IT is the view of some that 60 years after independence, we should no longer blame our colonial masters for our woes; was Nigeria destined to fail from the outset?
Let us be very fair to both the colonial masters and ourselves. The colonisation journey is not a tea party or a love enterprise. You may get some cultural justifications with people saying it was a mission to civilise the noble savages but that is absolute nonsense. Colonialism was driven by greed. Africans had relationships with Europeans for hundreds of years before colonialism. It was the industrial revolution that made the need for raw materials important that led to colonising people. The exploitation began with slave trade. The Nigerian history has a few incidents like the famous Race to Nikky. Race to Nikki involved colonial race who signed treaties with trading posts. There was a trading post in the Borgu nation that the British and the French were rushing to. So, Lugard made an expedition to Nikki. Well, the French arrived there first which became the basis for boundaries and they ended up with trading post being in Benin Republic and the rest of the Borgu kingdom in Nigeria. So, the whole idea of colonialism was to enforce authority through these kinds of trade missions with vassal kinds of kings. So, what we therefore had was the divide and rule strategy.
The Americans who had become the dominant power at the end of World War II basically decided to stop and colonialism had to end but they found ways to remain relevant in colonised territories. Those ways of remaining relevant was to essentially divide people. However, if you are stupid and people are trying to take advantage of you, is it not left to you to reconstruct? Sixty years is more than enough for that reconstruction to overcome this device of divide and rule that has weakened us.
Today, we have impunity. Recall what happened during military rule when we had a convergence of soldiers and oil. Due to the structure of the army, soldiers wanted the structure more centralised in the way authorities go. Oil then made it easy for a central authority to ignore anybody because you are getting direct revenues from oil and they don’t have to depend on your taxes.
I told my northern friends to send their children to school and that if you don’t send them to school, they can be Almajiris and will be begging for food at 11 years old. But when they are 40 years old, nobody will give them food and they have no skills, they will carry guns and that is what we are seeing today. A failure to find enlightened leadership that will govern as citizen-leaders not as lords is what has brought Nigeria to where we are.
Statisticians recall that in the early 1960s, Nigeria compared favourably with the present Asian Tigers. Why did our peers leave us far behind?
There are a number of factors that you have to look at when analysing human progress. Generally, in my intellectual journey, I have tried to narrow this down to major factors. They include the kind of policy choices that you make. Do you choose to be state-controlled such that the government will do this and that? Nigeria was pushed early in its life, especially oil providing so much resource. The leaders of the time, occupying the commanding heights of the economy, will prove that that was not the cleverest thing to do because it takes away the creativity of entrepreneurship.
Second major factor is institutions. If your institutions are weak, you will not make much progress because institutions shape economic performance.
Third is human capital. How much are you investing in your young people? This is because progress is based on production not on sharing and the way to produce is to invest in health and education of the next generation.
Fourth is entrepreneurship. We must be keen on the spirit of enterprise; people who are creating wealth are driven by all kinds of incentives.
Fifth is values. Values shape human progress. Look at the values in Nigeria. People forget that politics is about morality and public virtues. The values in our politics are, “Can you pass the Adedibu test? Can you swear on the Qu’ran? Can you fight in the market place?” Our values have gone sour. We have witnessed a collapse of culture. Central to all of these things is leadership. We have had very poor leadership in Nigeria. The result is that our ancient colleagues have way overtaken us. Let us take some simple illustration of Singapore. The primary driver of investment and growth in Singapore was forced savings. One of the most important forced saving elements is the Housing Development Board of Singapore which is the same housing fund in Nigeria. In Nigeria, we ‘chopped’ the money. While over there, it was invested in a way that became the base for Singapore’s explosion and it becoming an investment destination. These things all matter and cumulate and we have managed to get it consistently wrong in Nigeria.
If all these factors that you have identified come to play, can we ever meet up with those Asian Tigers?
You can always have opportunities to leapfrog. What you invested that made you great today might be what drags you back tomorrow. Sometimes you have to unlearn to learn. For example, let us look at cell phone technology. Due to the fact that we did not have heavy investment in fixed telephone lines, we had to leapfrog to cell phone and that made us greater users of cell phones. It means if we put ourselves to it, we could advance cell phone technology better than them. The result came out in the concept of mobile money which largely came out of Nairobi, Kenya; even Tanzania overtook Kenya in mobile money such that while you can pay your taxi fare in Dar es Salaam using your phone, you can’t do that in Europe because they were so invested in the other one that they did not advance the concept of mobile money as fast as Africans did. In Nigeria, of course, the nature of our Central Bank and the games it has played with the telcos has prevented the mobile money from being a veritable leapfrog source.
It would seem that Nigeria has made little progress going by our human development index in the last decade. How should we progress?
We need more enlightened leaders; we need leaders who are sacrificing; who know that it is about history, immortality and not about the size of their bank accounts. I dare say 75 per cent of young people I talk to want to leave Nigeria.
You mentioned the Central Bank. This Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has pumped billions into its various development finance interventions. How well do you think the desired objectives have been achieved?
As a policy scholar, I tell people that a good policy anticipates the problems of implementation. The CBN says it wants to spend so much in agriculture and someone like me, for example, who is heavily vested in that area, invested hundreds of millions of money that I have scratched out of the ground, not one kobo of bank loan, can’t even get equity in the agric space. I come forward and the first thing a government owned bank tells me is that I am a politically exposed person. What makes me a politically exposed person? I have not held government office for 40 years. But when a politician who wants to use it for election campaign comes forward, they will give the person. These things prevent effectiveness of good ideas.
Nigeria is expected to enter its second recession in four years. Was this avoidable?
In many ways, there were things that were going to force a downturn from COVID-19 but there were things we had set up to do to ourselves before COVID-19. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. It was avoidable in some ways but we can’t tell that this impact of COVID-19 will be on us so much. I think clearly by middle of last year, even if COVID-19 didn’t come, Nigeria was bound for a recession.
When Forbes magazine published an article that Nigeria was a money-losing machine, I wrote a piece about it. At that time, the Russians and the Saudis were showing power in the oil business and oil prices were tanking, falling below budget rates. The National Assembly was going to spend more money changing its roof than it was going to budget for education for the whole country. Also, they were going to buy new cars. The Nigeria political class is the single biggest danger to economic progress in the country.
So, yes I thought that their actions were going to lead to a recession. The ability of many industrial producers to receive inputs was affected; this meant that factories were going to close, there will be job losses and we were going to be pushed towards a recession. Also, oil prices crashed under COVID-19 and that further deepened the mess. But we must bear in mind that if we had done the things we keep saying we will do in every budget speech, that is, to diversify the base of the Nigerian economy away from mono-cultural dependency on crude oil, by now, we won’t have been in this position and surely it will have been easier for us to avoid a recession.
So, is there hope for Nigeria to attain the desired sustainable economic development?
Anything can happen. If you can just get the right people in power, people can begin to change. It has happened elsewhere. The story of Brazil is a classic example. Brazil used to be described as the story of potential that never came alive. And then, Brazil experienced military rule and people were beginning to think that Brazil is a hopeless case and would never get it right. But, military rule ended and the new government appointed a big critic of the development strategy, Henrique Fernando Cardoso, as foreign minister. Things were still quite bad; the lifespan of the finance minister was three months because inflation was soaring. They appointed a new finance minister and things were still getting worse; then Cardoso asked if he could be finance minister. And before he could think about it, he was announced the finance minister. And he exercised courageous leadership in putting together the brightest and best young economists in Brazil and asked them to argue about the problem and assuring them that though he had built a personal prestige over the years in discussing economic theory generally referred to as Dependency Theory, he would boldly support whatever they came up with. What they came up with was the opposite of what he stood for; he backed it with courage and Brazil’s economy began to grow.
He then became president of Brazil, laid a big foundation that Lula Da Silva then built on and created progammes that some of us tried to borrow like Conditional Cash Transfers to stimulate economic activities. And Brazil was powered into the commission of the six largest economies in the world so quickly. It is possible that if a few things change, a lot could change.
Some analysts argue that unless we get our politics right, the economy will continue to suffer. Is wrong politics a core reason for our lack of development?
It is a significant part of it. Progress is a function of the choices you make and politics is a process of making those choices. Let us just take the current Buhari administration. Many of us argued that things were so bad and we needed a kind of new beginning in 2015. We thought we had reached a point where we said only if all he can do is stop corruption, allow some people who know what they are doing to fix things and finishes a term and goes away, then we could have a fresh start for Nigeria. We all got into the “anything but Jonathan” mode but we did not anticipate that we were going to create problems.
Within a few weeks of President Buhari being inaugurated, he made a couple of comments outside of Nigeria that many of us found enormously damaging of economic possibilities in Nigeria. We spoke up immediately and got branded. Today, we are back to it. Go back to those first few months of Buhari’s government, the policies they created are the reasons we have the mess we have now.
Sixty years of independence attained, we begin another decade. Is it all gloom?
Wale, I wrote a book, “Managing Uncertainty”, published in Ibadan, in 1998 by Spectrum Books. Uncertainty is unfortunately what makes it impossible for anybody to predict what will happen. For all you know, there might be no Nigeria in the next three years. For all you know, a good set of guys might emerge and Nigeria is that dream that we have always called for. If I know what it is, then I will not be talking to you.
I dream that Nigeria becomes a blossoming and thriving community that it has the capacity to be. Right now the absence of competition on who will bring more progress to the people is keeping Nigeria traveling south. If we restructure, if we have the right people in leadership, then we could be making a lot of progress.
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