Nigeria is blessed with plenty in resources: large acres of uncultivated of farmland, mineral reserves, water resources, and a massive population potentially capable of putting all of these to use for the wellbeing of our people. For several reasons, however, this desirable end is not to be. Why?
I mention two reasons only to dismiss them. One, for convenience, we blame our plight on anyone but ourselves. Here, colonial exploitation is our whipping child. But while our experience of colonial exploitation is real, after 59 years, shouldn’t we wake up to our responsibility and deal with neocolonial collaborators in our midst?
Two, some have suggested that we missed the road early on because when we became a nation, we did not opt for an indigenous political system unique to us. I respectfully beg to differ. We were a nation in name only when we started the journey of independence. Therefore, there couldn’t have been an agreement on an “indigenous” political system.
Let us then focus on what the real issues are. First, there is ample evidence on the importance of human talents in the development of other resources for the benefit of humankind. Our founding fathers recognized this and prioritized education. Therefore, in fairness to them, they started well and placed us in the path of progress. However, we, or more precisely, the uniformed ones among us, got rid of them and their emphasis on education.
It was not for lack of money that we relegated the education of our children to the back burner. It was a deliberate policy of preventing them from actualizing their God-given potentials. The uniformed ones prioritized conspicuous consumption and white elephant projects. Yet ancestral wisdom is clear on this matter. The children you don’t train will rubbish your investment in the projects that you prioritize. So it is that from bars on bridges to cables on electric poles and louvres on uncompleted low-cost houses, those we failed to train prioritized the vandalization of our pet projects to make ends meet.
Even after the uniformed ones were forced to retreat, they ensured that they handed over only to those who were not going to disrupt the apple-cart. With a meaningless jargon of qualitative education, they stagnated the forward movement of higher education for several decades. The most atrocity was committed during the regime of General Babangida with a deliberate policy of divide and conquer which ended up hurting every section of the country. Since then, it has been a downward spiral to the abyss in which we now find ourselves.
Second, with such a huge deficit in the development of human resources, we are not able to manipulate the abundance of nature for our benefit. Therefore, in the oil sector, we depend on multinationals with no interest in our wellbeing. And we complain that they steal our oil? Our refineries are moribund for lack of maintenance because that is not a culture that we train ourselves to cultivate.
Third, just as we abandoned education, we encouraged a contract-based economy and welcomed the proliferation of emergency contractors, apology to the late music icon, I.K. Dairo. The result was the rural-urban migration. Agricultural settlements were deserted and with it, productivity of agricultural products suffered irreparably.
Fifth, the result of the foregoing is our realization that, without adequate human resources to manipulate nature, our natural resources, though plentiful, are useless. For the elite or run-of-the-mill egoistic maniac, this reality is a signal for greed to take over. In the circumstance, many unable to compete successfully in the race are left behind despondent and resentful. The result is our national nightmare. Think gang, cult, human trafficking, armed robbery, and kidnapping. It didn’t start yesterday. And without a drastic national approach to dealing with the root cause, it will not stop.
Greed is not alien to human nature. As Thomas Hobbes theorized, it is natural human reaction in the face of scarcity. You would like to grab more and more in case there is no more. So would others. And this must lead to some unwholesome situation with many motivated by greed running into one another, causing violent conflicts, Hobbes’s war of all against all.
Note, however, that such a conflict would, for Hobbes, occur in a state of nature, where there is no political authority to moderate interactions among human beings. That this same conflict is occurring between the boundaries of our nation is an unfortunate evidence of our proximity to the state of nature even after 59 years of independence
What is the real issue that deserves attention? Is it scarcity of resources, greed, or failure of political authority? To my mind, it is all three combined in various degrees.
First, our scarcity is man-made. Until a few years ago, we had carried on as if our newly-found oil wealth was inexhaustible. We fought a civil war without borrowing, thanks to the black gold. Even when it was made clear to us in the early 1980s that oil wealth was susceptible to the vagaries of the global market, we weren’t deterred from ostentatious living or from dependence on this single product for all our national development goals.
In fairness to the Buhari administration, therefore, whatever its challenges in other areas, we must applaud its recognition of the need to take economic diversification seriously with investments in agriculture and mining especially. With increased output in agriculture, we can at least expect to feed ourselves and reduce our expenditure on food importation. But we must go beyond this least common denominator. We must worry about the development of human talents capable of transforming our increased agricultural output into the beginnings of an agro-industrial revolution. Education is key to this and must be taken seriously.
Second, greed is certainly a disproportionate part of the problem, and it starts at the top with the political class. What have unfortunately downplayed the influence of the conduct of those in positions of authority on those below them. Leaders must lead by example. In the First Republic, political office holders served in part-time capacity. Those were still the most productive times in our political experience when citizens felt the impact of government positively on their lives. And those were still the most peaceful times of our national history. With access to education for anyone who desired it, and availability of jobs for those who took advantage of educational opportunities, greed was reduced to its barest minimum.
Now, however, we have a complete reversal of the values that we started out with. The political class leads in the matter of vicious greed even when resources are desperately scarce. Many commentators, including this columnist, have berated the humongous emoluments cornered by current political office holders. Is there a rational and moral justification for a Nigerian Senator to earn more than a United States Senator? Or a state governor with no internally generated revenue to earn more than his U.S. counterpart?
As CNN reported in 2016, the governor of the State of Maine, Mr. Paul LePage was the lowest paid governor in the US. His wife, Mrs. Ann LePage decided to take up a waitressing job at a local restaurant to supplement her husband’s $70,000 annual salary. Is Nigeria more economically developed and more financially sound than the US? But beside the huge salary, our chief executives have access to other perquisites of office including security vote for which they are not accountable. The youth envy this and end up as yahoo boys, kidnappers, and armed robbers.
Finally, then, an effective political authority, mindful of our desperate situation, will map out a strategy to tackle our many challenges, not least of which is greed in high places. Surely, greed and corruption are not limited to the corridors of political power. However, corruption radiates from politics to other sectors. Corruption in high places motivates corruption in low places. Those least advantaged to benefit from corruption see themselves as unlucky. They resort to what they can control, namely, violence against their fellow citizens.
Without effective political authority and political institutions that are incorruptible, the tomorrow of our nation is uncertain
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