AS I woke up for prayers and meditation I heard the radio playing an old song by Fadaka-‘Now that we found love, what we gonna to do with it’. It was early morning of 21st April 2015-my birthday and a pleasant call was coming in from my Golden Girl in Canada to wish Daddy a happy birthday. Soon after my mind went back to the song on the radio because of its relevance to the current situation in Nigeria and I could hear an inner voice singing ‘Now that we got a change of administration, what are we going to do with it as a people’.
Then Mill’s idea of the ‘good society’ comes to mind. Mill seeks for ‘an appropriate material livelihood for everyone’, unlimited growth of human control over nature, constant increase in the security of persons and property, prosperity of all and the ‘happiness of the greatest number’ of people in given society. For me these could be good for Nigeria- a country that is so far from being the ‘good society’ of Mill’s dream. For too long the country has travelled on the wrong road and remained in the wilderness of poverty and under-development. Misery instead of happiness has been the lot of majority citizens. The question begging for answer is: How do we achieve appropriate livelihood, promote prosperity and happiness for the greatest numbers of citizens in Nigeria?
It is highly debatable whether it is proper to set an agenda for progress and development for an elected government which presumably got the highest number of votes on the basis of its manifesto. However it has been a tortuous journey to the moment when a ruling party in Nigeria could be voted out of power for poor performance. There are many gaps to fill and mistakes to correct such that patriots cannot afford to be aloof. The moment calls all hands on deck for a fresh beginning.
In this respect one is happy that the president-elect General M Buhari has already promised to ‘lead a government founded on values that promote and protect fundamental human rights and freedoms, the supremacy of the Constitution and rule of law…and to build a country that is fair to all its citizens…respects human dignity, promotes human development, equality and freedom’ I see here the recognition of some of our past weaknesses which include wrong philosophy of governance or inappropriate ideology of development, exclusion of the state from economic activities, low citizenry participation, disregard for the provisions of the constitution, infrastructural decay, rural neglect, corruption, insecurity, unemployment especially youths to mention just a few.
While it needless to ask for a proper focus on these problems, the year 1999 when the country returned to Democracy provided opportunity for a fresh start but which was botched by the ruling elites by taking the wrong road. As I observed in my book Power of Youth and Other Essays on the Political Economy of Nigeria the wrong step was informed by a number of factors -both local and international that must be guided against henceforth. These include influence of international politics of ideology as was re-ignited by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA in the 1980s to the effect that the market is the engine of development and the state has no business with doing business, the fall of USSR and the belief that socialism was dead , the influence of western media in projecting the capitalist ideology across the globe in the name of globalization, the persuasive activities of the IMF, the World Bank on developing countries to embrace western market based model of development, the poor knowledge and lack of creative thinking and development-oriented nation-building local elites as well as emergence of false prophets in the corridors of power, many of them novices in development issues or nation-building matters.
One of the results was the wrong taken- private –sector market driven economic path- a somewhat breach of the constitution. Rather than being guided by the provisions of the 1999 constitution the government adopted the wrong philosophy of excluding the state from economic activities in the name of globalization of which privatization is a major plank. It was a step informed by blind loyalty and uncritical embrace of an inappropriate ideology that was bereft of reason, historical and constitutional support. In this way the state was sent on leave of absence for sixteen years.
Yet according to the 1999 Constitution the ‘security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government and the participation of the people in their government should be ensured. Also the state shall harness the resources of the nation to promote national prosperity and an efficient, a dynamic and self reliant economy and it should control the national economy in such manner as to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen on the basis of social justice and equality of status and opportunity.
It is clear from the foregoing that the constitution envisages state intervention but instead of this the elites excluded the state and went ahead with a bogus privatization which saw the sale of public enterprise that swelled the unemployment load without any attempt to establish labor-intensive industries. What stopped us from having a national carrier, more refineries, and agro –based industries except economic heresy from abroad?
But such exclusion of the state was bad development –economics and a-historical. It is akin to denying the best player of foot ball team from playing in a crucial competition on the ground that it is not right to win through him. The state in developing countries has more muscle than the private sector to lead and drive the economy. The private sector is still at its infancy and thus weak. Values such as trust, honesty, and discipline are in short supply in Nigeria. Above all the purpose of the state is to provide for the security, and welfare of the people and thus in a better position to mobilize necessary resources to do the needful including the provision of employment. Most of the problems of today were all there-unemployment, insecurity, rural neglect, infrastructural deficiency, corruption etc and they required strong frontier attack than the indirect approach of the market adopted by the ruling elites.
It is needless to remind us that the country has been in serious economic crisis since before 1999.And the state has a duty to resolve the crisis. In the history of nation-building, the state has always led in the mobilization of resources to lay appropriate infrastructure in order to drive growth and development. The USA used the approach in its formative years in the 18th, 19th century and would use it in the 1920s & 30s era of the great depression to stimulate recovery, and even in this century-2008 to resolve serious financial crisis. The Marshal plan for Europe after the world war 2 was nothing else than massive state intervention. Dubai, Singapore, China etc are driven on the principle of government led development efforts. Capitalism has more than face.
The new government must not give room to the false prophets of development to misdirect the country again because they are novices in nation-building in developing countries. They lack the ability for creative thinking and adaptation of global ideas to local condition. They chase shadows rather than the substance of solving the daily problems of our country. The new government must work out an appropriate philosophy or ideology of development based on justice, equity and fair-play to be preached and driven by a well assembled development oriented and national- unity conscious elite.
Another serious mistake of the past was the alienation of majority citizens through barren, harsh and unrewarding policies. One of the consequences was low citizenry participation which is one of the reasons for policy failure of the era 1999-2015. I was always amused when I heard our false prophets likening men to egg which must be broken first in order to make an omelet forgetting that unlike the egg, the man has feeling and can sense and react to acts of injustice and even frustrate some policies considered inimical to the progress of society and happiness of majority citizens. The citizen must be carried along.
Any casual observer of the Nigerian scene would appreciate that many Nigerians did not bond with the development vision of the government since 1999. For instance many people did not understand what NEEDS,7-point agenda and Transformational agenda were all about. Yet without people understanding and buying into the leadership vision, nothing much can be achieved in the development arena. The mobilization of the citizen to share in the leadership vision should be the starting point of this administration.
Because the country was on the wrong road, many things went wrong too: corruption, injustice, immorality, profanity, unethical conduct etc were on the increase. She failed or was unable to appreciate where the shoes pinched most. Otherwise national statistics had since revealed that about sixty percent (60%) of the nation’s active population are youth and that unemployment was very high in the country – 40% (about 40 million) people most of them youth, thereby becoming a source of threat to the economy. With over 40 million unemployed, we did not need to be specialist to know that the country was sitting on a keg of gun powder. All these largely explain the rise of more militia groups, kidnapping groups and terrorist sects such as Boko Haram. And they also explain the sprawling poverty and underdevelopment across the country today. All these must be given utmost attention through frontal attack by the state at not the indirect approach of the market.
Have you traveled recently as I have done to the hinter- land of the country? You’ll be amazed at the high level of neglect of the rural areas and the vast extent of infrastructural decay as well as the teeming population of youth that are not covered by any form of policy and therefore amenable to negative participation. Against this background, it is proposed that the new administration focus on Positive youth development and empowerment, self-employment address unemployment, rural infrastructural decay, insecurity, food shortage etc. in the years ahead. All these will require active state participation in economic affairs such that the private sector will be an active partner in the development process. Thank you all for wishing me a happy Birthday.