ostensibly apes
is based on this pessimistic idea—that human nature cannot be trusted with
power, that it is ultimately strong institutions that are the bastion of true
democracy. One of the Founding Fathers of that Republic, Madison, famously
said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Rev.
Fr. Paul Irikefe is a Catholic Priest and the author of a forthcoming book, Why Nigeria is not Working: The Predicament
and the Promise.
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