Argentine, turned Cuban, revolutionary, Che Guevara, observes that “a large proportion of the so-called developing nations (including Nigeria, you may want to add), are in total stagnation, and in some of them (condescendingly described as emerging economies today), the rate of economic growth is lower than that of population increase.” That smacks of the Malthusian rhetoric of arithmetic and geometric proportions of growth of resources and their users respectively.
Nigeria’s former Minister of Agriculture, and now President of Africa Development Bank Group, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, argues that “People must be at the heart of development.” At the risk of over-flogging the issue, one must agree with Louis D. Brandeis, Associate Judge of America’s Supreme Court, that “The most important political office (in a country) is that of the private citizen.”
Providing welfare of that individual citizen is the irreducible minimum purpose of governance. This agrees with the thoughts of Obafemi Awolowo, who argues that man, the initiator, is also the beneficiary of his benevolent actions. Senate Majority Leader Godswill Akpabio suggests that government must “seek ways that would enable the ordinary citizen to feel (its) impact in their lives.”
Governance, ab initio, must be about catering to the physical, social, and spiritual welfare of the individual Nigerian, regardless of ethnic, linguistic, social, educational, and religious background. The individual must be the focus of the current plan from the poverty that Musician Majek Fashek says is Nigeria’s main problem.
But you will be hard put to care for the individual in a political system weighted in favour of some, and against others. Yet, Uchenna Madu, factional leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Survival of the Sovereign State of Biafra, misses it a little bit with his declaration that “Our conviction is that Nigeria is not accommodating every integral ethnic nationality.”
Also, the Niger Delta Avengers, who wants a referendum that will give leave to those who want out of the Nigerian state, misses it. The group should both be talking about the greatest good of the greatest number of individual Nigerian citizens. It is not about ethnic groups, but of the individual, stupid!
In 2004, America’s Central Intelligence Agency predicted that Nigeria would unravel in 2015! The CIA’s local seconders are separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (the BAIFREXIT lobby) and MASSOB; ethnic militia Oodua People’s Congress, Niger Delta Avengers, and the Red Scorpion; and terrorist Boko Haram insurgents. The Arewa Consultative Forum, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, and Afenifere all complain their ethnic groups are marginalised.
Walter Rodney observes that the “peculiarities in the superstructure of any given society have a marked impact on (its) rate of development.” He adds: “It is indisputable that… personal development (of individual citizens) is very much tied with the state of the society…”
The failure of the Nigerian state to guarantee opportunities for optimal exploitation of its material and social resources has compelled many to seek greener pastures elsewhere. The resultant brain and brawn drains have led many to adopt citizenship of other nations. The name of Onitsha-born sprinter, Francis Obikwelu, who became a citizen of Portugal in 2001 readily comes to mind.
By deriving the word, “economics,” from two Greek words, “oikos,” for house, and “nomos,” for custom or law, that both mean “rules of the house,” or politics, when combined, scholars must have recognised the importance of sorting political matters before the economics. You could also say that economics and politics are the same side of a coin.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggests that “Each of us (the individual) places in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will.” The aggregate will of the people, transformed into sovereignty, is transferred to the state, the supreme, final, absolute, coercive power, by whose leave governments exercise power.
When the purpose of governance is agreed and settled in the interest of the individual, and the people have a common understanding of the purpose of government, then you can determine the political and economic route – democratic, republican, communist, socialist, free-market, or mixed economy, or whatever else – to be travelled to run the polity.
When this is also settled, the ability of the state to rationally allocate scarce economic resources is further enhanced. In other words, the economic fortune of all citizens is in the politics that binds all. The Yoruba put it in a more roundabout manner by saying that the aliment of Aboyade Esquire afflicts all worshipers of “oya” deity.
The Nigerian state must define in clear and certain terms, the national interest, and the road that will be travelled to actualise it. To achieve the American Dream that promises food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, car, television, freedom of choice, legitimate personal aspirations, and lately, access to the Internet, even at the bus stops, America took some steps.
One of such steps was in the National Security Council Memorandum 68 submitted by the Paul Nitze committee to President Harry Truman in 1950. The Memorandum, which set out to protect the Western Hemisphere (read American interest), used the Cold War as an excuse to justify increased military spending. The Memorandum also slipped in the argument that without military spending America’s economy would decline. Wow!
This rogue theory that economic progress was a function of military spending, aptly captured by the term, “military-industrial complex,” put America’s taxpayers’ money into research and development via a brazen collaboration between the Pentagon and the defence industry.
Uncle Sam still underwrites both the research expense and a profit margin of the defence industry, and, it surprisingly works to the benefit of all! To be sure, some American cynics, including linguist and unrepentant social critic, Noam Chomsky of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, snicker at the arrangement.
After the military perfects the use of the research, it returns the technology or product to the manufacturing sector of the economy. You probably don’t know that the Internet, computer, mobile telephone, and the Velcro nylon fabric, now in the hands of private business, were developed with public funding through America’s defence department.
It’s not so hard to discern the direction that Nigeria will likely go: The nation’s history and national character tend towards a democratic, republican, and federal structure. Marxism and Communism, felled by the fall of the Berlin Wall, are not quite in the Nigerian character, though Socialism is, to an extent.
The Federal Government will discharge responsibilities for external affairs, defence, internal security, central bank, currency, customs and excise, postal and telecommunications services. The states and the local governments will have statutory authority over residual matters, like housing, and health care. Education could be on the concurrent list.
But all tiers of government should jointly orchestrate the infrastructure requirements that will put the individual, and the corporate economic entities, in a position to exploit the nation’s agricultural, mineral, and human resources. Whether the infrastructure will be provided by private or public agencies, it must cater to the individual.
The Nigerian state must strengthen the legal system to guarantee justice and equity to all, and empower the individual to be the best that he can be. In short, empower the individual Nigerian citizen by unleashing his potential to always do good to himself and fellow Nigerians, and ensure that those who aspire to governance have this noble mind-set.
By Lekan Sote – [email protected] 08023290735.
