Fifty years after Professor Ayandele’s scathing critique of Nigeria’s “deluded hybrids” – the Western-educated elite who abandoned indigenous values without fully embracing modernity – his diagnosis remains painfully relevant. As Nigeria struggles with persistent inequality, ethnic tensions, and governance failures, we might wonder: Is elite capture an inevitable post-colonial condition, or can nations transcend their colonial inheritance?
The answer lies in examining those rare post-colonial societies that have successfully navigated the treacherous waters from independence to inclusive democracy. Their journeys offer not just hope but practical roadmaps for Nigeria’s possible transformation.
Consider Botswana, a diamond-rich nation that could have easily fallen prey to the resource curse that has long afflicted Nigeria. When Seretse Khama, Oxford-educated and heir to the Bamangwato chieftaincy, became president at independence in 1966, he faced choices similar to Nigeria’s founding fathers.
Yet, unlike our “windsowers” who reaped, or want to reap without sowing, Khama deliberately integrated traditional Tswana governance structures with modern institutions. The Kgotla, a traditional community forum, became incorporated into local governance, creating cultural continuity rather than the “cultural schizophrenia” Ayandele identified in Nigeria’s elite.
Botswana’s approach to resource management stands in stark contrast to Nigeria’s oil sector, where wealth flows primarily to connected elites. The establishment of the Pula Fund in 1994 ensured diamond revenues would benefit future generations through investments in education and healthcare.
While Nigeria’s oil wealth has created spectacular inequality, Botswana achieved universal primary education and dramatically reduced poverty. The difference wasn’t geological luck but institutional design – precisely what Ayandele prescribed for Nigeria’s development.
Across the Indian Ocean, Mauritius offers another instructive contrast. At independence in 1968, this small island nation faced seemingly insurmountable challenges: a sugar monoculture economy, deep ethnic divisions between Indo-Mauritians, Creoles, Franco-Mauritians, and Sino-Mauritians, and limited natural resources.
Nigeria’s diversity pales in comparison, yet Mauritius forged national unity where Nigeria found division. The secret lay in elite compromise. Mauritius’s post-independence leaders, including Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, negotiated power-sharing arrangements that guaranteed minority representation.
The Best Loser System ensured parliamentary seats for underrepresented ethnic groups, creating incentives for cross-ethnic cooperation rather than the winner-takes-all ethnic mobilization that has characterised Nigerian politics since the First Republic. When elites must build diverse coalitions to govern, the extractive politics Ayandele condemned becomes more difficult to sustain.
Perhaps most relevant to Nigeria’s petro-dependency is how Mauritius diversified from sugar dependency to a service economy through strategic investment in education and export zones. While Nigeria’s elite have talked about diversification for decades while deepening oil dependence, Mauritius’s leadership actually executed the difficult transition, creating a broad-based prosperity that reduced both poverty and inequality.
The East Asian miracle, particularly South Korea’s transformation from Japanese colonialism to democratic industrialisation, offers even more dramatic lessons. Under Park Chung-hee, Western-educated technocrats were directed toward national development rather than personal enrichment.
The Economic Planning Board recruited top graduates regardless of family background, creating a meritocratic counterweight to traditional elites. This reorientation of elite ambitions toward national development rather than personal accumulation represents exactly the transformation Ayandele envisioned for Nigeria’s educated class.
South Korea’s education revolution particularly challenges Nigeria’s credential-focused system. Rather than producing graduates with impressive certificates but limited skills, South Korea reformed education to emphasize technical capabilities and innovation. The vocational high school system established in the 1970s trained industrial workers while universities focused on engineering and applied sciences.
Nigeria’s universities, by contrast, continue producing graduates ill-equipped for available jobs, with staggering unemployment among degree holders – a modern manifestation of the “deluded hybrids” phenomenon Ayandele identified.
Even more radical was Costa Rica’s path. Following a brief civil war, President José Figueres Ferrer made the extraordinary decision to abolish the military entirely in 1949, removing a traditional tool of elite control. The nation constitutional redirected military spending to fund education and healthcare.
This singular act has created Latin America’s most stable democracy and highest-performing education system. Nigeria’s defence budget continues to grow every year with questionable security returns; but Costa Rica investment in human development has achieved universal literacy and healthcare coverage.
Unlike Nigeria’s urban bias, Costa Rica invested heavily in rural infrastructure and land reform. The Institute for Agrarian Development distributed 1.3 million hectares to small farmers, creating a rural middle class with a stake in democratic stability. This approach to inclusive development stands in stark contrast to Nigeria’s neglect of rural areas, where poverty rates remain dramatically higher than in urban centres despite agriculture employing the majority of Nigerians.
What unites these diverse success stories is a fundamental reimagining of the elite’s relationship with society. In each case, post-colonial elites eventually accepted constraints on their power, invested in broad-based development rather than narrow extraction, and built institutions that outlasted individual leaders.
The transformation wasn’t immediate or perfect – South Korea endured military dictatorship before democratisation, and Mauritius struggled with ethnic tensions – but the trajectory bent toward inclusion rather than extraction.
For Nigeria to escape Ayandele’s prophetic critique, we need more than new faces in old positions. We need constitutional engineering that creates incentives for cross-ethnic cooperation, resource management systems that transparently benefit all citizens, educational reforms that balance technical skills with cultural confidence and welfare programmes that create shared ownership in the Nigerian project.
The path remains challenging, but these case studies prove that colonial legacies are not destiny. Botswana, Mauritius, South Korea, and Costa Rica all faced versions of the elite capture problem that Ayandele diagnosed in Nigeria. Their success came not from extraordinary resources or favourable geography, but from institutional innovations that transformed elite incentives and behaviour.
Fifty years after Ayandele’s indictment, Nigeria’s educated elite have an opportunity to prove him wrong – not by dismissing his critique, but by finally embodying the “New Nigerians” he called for: leaders who synthesize global knowledge with local wisdom, who build rather than extract, and who measure success by national development rather than personal accumulation. The examples of successful transitions show this transformation is possible. The question remains whether Nigeria’s elite will heed these lessons or continue reaping the whirlwind that Ayandele so presciently foresaw.
Dr. Richard Ikiebe is a scholar specialising in Contemporary Media Leadership and History. With extensive experience as a media practitioner across both public and private sectors, he teaches as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos. Beyond academia, he holds other leadership positions, including President of iNSDEC, Chairman of the BusinessDay Board of Directors, and Co-convener of the YSoT.
