Olutayo Adesina is a professor of History, with special interest in Economic History and Political Economy at the University of Ibadan. He speaks with Deputy Editor, DAPO FALADE on fundamental issues negatively affecting efforts at achieving national growth and development, 59 years after the attainment of independence.
Nigeria is 59 years old today as an independent country. How will you describe the journey so far?
Nigeria is a very fortunate country although quite, unfortunately, we have not been able to achieve greater potential in the use of our resources to ensure that our people have benefitted a lot from the immense resources that God has endowed us with. It is then possible to describe Nigeria as a country that has not fulfilled its potentials. That is the way I see it.
Is it not a contradiction to describe Nigeria as a fortunate country that has unfortunately not been able to fulfill its potentials, after more than half of a decade?
Nigeria is in a conundrum; the country is a bundle of contradictions. In other words, the more you look is the less you. Secondly, how would you describe a country with such immense opportunities, immense resources and immense human capacity and yet our institutions are comatose, the roads are bad? The resources we have in this country, even at this level now, are enough to turn the Nigeria around. What we require is a much more focused management of our resources, but I am not seeing that.
We have policies and we must have plans of actions but those are not going to help us out of these problems. We must now sit down to develop a grand strategy for taking this country forward. Without a grand strategy, all our potentials will just remain potentials. We must sit down and see how higher education must speak to development; how development will speak to day-to-day existence; and how day-to-day existence will speak to community development. Right now, we are not doing that.
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At the earlier years of independence, we appeared to be on the right path to development. At what point did you think we missed it?
I think the problem came with the 1966 coup. If you go back to history and say the First Republic was acrimonious, how will you describe what we have now? What we had during the First Republic you cannot compare it with anything that came afterwards. All the development we had thereafter, we had crude oil, petro-dollars and so people were just putting structures on ground. They put things on ground, not because they had a consistent focus on what the country is going to be in the next 50 or 100 years. They were just acting on the exigencies of the moment and that was the problem.
In several countries, we have a situation whereby the leadership provides the impetus for development. Is it that Nigeria is not blessed with the right leaders to do this over the years?
Nigeria has not been that lucky to have such visionary leaders at the national level. We had them at the regional level, but there is a tendency in this country to push forward those who are leaders in their own rights but don’t have the kind of vision that those who are not there actually have. Look at the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, for instance. I am sure that if the man had been given the opportunity to lead this country, we must have been on the moon by now, but he did not have the opportunity to get there. Well, those who represented the West in government are educated but, of course, we all are not imbued with the same type of leadership acumen that some people have. That is why we have to do a kind of self-introspection.
Now, we have to begin to teach people to recognise their own identities, values and capacities so that you now see the capacities of others. You will accept that, that is the way to go. Right now, the kind of situation we are in is too self-centred to enable us to provide the kind of analytical tools or instincts for us to project our best foot forward and that is what is killing this country. We are not pushing our best forward.
Don’t you think it is a hindrance to any attempt by the states to develop at their own pace?
If you look at it in the context of going to Abuja every month cap-in-hand, there are resources that we can develop independent of the Federal Government. That’s why I said the Federal Government would soon become anachronistic because now we are having smart boys developing businesses, relations and relationships, and projects all over the place, independent of the Federal Government. These are the kind of things that we must now begin to develop. We should be able to tell state governments that they don’t have to depend on the mineral resources in their ground. Let us bring people together and ask what options we have. You will be amazed at the kind of options they will suggest.
Look at the Awolowo era, they were encouraging people to come to the Western Region and giving them tax holidays on their projects for a number of years. The projects were growing and they were recruiting people and providing employments. For instance, I would have loved to establish a school in Osun State where I come from, but tax will kill me. I actually went back to my father’s land there one day and I was doing a short fence round the property. Within a few minutes, the local government area officials came to meet me and said, “You have to pay tax on the fence you are building. I replied: I have not even made any kobo on the thing and you want me to start with tax. No, if I am going to do that, allow me to develop the school, give me a tax holiday for developing that school and you will be amazed at what I will return to Osun State. But now you have killed the project, even before taking off.” After that encounter, I ran back to Ibadan.
What exactly do you think we left undone?
We did not produce visionary leaders and that is the greatest problem we have had. We produced leaders who understood leadership but did not understand the requirements of leadership. Yes, you could lead people but you also have to be strategic in that leadership. So, in creating leaders, we did not organise the society in a way that is sustainable. You have to develop ethos, national philosophy, work ethic and sense of mission, sense of direction, unity of purpose, unity of action and unity of plans. All these were absent.
But we had that type of leadership during the First Republic. Why the break?
You have not studied the military interregnum very well. From then, we began to have some people who were not trained for leadership. It is not their duty to lead; it is their duty to fight battles. This means the military is unitarist; they were not trained to lead or study the society and to understand the dynamics of the society. Yes, they could have been trained to understand the dynamics of battles and the battle fronts, but not the dynamics of the people or the society they were leading. So, they were here with just one track mind.
The way out of this problem will be the restructuring and repositioning of the educational sector to begin the retraining of people to understand what development is all about or what human progress is all about. Without doing that we will continue with the post-First Republic leadership style which has led us nowhere.
Given the scenario you just painted, do you see the country surviving beyond its first 100 years of existence?
That is one thing about the country. Yes, Nigeria has what I will call a death wish but surprisingly, the country is not dying. You will think that, with the gargantuan problems we have, Nigeria should have died, but, like someone said, it was in Michael Crowder’s Story of Nigeria, “Nigerians have perfected the art of moving to the edge of the precipice and never falling in.” That brinksmanship is what we are used to, but one day, that brinksmanship will fail; it will give way
There is always a metamorphosis: you will think Nigerians have done it this time and there is no end, but suddenly there will be a change around. This is because we have a certain capacity but which we have not used in a positive sense.
Let us be hopeful in a post-President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. A new pathway can be developed but that is if 2023 does not become acrimonious. If it is going to become acrimonious, of course, there is no saying what is going to happen. But we also have a duty to start warning people right now, especially the ruling elite, which I can describe as backward-looking ruling elite, that this is not their country; it is our country and by the time we get tired of their machinations and manipulations, we will take action.
Action as the #RevolutionNow embarked upon by the publisher of Sahara Reporters, Omoyele Sowore…
No, Sowore was too academic about that. There is what you call the objective readiness and Nigeria is not ready for a revolution. You also have to define what the revolution is all about. What Sowore is trying to do was a revolt. There is a difference between a revolution and a revolt…
Don’t you think a revolution can start from a revolt?
It can but that is if the country is objectively ready. The revolution must not be a destructive one that would not achieve any good purpose. The kind of revolution we want is something that must start from the mind. We train children from the primary school and which I am hoping will start very soon that no urinating by the roadside or trashing of refuse along the road, if you do that as a father, I think your children will caution you.
But if you don’t begin that consciousness in a planned and organised manner, what we are going to have in our hand is a destructive revolution; a revolution without any ideology or any readiness for a progressive change and we are all going to be consumed. We all saw what happened with the South African matter when people began to smash cars in Lagos. I mean some people worked hard for their money and there is nothing stopping me from consuming what I desire. But you begin to smash my car because I look prosperous. There would not be any distinction between those who stole their money and those who worked hard for their money. That is not the kind of revolution we want. We want a revolution where we can open our eyes and decipher those who meant well for us, those who are evil, those who are backward-looking and in several countries of the world, that has been accomplished; to say ‘no, we desire a positive change and we must all be that change.’
But revolution can be spontaneous without any planning…
No, that is why I used the phrase, objective readiness. It has to be that everybody is now tired and we are getting there actually. Look at the settlement syndrome. When it was going to creep in, did anybody call meeting? The day it will frizzle out, nobody will call a meeting. Everybody will get tired: you get to the airport, you are embarrassed; you get to the bank, you are embarrassed; you get to the university, they ask you for settlement. One day, people will say enough is enough and that time is coming very soon.
and then