I have long wondered why high-ranking officials in government, quasi-governmental agencies and the private sector incessantly make public statements that are entirely at odds with observable reality. It is bad enough that government leaders do it, but anywhere you are in the world, you tend to expect politicians to lie to you. It is altogether more worrying when you read (for example) an extensive interview with one of the bosses of one of Nigeria's biggest major banks, and realizing the man was saying things that would cause a secondary school-level economics student to wonder how he got to be the boss of a major bank.
The interview in question was in 2003, a handful of years before the collapse in Nigerian banking assets, but the problem is bigger than that. Many years ago, when I was a secondary school student, a friend of mine whose uncle worked at the Rivers State-owned integrated agribusiness Risonpalm gave me the snapshot of the company's business plan; at the time, I was aghast, and years later I was not surprised to find Risonpalm had basically gone bankrupt (in the last 7 years or so, the Rivers State government has made moves to revive the firm; I visited the company on a school trip back in the day, and was monumentally impressed by the facilities, which made it all the more troubling to realize what the management were doing).
If you've read through the blog from the beginning, you will have noticed I frequently mention the paucity of information quality and quantity as a major stumbling block to the transformation, development and progress of the federal republic. Indeed, if Nigeria were to miraculously become substantively democratic overnight, we won't enjoy the full benefits, because the electorate would cast their votes based on what passes for conventional wisdom about Nigeria, when said conventional wisdom are either falsehoods with no relationship to the facts or guesses/estimates with no empirical foundations.
I do not always agree with Salisu Suleiman, a former blogger turned columnist for NEXT, but he is one of the best Nigerian writers/commentators on the scene today. Not just for the aesthetic quality of his prose, but also for the quality of the thinking behind what he writes, even when I disagree on the specifics of particular issues.
His latest FORENSIC FORCE column in NEXT speaks to the issue raised in the first paragraph of this post.
I don't want to diminish it in any way by paraphrasing it or even discussing it.
Just read it.
Understand that this is a serious problem.
Back in 1999, newly-inaugurated President Obasanjo more or less issued an presidential directive that ordered NEPA to fix the electricity problem in one year. At the time, I didn't understand how anyone in their right mind could think it was possible to do that in one year. But he was serious; in fact, one year later he reshuffled his cabinet in part because then-Minister of Mines and Power, the late Bola Ige, had mad no impact on the electricity situation (not that anyone could, not in one year).
That was bad. Nevertheless, Obasanjo was not and is not a PhD-holding, academic-journal-published university professor. Not that you need to be an expert to know it will take more than a year to fix electricity. What was frankly inexplicable was then-CBN Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, publicly backing the 3-year timetable to merge the currencies of 6 countries that were financially, fiscally, economically, politically and geographically dissimilar. The plan to create the West African Monetary Zone predated Soludo's tenure as CBN boss, but when he came into office he publicly expressed his support for what he surely knew was an unrealistic (dare I say silly) plan.
The proposed West African Monetary Zone was launched in 2000 and was supposed to be completed by 2003. When 2003 came, they pushed the deadline back to 2005. That came and went, and the deadline was pushed to 2009. Soludo was replaced as CBN boss by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi in 2009, but by then the deadline for WAMZ had been moved to first to January 2010 (the global economic downturn was blamed) and eventually to June, 2014, which is the current, just-as-unrealistic new deadline.
The problem with Obasanjo's 1999 electricity decree is different from the problem with Soludo's public support for something he had to know didn't make sense, and the problem with both of those instances is different from the problem Salisu Suleiman outlined in his Forensic Force essay .... but they all boil down to the same thing.
The public utterances of our public and private sector leaders are often at variance with empirical, observable fact. It would not matter so much if there were secret, sensible plans behind the scenes, plans they were hiding by publicly telling us nonsense ... but the reality (as outlined in Suleiman's column) is there are no real plans at all.
Indeed, the random, ad hoc, stochastic, ill-thought-out public utterances occur principally because the speakers do not actually have a plan to refer back to when required to speak publicly on issues. So they just make things up, usually saying whatever they think will come across as "wise", and generally drawing from (and then, in the event, helping to propagate) the same unfounded conventional "wisdom" upon which Nigerian citizens waste so much energy.
In this environment, we (as citizens and as a federal republic) end up expending vast amounts of energy going in no particular direction. Sometimes it is all motion and no movement.
Worst of all, things that were originally very good ideas end up either as failed projects or as projects that couldn't and didn't achieve their full potential because of the lack of planning, monitoring, execution, etc.
Soludo either didn't anticipate what would happen after the banking consolidation, and didn't notice it when it did happen in real-time ... or maybe he noticed it, but was too tied-down by political interference, political affiliations and political debts to do anything about it. As it stands, even as the bubble grew, Soludo publicly said nothing was wrong. And even as the bubble bust, Soludo still insisted in public that nothing was fundamentally wrong.
Unfortunately, we the people never truly know what is going on ... until whatever it is has already happened and there is nothing we can do about it. And even then, we end up arguing with ourselves over what really caused it to happen, a battlefield of dozens, hundreds of baseless arguments warring without quarter or conclusion. The weird thing is, we all seem to think the outcome was the result of a "plan" even though there clearly was no such thing. It is why we are such conspiracy theorists; it is why we find it easy to believe 20 million members of a "rival" ethnic group somehow got together to "plan" the doom of our own ethnic group.
For every major incident in our recent and distant history, the fact is nobody knows what really happened or why things happened the way they did. Nobody will admit they don't know what happened or why.
I guess I digressed ....
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