KWAME Nkrumah famously enjoined Africans to “seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added onto you”.
These remarks rang true during the heyday of the anti-colonial nationalist struggles. Today, our continent is politically independent. But we are not yet economically free.
Africa is the richest continent in the world in terms of natural resources; but our people also remain the most impoverished. Nigeria recently overtook India as the world capital of poverty.
Over a hundred million of our people wallow in destitution. Africa has little or no control over the wealth that lies beneath its soil.
Now is the time to seek the economic kingdom!
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Through a pernicious system of informal empire, we have no control over the commanding heights of our national economies. As a consequence we produce what we do not consume and consume what we do not produce. Our centuries-old encounter with Europe makes it clear that they will never help Africa move forward. Their only real interest is untrammelled access to our natural resources while making us a dumping ground for their goods. China, as far as I know, has been a force for good on our continent. But we are also aware that they are not Samaritans; they are in our continent because it makes business sense. So far, it has been a win-win positive-sum game. But there are aspects of Chinese engagement with Africa that reek of economic colonialism.
We are only now realising that Chinese loans often collateralise vital national assets which we stand to forfeit when we default on our repayment obligations. In Kenya, in Zambia, in Djibouti and in several other jurisdictions, our countries are about to give up vital national assets because of failure to repay their loans. We understand that the current administration in our country has used our oil wells in the Niger Delta as collateral for the loans it has incurred from Beijing. Now is the time to fight for the liberation of our continent from economic slavery!
For Nigeria in particular, seeking the economic kingdom entails prioritising seven key sectors over the coming decade: security law and order; power; infrastructures; agriculture and food security; industrialisation, civil service reforms; and human capital investments and job creation.
First, we must re-establish the foundations of peace and security, without which no progress can be achieved. The greatest challenge facing our country today is insecurity. If it is not Boko Haram, it is armed Fulani militias; and if it is not armed robbery it is kidnappers. Nigeria has become the kidnap capital of the world. From Kautilya to Ibn Khaldun and Thomas Jefferson, it is in established axiom of political philosophy that the first duty of civil government is to secure the common peace. When a government fails to protect the lives of families at the hands of a rapacious beast — be it Boko Haram or murderous herdsmen militias – then it has failed in its most elementary duties. We must overhaul our policing; retool the intelligence services; re-organise the armed forces; and mobilise local self-defence to protect our villages and communities against murderous foreign bandits.
Secondly, we must launch “Electricity for All” as the key to economic transformation. Recent econometric modelling has shown that tackling this challenge alone could increase the national GDP by 65 percent. Since the unbundling of the national Power Holding Company, electricity supply has, paradoxically, deteriorated. The so-called privatised Distribution Companies (DISCOs) have had no incentive to invest and expand their services. Although we are told that Nigeria currently generates 5,000 MW, the power sector is hampered by weak transmission networks. We need a fresh approach to the power sector. We must accelerate completion of the various power projects while committing to investing heavily in power transmission.
We must also tap into the potential of sustainable energy systems such as solar, wind and biogas. We should pass a law requiring all public buildings to install off-grid solar panels. It should apply to all ministries, agencies and departments of government, including government clinics, hospitals and schools. This singular initiative could bring a new lease of life to the public sector while boosting productivity by a considerable margin throughout the economy.
Thirdly, we must invest heavily in infrastructures as the cornerstone for economic transformation. We must upgrade our ports and harbours while building more modern airports. We must also launch a ship building industry to ensure we valorise our merchant sea-faring potential. No country of our size and potential can afford to neglect rail development. We need a system of fast trains linking all our cities and towns. The heavy traffic jams that continue to inflict such misery on motorists in our major urban cities are likely to worsen with the current rate of urbanisation and demographics. The long-term solution is to build trams and light rails to ease the urban transportation nightmare.
We must also commit to development of our roads and highways. Our immediate priority should be filling up all the potholes on our dilapidated roads through direct labour public works that employ thousands of our youths. We should also develop the vast bitumen deposits in Ondo and Ekiti. The proposal by cement mogul Aliko Dangote to use cement concrete on our road construction projects is worthy of consideration, particularly in the South East and the Niger Delta, where soil erosion is endemic.
Fourthly, we must launch a green revolution to ensure food and agricultural self-sufficiency. Historically, Nigeria has been one of the leading agricultural nations in the developing world. More than 70 percent of our population work in the rural-agrarian sector. Much of our food production system relies on peasant agriculture, with all the constraints and limitations that this entails. The discovery of oil in the 1970s created a new political economy anchored on collection of rents from the oil majors. While it brought untold wealth to our national coffers, it also generated widespread corruption and rent-seeking behaviour. The social contract between the government and governed was undermined. A surfeit of cheap dollars encouraged massive importation of food and other items, leading to an artificially high exchange. Local farmers and local industry were discouraged.
Today, we are a major food-deficit country. According to a recent study, between 1990 and 2011, our average annual food imports stood at N1.923 trillion. Although there have been some improvements in recent times, the annual average still exceeds N1.5 trillion. Food security must therefore be placed at the heart of a renewed strategy for rural-agrarian transformation. We must also empower our researchers and scientists to work on developing our indigenous seeds into highly improved varieties that bring optimal yields while enhancing the nutritional quality of the food intakes of our population.
Fifthly, we must commit to building a first-rate technological nation through an agro-based mass industrial revolution. To achieve this, we must invest in our people and upgrade technical skills while revitalising our steel industry. We need to revitalise our iron and steel and machine tools precision-engineering technology so that all the most important components of key industrial machinery are produced within our borders. Industrialisation requires the right enabling competitive environment that nurtures talents and encourages creativity.
Sixthly, we must invest in our people. In our twenty-first century digital industrial civilisation, people are the new wealth of nations. Sir Winston Churchill once prophesied that “the empires of the future will be the empires of the mind.” The great British wartime Prime Minister was prescient enough to foresee the knowledge revolution of our twenty-first century. The combined lessons of economic science and of world development in the last two decades make it abundantly clear that human capital is the driver of the wealth of nations. The new endogenous growth theories pioneered by economists such as Robert Lucas at Chicago and his student Paul Romer – both of them Nobel laureates – place emphasis on human capital, technology, innovation, knowledge and creativity as the critical factor in creating the society of abundance.
It is unfortunate that we in Nigeria have continued to pursue a policy that downgrades human capital while discouraging talent and creativity. The youth have been shunted out of the development process. Youth unemployment in Nigeria stands at over 20 percent. In some of the most impoverished areas, particularly the north east, it is as high as 70 percent. It is a national tragedy. Every year, over a million young people are churned out of the school system. Most of them are unable to find gainful employment. Not too long ago, a World Bank study characterised our economy as modelled on “jobless growth.” Basic technical, literacy and numeracy skills remain binding constraints to employability among our youth at all levels. We must therefore upgrade the school system and revitalise higher education, with emphasis on STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Access to universal healthcare is a vital ingredient of national competitiveness. Today, Nigeria’s average life-expectancy stands at a low 54.5 years. Malaria – a preventable disease – costs us over N300 billion annually in lost income; accounting for 11 percent of maternal mortality and 30 percent of child deaths. Nigeria has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, at 9 percent. Every single day, 2,300 precious under-five year olds and 145 women of childbearing age die due to preventable diseases.
When billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates bemoaned the human capital lacuna in our national development, we murmured defensively. Investing in people is ultimately about creating an eco-system where talents flourish. Our policymakers will need to reframe the paradigm underpinning national development efforts to focus on peoples, skills, intellectual capital and the knowledge economy. Education and health are the key to human capital development. An educated populace is also a healthy one. Research has shown that educated mothers are more likely to bring up healthy children who survive infancy. Maternal mortality is also less prevalent among literate women. An educated and healthy workforce is the sine qua non of national prosperity.
Finally, we need to deepen the structural reforms necessary to re-engineer growth and prosperity. From the decade of the eighties up to the early nineties, Nigeria embarked on a series of structural reforms under the tutelage of the Bretton Woods Institutions. These reforms were predicated on privatisation of state enterprises, liberalisation of key sectors of the economy to ensure that the market rather than the state becomes the key driver of the economy. These reforms had, at best, limited impact.
The second wave of reforms was 1999 to 2007, with the inception of the Third Republic under President Olusegun Obasanjo. The new administration sought to restore Nigeria’s credibility among the nations by ensuring a sounder basis for political and economic governance. Institutional reforms were complemented by reforms within the banking/financial sector, including privatisation of several public enterprises. The results were spectacular, particularly in such sectors as telecommunications. But privatisation efforts were sadly less successful, particularly in such sectors as power, iron and steel and the oil refineries. The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) has largely been killed by collusive action between petroleum/diesel importers and the oil majors.
The third-generation reforms must aim to build a developmentally-oriented bureaucracy imbued with a sense of mission and national destiny. They must be anchored on restoring merit, discipline and professionalism in the civil service. We need a strong and effective government, not necessarily a large and domineering one. The state must be reinvented as a smart, entrepreneurial servant of the people, not a Leviathan that sucks their blood.
The medieval Chinese often defined the ideals of fuqiang – the pursuit of power and wealth – as the abiding purpose of the state. The task and vocation of a new generation of leadership in our country is to advance our national power and prosperity in the context of an intensely competitive and changing world. We need national champions who believe in the New Nigeria Project — a purpose-driven, progressive democracy anchored on positive science, social justice, democracy and the rule of law.
and then