President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and fight to unlock Nigeria’s productive potential?
May 28, 20241.1K views0 comments
DAMILARE EBENIZA
Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. He is an analyst for West African Democracy Radio in Dakar, Senegal and actively contributes to critical dialogues shaping the region’s socio-political landscape. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com
In his last book titled Leadership, the late Henry Kissinger wrote: “Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept and a way forward proposed.”
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“Leaders,” he said, “are inevitably hemmed in by constraints. They operate in scarcity, for every society faces limits to its capabilities and reach, dictated by demography and economy. They also operate in time, for every era and every culture reflects its own prevailing values, habits, attitudes that together define its desired outcomes.” He defines ‘Strategy’ as “the conclusion a leader reaches under these conditions of scarcity and temporality, competition and fluidity.”
Any serious analysis of the first year of the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu requires an understanding of the journey our nation has made at least since 1960, and how the choices made during this journey led to the situation the current administration met upon taking office on 29 May 2023. This is not one more effort at blaming anything on the past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. Such thinking may be true, but only partially. More importantly it does not help identify where, as a nation, we must focus our limited resources for maximum effect. In my mind, any meaningful analysis should begin with how our nation got to where she is now. Once this is done, it becomes easier to assess what the current government has done in the last twelve months. One thing is clear: “we cannot get out of ‘this’ crisis with the same thinking that got us into it the first time.’’
This is a two parts analysis. The first part deals with the past. The second focuses on the big strategic ideal of the current administration to pull the nation out of its economic difficulty and unlock our people’s globally attested productive potential. At the end of this strategy is a nation in which its people’s interactions are defined not by tribal jealousy and mutual distrust but by mutual trust and cooperation to break new grounds in the history of the black race.
Part One: The past
In March 1947, representatives of all parts of Nigeria met for the first time. As the Colonial Report For the year 1947 put it, “representatives of all parts of Nigeria, selected from among their own number by the unofficial members of the Regional Houses, met together to discuss their common business’’. At this important moment in the history of our nation, His Excellency the Governor of Nigeria, Sir Arthur Richard, G.C.G.M., in his speech quoted an American President who said: “The ability of a people to govern themselves is not easily attained. History is filled with the failures of popular government. It cannot be learned from books; it is not a matter of eloquent phrases. Liberty, freedom, independence are not mere words, the repetition of which brings fulfilment. They demand long, arduous, self-sacrificing preparation’’. He advised those in attendance that “The new Constitution was designed to encourage the sense of unified interest beyond the realm of tribal jealousies, and to provide the training for even swifter advances towards self-government’’.
To get a sense of the progress made in the next 13 years leading up to independence in 1960, let me quote a conversation that took place in Lagos a few months before our independence between the British Prime Minister Maurice Harold Macmillan, who was on his “Wind of Change’’ tour of Africa and Sir James W. Robertson, the Governor General of Nigeria:
Prime Minister: “Are these people ready for self-government?’’
Governor General: “No, of course not’’
Prime Minister: “When will they be ready?’’
Governor General: “Twenty years, twenty-five years.’’
Prime Minister: “What do you recommend me to do?’’
Governor General: “I recommend you give it to them at once’’.
Whatever one makes of the confidence the Governor General had in our ability to govern ourselves as a people, it is important to know that for African leaders who immediately took over from the colonial masters, the only key performance indicator was the level to which their various new countries measure up to the former European masters. Like many African literary thinkers of that era who devoted their lives to proving mostly to a western audience, that an African can also think, securing a living standard comparable to what is obtained in Europe was for politicians the only measure of success. The result of this well intended policy orientation is not just large social spendings that belied prevailing economic realities or the resulting debt crisis, but a path dependency for subsequent African leaders. Virtually every politician who has sought to occupy the highest office has promised to deliver miracles for the people with little emphasis on the role the people themselves will have to play for those economic miracles to happen. This in turn shaped the relation between the people and those who lead them. The real corruption on the continent today is not that public officials are looting the public treasury, the real corruption is in the meaning of the word citizen and the responsibility it entails.
The more I read about Nigeria’s history since 1960, the harder it is to move past the civil war. It is both the most tragic period of our nation’s history and its proudest. Proudest, not because of the side that won, but because whatever side Nigerians were on in that war, they knew what they were fighting for. That Nigeria was a country of a people for whom the promise of the future is worth paying the ultimate price for today. Tragic because, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, it was a fraternal war, because it was conducted within a common political unit and because both warring sides at the same time absolutely affirm and absolutely deny this common unit.
Nigeria survived this difficult episode of its history. But a few years after the civil war, our country lost its way. To get a sense of just how bad the situation we are in today is, it may help to know that virtually all the key policies implemented by the Administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu were recommended to Nigeria in the early ‘80s. Following the coup of 1983, the military tried to implement its version of the recommended policies. Perhaps no better way to summarise the raison given for the coup than the coup broadcast of 31 December 1983:
“I am referring to the harsh intolerable conditions under which we are now living. Our economy has been hopelessly mismanaged. We have become a debtor and beggar nation. There is inadequacy of food at reasonable prices for our people who are now fed up with endless announcements of importation of foodstuffs. Health services are in a shamble as our hospitals are reduced to mere consulting clinics, without drugs, water, and equipment. Our educational system is deteriorating at an alarming rate. Unemployment figures, including the graduates have reached embarrassing and unacceptable proportions, in some states, workers are being owed salary arrears of eight to twelve months.”
Four years later, the results of the military intervention and its subsequent reforms to solve those well identified problems were, as the Half-Yearly Economic Review of July-December 1988, published in February 1989 by the Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria (MAN) described them: “a level of inflation which the country has not experienced in the recent past. The result of excessive public sector borrowing, and the precipitous decline of the Naira has worsened the plight of the people, leaving in its trail woes of pain and hardship, as the cost of living goes sky-high, living standards have consequently fallen to an abjectly low level’’. If 2024 looks a lot like the 1980s, it is because, to quote Franklin Pierce Adams, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
That this country is dealing with similar problems 40 years later should cause all of us to rethink our role in this drama. We are in this situation not because past and current Nigerian leaders are all bad people. In fact, and this may sound counterintuitive, the problem of this nation is because we have had too many good-hearted, people pleasing leaders. Perhaps if the 8 billion dollars spent on the three steel mills in the 1980s have kickstarted the industrialisation of this nation’s economy, the story we now tell may be different. Those who led us before are in most cases decent people who truly meant well for the nation. The problem is that in governance when the heart overrides the head, economic disasters ensue.
So how did we get here?
When I tell people around me that our current economic conditions are the envy of the citizens of most countries around us, that our fuel even with the removal of subsidy is still by far the cheapest in the region, that we underpay for power, and that the second lowest value added tax in the region is around 15% ( we pay 7.5%), that even with the inflation at almost 35%, it is still considerably cheaper to live in Nigeria than anywhere around us, they found all this hard to believe. Those who care to offer a counter argument say something along this line: even if life is hard elsewhere, we are the leading oil producing country in Africa. Look at the lifestyle of our politicians, clearly this nation is rich. All we are asking is a bigger share of the pie.
This by the way is essentially what the Nigerian Labour Congress is saying by demanding 600,000 naira as minimum wage. Of course, such demand makes sense only if you believe your country is rich, and if you do not have to answer the following simple but important questions:
- How much would that amount to in terms of government spending?
- What would a 600,000-naira minimum wage mean in terms of pay increase for those above minimum wage who currently are not earning 200,000 naira?
- What impact would that have in the already high inflation rate in the Country?
The same thinking is behind the idea that the government should have put in place palliative measures before the removal of subsidy when the sole purpose of removing fuel subsidy in the first place is to communicate that the government lacks the financial capacity for it. Palliative is a subsidy with another name.
To understand the impact of this way of thinking on our nation’s development, one just needs to spend some time reading World Bank reports on Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s. This nation used to be compared to Indonesia. In 1980, Nigeria GDP was estimated at 64.2 billion dollars. In the same year Indonesia’s GDP was about 73.48 billion dollars. Today, Nigerian GDP has dropped to below 400 billion dollars. Within that same time frame, Indonesia has grown into a 5 trillion dollar economy. Our misery is self-inflicted. And blaming politicians is not thick enough to mask our collective responsibility. In describing lavish government spending of social programmes infested by criminality like our fuel subsidy, Ronald Regan said: “many of these programmes may have come from a good heart, but not all have come from a clear head. We can be compassionate about human needs without being complacent about budget extravagance.’’ Nigerians do not need government handouts. They need a hand to stand on their feet. And this requires mobilising resources to fund education, health and unlock the nation’s growth potential. This is what the current administration is all about.
NEXT WEEK
Part two: Unlocking the Nigerian growth potential.
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