Welcome. Lafia. E kaabo. Nno.
Next year, on the 1st of October, 2010, the Federal Republic of Nigeria will mark fifty years since the end of British imperial rule. And an even bigger anniversary is on the horizon, less than five years away. On the 1st of January, 2014, it will be a hundred years since the 1914 Amalgamation created “NIGERIA”.
With two big anniversaries coming back-to-back (so to speak) the people of Nigeria should be taking stock, thinking about where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going.
I love Nigeria. I love our many cultures and nationalities, our people and our geography. Diversity is a beautiful thing, even if we don’t realize it yet. Reject the popular pessimism, and the mythologized view of “the good old days”, a perfect past that never was. Do not deny that Nigeria has made progress, and is a better place today than it was in the colonial and pre-colonial periods.
But has our progress has been slower, shallower, narrower, less rooted, and smaller scale than could have been achieved with a different set of decisions and actions? If it has, what decisions and actions should we take going forward to accelerate our development?
Take the lasting national economic emergency that is the electric power generation.
My hometown did not have electricity in 1960. No one complained or was “angry” about it back then; our expectations of life were different in those days. After more than thirty years, and with a lot of self-help (e.g. buying a transformer with community contributions since the government and NEPA claimed to lack funds), the town was at last connected to the national grid. As you know, the grid does not have enough juice to power Lagos, much less all of Nigeria.
This is the Nigerian conundrum.
On the one hand, there is clear progress; one town is many steps closer to the goal of electricity than it was in the so-called “good old days”. Nevertheless, considering the critical role of power and energy in a modern economy, is this really the best we could have done after fifty years?
Let me try to illustrate how far we are from where we need to be. With a third of Nigeria’s population, and per capita income (reflecting economic activity) five times higher than ours, 45,000MW of supply is insufficient to free South Africa from sporadic blackouts. I offer a layman’s suggestion that 150,000MW will be insufficient for Nigeria to fully function at the height of its economic possibilities. It is a travesty that Nigeria produces only 4,000MW from a pathetically insufficient installed capacity of 10,000MW.
We are so far behind, it is not funny.
And fifty years is sufficient for rapid progress and development.
The world’s wealthiest countries completed industrial revolutions and socio-economic transformations in less than half a century. Nigeria has had the benefit of 20th and 21st century knowledge, where some countries worked with no more than 19th century information and technology. The late Deng Xiaopping opened up the Chinese economy 30 years ago, and rapid change began 20 years ago. Do not use China’s size as an excuse; read scholarly and non-scholarly works comparing African countries (e.g. Ghana) and Asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) that were on economic par fifty years ago. And please, don’t point to the countries that have done worse than us; such regressive thinking is why we officially pride ourselves on being the “Giant” of the world’s poorest and politico-economically weakest continent. And we are not even that: South Africa has a bigger economy, Cameroun more success in football, Botswana better governed, Benin Republic more democratic, and Egypt more geo-strategically relevant.
Ninety-five years ago, the British amalgamated us into a single political entity. They could do it because they had the power to do so and the will to exercise that power thus. The experience of subjugation should have taught us that being scientifically, technologically, militarily, economically, and politically weaker than other nations exposes us to their exercise of raw power. Rapid progress after 1960 should have been our target, not six years of political strife followed by 30 months of war.
Nigerians complain and criticize a lot, and I am glad we do. One reason we lagged in past historic epochs was our sense of contentment with what we had. In the “good old days”, we did not expect better, and did not demand better. Nowadays we want more, and we are frustrated that we are not getting it.
This is good. But are we demanding the right things?
Over the last fifty years, we have invested a lot of energy doing things that had little or no relevance to what we need to move our federal union forward.
In the latter half of the 1960s, Nigeria mobilized two armies that collectively fielded perhaps half-a-million soldiers (or more) over the course the Civil War. Combining these two armies and deploying them, suitably equipped and trained, against the Apartheid war machine in 1967 would have been the proportional equivalent of attacking Nigeria in 2009 with an army of 28 million soldiers. The Apartheid regime ostensibly represent 2.26 million South Africans of European descent in 1967 – and the near-20 million black South Africans in 1967 would proportionally translate to a 1.4 billion-person fifth column in 2009’s Nigeria. It was a numbers game they could not have won, given equal technology and training.
Another example. Think what good over 500 thousand soldiers could have done in the Congo-Kinshasa in the 1960s. The armies of Mobutu and Moise Tshombe together numbered far fewer. In this alternate universe, wealthier versions of Nigeria and DR-Congo could have been huge trading partners by now, driving trade and wealth creation across West and Central Africa. In either case, South Africa or Congo-Kinshasa, the casualties would likely have been fewer than the number of citizens Nigeria lost to major and minor violence between 1960 and 1970.
I am not advocating war. I hate war. But I want you to realize Nigeria has always had the resources to do the vital things we need to do to create a platform for true growth and development. Nothing has been out of our reach, its just we have not bothered to reach for them. For example, it is hard to be a force for citizen democracy in Congo-Kinshasa when we were quite incapable of it at home in Nigeria.
It could all have been different. Nothing was written in stone. If our outcomes have not been optimal, blame our choices, decisions and actions. In fact let us admit that the constant distinction we like to make between “military” rule and “civilian” rule is an excuse, an obfuscation designed to free we the people from responsibility. The “military” and “civilian” (who are often the same people, or share the same basic “ideology” if you can call it that) are both outgrowths of Nigerian society, reflecting our vices and exploiting our self-inflicted divisions. Today, some of us very conveniently heap the blame for our frustrations on current President Umaru Yar’Adua. Leave the man alone! He is not the one who created the system. We have changed presidents more frequently than most countries in Africa or Asia; when will we realize that we have to change the system if we want different outcomes?
We have to elevate the discourse. We are arguing about the wrong things. In fact, Nigerian politics has been a long, loud, loquacious, sometimes violent argument about NOTHING.
Think about it. In all of the malarkey before, during, and after the discredited 2007 general elections, do you recall any candidate saying anything that convinced you he had a plan to address the electricity crisis?
The current socio-political environment will not produce a solution to communal violence or electricity or anything else in the near or distant future. With the fiftieth anniversary of Independence is upon us, and the centennial of Amalgamation just behind it, let us slow down and take the time to think. Think deeply. Then we must decide. And after we decide, we must do, and do with all of our collective might.
Join me. Let’s ponder our past, consider our present, and argue (yes argue) about how to chart a stronger future.
I don’t mind if you disagree with me. In disagreeing you will probably make more sense than anything in our current political discourse. Indeed, as much as I am a supporter of Nigerian unity, I recognize that if Nigeria was a truly democratic place, there would be political parties (and concomitant voters) doing what the SNP is doing in Scotland, or what the Parti/Bloc Quebecois is doing in Canada. So I want to hear from you, from all of you.
You will certainly hear from me. I intend to talk about anything and everything related to the future of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, from the constitutional review process to the national football teams.
Did I mention there is a World Cup next year?
Welcome to my blog. I am new at this, and it will probably take me a couple of weeks to work out the kinks. Stay tuned, the debate is just beginning.
Oh, and I’ll try to keep my posts to two pages and under. It is hard to do when dealing with complicated issues, but I’ll give it my best shot.
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