How Awo foresaw FGN/Bill Gates’ debate

In the past two weeks at least, the Nigerian government and the US billionaire businessman and philanthropist, Mr. Bill Gates, have been at variance over the rather unflattering comments that the latter made about the programmes and policies of the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration. In defiance of the norm, Gates, speaking at the expanded National Economic Council (NEC) meeting on Investment in Human Capital presided over by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo recently in Abuja, chose to critique the path charted by his hosts in governing the Nigerian people. To the Co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the government had put the cart before the horse, development-wise. His words:  “The Nigerian government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan identifies investing in the people as one of three strategic objectives. But the execution priorities don’t fully reflect people’s needs, prioritising physical capital over human capital. Investments in infrastructure and competitiveness must go hand in hand with investment in people. People without roads, ports and factories can’t flourish. And roads, ports and factories without skilled workers to build and manage them can’t sustain an economy. If you invest in their health, education, and opportunities –the human capital we are talking about today–then they will lay the foundation for sustained prosperity. If you don’t, however, then it is very important to recognise that there will be a sharp limit on how much the country can grow.”

As a non-state actor, Gates’ foundation has donated over $1.6 billion to Nigeria. His words, as well as the context in which they were spoken, were thus bound to stir controversy and cause officialdom some consternation.  In his response to Gates’ position, Osinbajo insisted that investing in people was a primary aspect of the current administration’s Economic Recovery Growth Plan. He said: “Nigeria has strong economic growth and development ambitions encapsulated in our economic recovery and growth plan which we launched in 2017. All of those lofty ambitions can only be achieved through the determined application of human skill and effort and for that effort to be meaningful and productive, it has to come from people who are healthy, educated and who empowered. It is this realisation that has helped us to ensure that one of the primary planks of our economic recovery and growth plan is ‘investing in people’; and it is for this reason that we are expanding the reach and quality of our health care through the National Health Insurance Scheme and working to guarantee basic education for all persons whilst also upgrading and modernising the quality of secondary and post-secondary education.”

On the other hand, the Kaduna State governor, Mallam el-Rufai, said that Gates had failed to put his analysis in context. As he noted, “The state and local governments have the responsibilities to invest in education and health care. So, it is up to state governments to invest more in education. That is what I said, but it was misrepresented to mean that I was attacking Bill Gates.” For his part, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, said that the Federal Government had made significant improvements in capital allocations in human capital-related sectors in the last three years in spite of dwindling revenues. For instance, he noted, capital allocations to education, including the Universal Basic Education, in the 2015 Budget was N91.903bn. This allocation, he noted, was increased to N112.54bn in 2016; N152bn in 2017; and N170.79bn in the proposed budget of 2018. In the health sector, the minister said while N22.67bn was provided in the 2015 budget for capital expenditure, the sum of N28.65bn was provided in the 2016 budget; N55.61bn in 2017; and N71.11bn in the 2018 budget proposal.

Gates, however, stood his ground, reeling off the statistics behind his prognosis. In an interview with CNN, Gates said: “While it may be easier to be polite, it’s more important to face facts so that you can make progress. The current quality and quantity of investment in this young generation in health and education just isn’t good enough. So, I was very direct.”

Instructively, the ripostes by the government seem to make a point already acknowledged by the US businessman, namely that the government has a policy of investing in the people. They have not yet addressed his charge of faulty “execution priorities”. Bill Gates, it appears, has some company in the National Assembly. For instance, only on Thursday, the Senate admitted that Nigerians were not feeling the impact of the Federal Government’s N1.5 trillion National Social Investment Programme, saying that it might go the way of the disbanded Subsidy Reinvestment Programme of Programme (SURE-P) of the immediate past administration.

It is also doubtful that many Nigerians would fault Gates’ position that Nigeria is currently one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth, with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world, ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad. It is a fact that one in three Nigerian children is chronically malnourished. It is also true that in upper middle-income countries, the average life expectancy is 75 years, in lower middle-income countries, 68, and in low-income countries, 62. But in Nigeria, it is just 53 years. In any case, the United Nations 2017 Human Development Index report ranked Nigeria 152nd out of 188 countries with a value of 0.527, putting the country in the low human development category. Nigeria also has one of the highest figures for out-of-school children, and one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world.

• I didn’t attack Bill Gate, but not wrong doing so ―el-Rufai

Awo and the development of human capital

The linkage between a high human development index and economic growth— for instance, just 1 per cent increase in government expenditure on education will, on the average, lead to 23.8 per cent increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)— is well recognized. This is partly why, in June 2015, the Oyo State governor, Abiola Ajimobi, called for human capital development in the country in order to enhance its progress. Speaking while receiving the then Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan, Professor Isaac Adewole, in his office, Ajimobi said: “I am a fervent believer in the building of human capital development, because it is not the number but intelligence that leads to the development of a nation. The U.S, China and Japan as the leading developed nations of the world achieved their status because they placed premium on human capital development.” Ajimobi, who recalled that late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Premier of the then Western Region, invested in education and infrastructure, added that while some of the infrastructure decayed, his education legacy endured. It is clear from Ajimobi’s statement that human capital development is key to successful governance.

And while the debate between the Federal Government of Nigeria and Gates rages, observers of Nigeria’s political trajectory would remember that the billionaire philanthropist merely reiterated a point stressed at various times by Nigeria’s most celebrated politician and thinker, Chief Obafemi Awolowo (the first Leader of Government Business and Minister of Local Government and Finance and first Premier of the Western Region under Nigeria’s parliamentary system, from 1952 to 1959), since the First Republic.  For instance, in an address delivered on the occasion of his installation as the first Chancellor of the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) on May 15, 1967, the sage demonstrated the futility of espousing infrastructure development without first actualising the mental elevation of the people. As he noted:  “Whether we are conscious of or acknowledge it or not, the fact remains stubborn and indestructible that poverty, disease, social unrest and instability, and all kinds of international conflict, have their origins in the minds of men. Unless we tackle and remove, or at the very least minimise, these evils at their source, all our efforts in Nigeria to bring about happier circumstances for our peoples, and all the endeavour of mankind to evolve a better world, would be completely in vain.”

This thinking was behind the successes of the Action Group (AG) and later Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), including, among others, the introduction of free primary education for all and free health care for children in the Western Region, establishment of the first television station in Africa in 1959, building of the first skyscraper in tropical Africa: the Cocoa House (still the tallest in Ibadan). As many would still recall, Awolowo created the Cooperative Bank in 1953 to empower the operators of small scale industries, and the Western Nigeria Finance Corporation for those operating on a higher business plane. Following its assumption of office in Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo  and Bendel states after the 1979 general election, the UPN, inheritor of the AG’s welfarist ideology, was the only party to promote free education. It also championed free medical treatment, full employment, integrated rural development and progressive programme for development of roads and schools. With regard to the debates centering on the intractable revenue allocation mechanism in Nigeria, the UPN supported a 30-40 per cent revenue allocation for the Federal Government, 40-50 per cent for the states and 10 per cent for the local governments. Its ideals of a social democracy caused the governors elected on its platform to tower above their colleagues in other platforms in almost all the indices of development.

 

Testimonies on the Awolowo praxis                                                                                                                    

Over the years, scholars and political commentators have pointed out the place of the strategy outlined by Awolowo in his achievements and successes. One of the sage’s harshest critics, Mokwugo Okoye, writing in the May 28, 1987 edition of The African Guardian, acknowledged “his great legacy of constitutional federalism, free universal education and medicare.” Universal free education and medical care are vital aspects of human capital development encapsulated by the Awo school of thought as “Life More Abundant.” Unfortunately, however, it would appear that the road taken by Awolowo is a road not taken by successive governments, particularly since the abrupt ending of the Second Republic.

As noted by a political scientist, Professor Wale Are-Olaitan in his introduction to Professor Akin Onigbinde’s  Development of Underdevelopment: Conceptual Issues in Political Economy, the author does not discountenance the importance of capital and other items that orthodox developmental analysts reify, but argues that “these items are no more than instruments which are put into use through the relationships that human beings enter into within and across national boundaries.” This, in essence, is the strategy recommended by Awolowo which Bill Gates have sought to draw attention to in his quest to make the Buhari government to fulfill the essence of governance.

Another scholar, Dr. Tunji Olaopa, submitted that at the centre of any good development performance, “is a visionary and transformational leadership,” which Chief Awolowo represented in the South-West region. To Olaopa, the Executive Vice-Chairman of the Ibadan School of Governance and Public Policy (ISGPP), a transformational leader is often contrasted to a transactional one. As he notes:  “Transformational leadership is essentially proactive—it pushes the boundary of policies that empower the citizens. Awolowo’s proactive vision commenced with the founding of a political party whose objective goes beyond an instrumental conception of attaining political power. Action Group fulfilled all the attributes of the classic political party organisation as known in best practice. It brought together people with common underlying ideologies about how society should be organised to achieve the common good…Awolowo’s political agenda was defined by policy dynamics in core policy areas of education, health, employment, agriculture, infrastructural development and a functional and efficient public service. The free primary education scheme and the universal free health programme were the two elements of his governance project that meant to produce an enlightened and healthy citizenry.”

“The Awolowo political leadership was not only farsighted but also realistic. A realistic leadership works according to the implications and consequences derived from a well-researched development agenda that is balanced between policy expectations matched by the cost implications of the intended programmes with a funding strategy. Awolowo’s people-oriented leadership was formed along this line. Awolowo was aware, for instance, that the real burden of a universal, free and compulsory education came from the challenge of funding it. In 1952, the government projected a total of 170,000 pupils to be enrolled in the primary schools. By 1954 (a year before the launch of the programme), 394,000 pupils had already registered. But then the government realised that a free education scheme cannot really be “free.” Economic realism led to the introduction of a capitation levy which was later abandoned for an increment in the existing tax regime. The success of the universal basic education scheme derived essentially from the fact that the Awolowo government did its homework, and was ready for the eventualities of policy execution that would have fazed any other government unprepared for the consequences of a complex implementation dynamic.”

As a matter of fact, Awolowo believed that a successful leader must triumph over the lusts of the flesh, for which reason he proposed the theory of mental magnitude, which relies on the philosophical belief that the mental element of a person (reasoning) is superior to the physical. Awolowo postulates two different conceptions of the nature of man, namely, “the Grecian dualist descriptions of mind and body and the Judaic tripartite description of mind, body and spirit.”

This is why, to make Nigeria work, according to an analyst, Kanmi Ademiluyi, “We must examine the models that fascinated Awolowo and which he adapted for positive development. Fundamentally, the emphasis on human capital development, as well as the emphasis on social capital as the most enduring form of developmental capital must be reignited. A new form of Awoism, will, like Awolowo did, look at options such as the German “social market” economic model founded on tripartite cooperation between government, business and trade unions. This is the basis for Germany being the strongest industrial economy in Europe. In addition, it is in tune with our using consensus building rather than adversarial means. Also of interest should be the Dutch farmers’ cooperative formula. Today the Netherlands has just 200,000 farmers organized in cooperatives exporting $110 billion worth of agro industrials a year. This again fits in with our cultural affinity.”

Furthermore, at the 2012 Obafemi Awolowo memorial lecture organised by the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, Second Republic governor and chairman on the occasion, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, observed as follows: “Chief Obafemi Awolowo is the most outstanding and memorable legend of Nigerian politics and governance since the 1940s. He is the one whose role in politics and governance can still be a reliable guide for any first-time President of Nigeria even though Nigeria lost the opportunity of having Chief Awolowo as its National President. If his policy of free, qualitative, and functional education, for instance, had been implemented and sustained throughout Nigeria, the 40-year gap in educational development between the northern and the southern parts, which inevitably makes the North stand more in the way of peace and national unity, would have been avoided. And the result of higher educational advancement would not have been almost absent in Nigeria.” This point was corroborated by Toyin Falola, a professor of History at the University of Texas in Austin, USA, according to whom “Chief Awolowo chose welfare politics and his entire career was based on the pursuit of this vision. Welfare politics would generate patriotism and loyalty to the state in a way that would keep Nigeria stable, orderly and peaceful.”

In conclusion, Bill Gates’ verdict on Nigeria and the Buhari administration, although understandably unpalatable to the establishment, has the potentiality to drive a new thinking in governance and chart a truly effective administration, provided that the government is willing to embrace the developmental model that has remained unsurpassed to date: the Awolowo model. The road once taken to proven success needs to be taken once more.