Is Nigeria on a cusp or precipice? Time will tell. However, in the short run there is general agreement that whoever wins the next election will have major course corrections to make. Nigeria’s problems are aptly graphically illustrated like phalanx of unfriendly alien spaceships so numerous they have blotted out the sun and darkened the sky and threatening the immediate human existence.
We are on a cusp because really and truly every election is an opportunity to propagate positive change or reject negative change. In more advanced societies things may not be as black or as white but in our current situation they are this bleak. A precipice because we as a nation have so many immediate challenges threatening our existence. From the more direct radical extremism in the North-East and also in the South-South to our continued reliance on natural resources as our primary source of revenue, the country totters on the brink and a misstep may send us over the edge.
If there is any major lesson to be learnt in the area of national development, it’s the fact that the fewer natural resources a country has, the better off it is. Nigeria should and must stop touting natural reserves as developmental indices; e.g., Enugu has coal or Plateau has bauxite, etc. That worldview is defunct and bankrupt. Our policies should rather be directed towards being able to proclaim in the very near future: ‘Jigawa has a 70 percent internet penetration rate’ or ‘Lagos has 92 percent secondary level education rate’. Countries with no natural resources dig deep and work very hard to discover the innovativeness, creativity, energy and entrepreneurship of their women and men. Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Coastal China are evidence of this fact, particularly the first three which are especially remarkable. Germany and Japan came from essentially having their core infrastructure destroyed after WWII to be among the top five world economies, and Taiwan, a non-arable rocky land with high typhoon incidence yet has one of the top five foreign exchange reserves in the world (top three at a certain point within the past decade). All these nations made such massive achievements with near-zero reliance on natural resources.
To borrow a leaf from the recent ‘The Economist’ article on the upcoming elections, “Sometimes there are no good options”, which is sad given a country which can boast of originating 1 in every 43 people on the planet. The incumbent has overseen rampant corruption (which Nigerians seem to be finally getting tired of), an aggressive jihadist insurgency (in which he exhibited gross incompetence), and an expansion to intractable levels of our perennial ills (the most obvious which is corruption). As a country which seems to have a Brobdingnagian deposits of patience, the inept leadership under President Jonathan and his gaffes seem to have sent his deposit of goodwill among Nigerians on a sharp downward spiral. Among these are waiting 10 days to acknowledge the disappearance of about 250 innocent girls (seeming to only act after international condemnation); waiting for two weeks to speak about a Boko Haram attack in his country estimated to have killed thousands not to mention close to 18,000 compatriots over the past 6 years (not mentioning the millions internally displaced) but yet being quick to offer Charlie Hebdo condolences to France over the death of 17 people; and the sack of arguably one of the most effective and outspoken central bank governors in Africa over his public inquiry into “missing” national funds. Lamido Sanusi’s sack subsequently resulted in an increase in Nigeria’s Sovereign Investment Risk Premium.
Buhari, on the other hand, has been reportedly linked with making inflammatory utterances, having a very poor human rights record from his stint as a military dictator, responsible for toppling a democratically elected president (but has been seeking for the past decade to take advantage of the same system), perceived to be associated with radical Islam and hasn’t exhibited a keen understanding of the socio-economic imperatives needed to take Africa’s largest economy from the precipice of an underdeveloped mono-product economy to a stable economy in tune with the demands of 21st century market economics (aside being staunchly anti-corruption). But the anti-corruption might just be enough to guarantee change in a country were corruption has affected every sphere of human existence and development like a vicious malignant cancer. Given a choice, most Nigerians would prefer to slaughter corruption on the altar of poor human rights. Whoever becomes the next president would need to recommit to ridding the country of vested economic and political interests and changing the prevalent culture.
Our shared progress as a nation would depend to a large extent on the degree to which we internalize the positive values of tenacity, patience, hard work and sincerity. We need to understand that the standard of living of a nation is related to the average value add of its workforce which is related to the average educational level of the same workforce. A decline in the nation’s educational level relative to the competition (which in today’s economics is the rest of the world) invariably means a decline in the standard of living. Social activism will also play a major role in helping the Nigerian citizen finally understand that their greatest power is their right to vote, and to vote not out of pressure or material benefits but a free vote, after proper introspection. To understand that every vote cast for a candidate supports a whole different set of values whose effects will be felt for years to come.
The paradox of the fast-paced 21st century is that we have to run faster to stay in the same place. This invariably means that countries which aren’t even ‘running’ are in serious danger of retrogressing at a faster pace. The simple truth is that if we want to ensure we compete with the India, China, Malaysia, Germany, Russia and the USA in the next fifty years, then the government’s commitment to ensuring every Nigerian child gets a thorough world-class secondary education will go farther than promising good roads and affordable housing. That, in my view, is putting the cart before the horse. We have been stuck in the rut of big talking and small thinking, coming up with vision 20:2020 when we’re are yet to get the basics of fundamental education and infrastructure right. We need to think big but act small by focusing on the basics. Nigeria might make more progress if the future president sets a four-year plan of tackling just one problem rather than have a bucket list of 10 items and end up not achieving any and oftentimes creating more before the tenure runs out.
NZE IBEKWE-UCHE
