Daily Independent Online.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004.
Nigeria: Dev. imperatives and critical success factors
By C. Don Adinuba
By some curious coincidence, three Nigerian public
officers have just attained 50 years. They are the Finance Minister, Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala; Governor Sam Egwu of Ebonyi State, and the Director General of
the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Dora
Akunyili. If their 50th birthday is marked in any way in the public domain, the
true significance lies not so much in their attainment of the proverbial Golden
Age as in what each person represents in Nigerian public life: a fine
combination of character and good education. Deep knowledge and enlightened
values are two critical elements most needed by the leadership in Nigeria; and
their absence has over the decades been most responsible for Nigeria’s
development morass.
As early as 1971 when Obafemi Awolowo published a
book on the direction Nigeria should take, he recognised the possession of
“mental magnitude” by the leadership as one of the critical success
factors to liberate nation from the shackles of acute underdevelopment which
creates and deepens mass disaffection, hunger, instability, hostility,
ignorance, illiteracy, homelessness, malnutrition and other old sorrows of
history—historical tragedies which seem to have found a permanent home in
the Third World. In his magnum opus, The End of History and The Last Man, Francis Fukuyama describes
societies living in environments marked by these tragedies as being “in
the primitive age of mankind”.
Awolowo’s prescription that the leadership
possesses mental magnitude as a major antidote to Nigeria’s debilitating
underdevelopment disease is apt. Countries which not long ago shared the status
of very poor nations with us but have in the last few decades made prodigious
progress have been led at critical times by men with mental magnitude, that is,
high intelligence quotient. Take Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore who in 1965 began
the historic and monumental process of lifting his very impoverished and tiny
country from the abyss of gross underdevelopment to the dizzy heights of a
First World nation. Singapore was in 1965 kicked out of the Malaysian
federation because it was considered an economic parasite in the union. A
nation of two million people 39 years ago, Singapore is not bigger than Lagos
Metropolis; it is actually like a dot on the world map. Its level of development
by 1965 was not higher than that of Nigeria’s Bayelsa State. While
Bayelsa has oil and gas, Singapore has no mineral deposit. In fact, nature is
so unfair to Singapore that the water, which its people consume, is imported
from neighbouring Malaysia.
So, how did Singapore become within a generation a
worldwide model in manufacturing, information technology, environmental
integrity, social discipline, cultural pluralism, aviation development, port
management and the entire gamut of prosperity? The answer is the uncanny
leadership provided by Lee Yuan Yew, the founding prime minister who holds a
double first class degree in Law of
the Cambridge University and whose lawyer wife also made a first class
at Cambridge. Their first son, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister, earned a
stunning first class in Mathematics at Cambridge. Their other children are also
possessed of dazzling brilliance.
The leaders of Chile, Uganda, South Korea, China,
Malaysia, etc, who turned around the fortunes of their countries are engaging
minds. Mahathir Mohammed, Malaysian Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003, was an
outstanding student at the medical school of the National University of
Malaysia, then in Singapore. Augusto Pinochet, the right wing army general who
came to power via a coup d’ etat in 1973 in Chile, is a brilliant
geophysicist who went to the University of Chicago School of Economics to
recruit whiz kids trained by Milton Friedman, the eminently influential Nobel
laureate. Chile is today the third largest economy in South America, after
Brazil and Argentina.
Yoweri Museveni grabbed power in Uganda 18 years ago
through a bush war. He has made his landlocked country, ruined by Idi Amin and
other awful rulers, a model in economic structural adjustment. He was an
outstanding student of the humanities at the Tanzanian University in Dar es
Salaam. Park who changed South Korea’s fortunes after coming to power via
a coup d’etat in 1961 did not have a string of university diplomas, but
he was a man of high thinking and imaginative ideas. Park was able to chart the
direction, which gloriously altered Korea’s history through brilliant
ideas, policies and practical steps. Jerry Rawlings who returned to power in
Ghana in a military coup d’etat in 1981 may not also possess countless
academic certificates. But he is well spoken and well read, at home discussing
stimulating books like The Pedagogy of The Oppressed by Freira, the provocative
Brazilian development economist who was a renowned research fellow at Harvard.
Rawlings brought to an end the kalabule tradition in Ghana perpetrated and
perfected by Afrifa, Achampong, Akufo and, to some extent, Liman. He thus set
Ghana on the path to discipline and prosperity.
By the time you take a deep and dispassionate look at
the intellectual abilities of each Nigerian ruler right from independence and
compare them with those of the transforming leaders we have cited in Africa,
Asia and South America, you can begin to understand why Nigeria, in spite of
the superabundance of natural and human resources, is in development morass, or
why, as Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah would say, “we are so
blest”. Could our rulers have possibly given what they never possessed in
the first place? Awolowo popularised a scriptural truism when he stated,
“only the deep can call to the deep”.
Still, no one is under the illusion that the
possession of high intelligence quotient by the leadership is all a society
needs to leapfrog or make appreciable progress within a short period. Among
other critical factors, there is the question of character. A brilliant person
without character is as bad as an ignoramu s, or even more dangerous to the
society. The three Nigerian high public officer holders who have just marked
the attainment of the Golden Year or the Age of Wisdom are not just bright
minds with considerable intellectual accomplishments, they mercifully have
character. Egwu and Akunyili are professional academics, and Okonjo-Iweala was
the student to beat at both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology before rising, purely through merit, to the pinnacle of the World
Bank in record time.
Each of these persons will make a rewarding study in
modesty, humility and simplicity. They have admirably remained their old
selves, unlike most Nigerian high public officers. Okonjo-Iweala is easily the
simplest and most natural minister; she possesses no airs and flaunts no
artificialities. Egwu and Akunyili are two persons you are sure will take your
telephone calls or return them. You need not book an appointment to see any of
them. If only a fraction of political officer holders could borrow a leaf from
these three individuals, the prevailing sense of alienation towards the
leadership, which pervades the land, will be obliterated. Most Nigerians see
their governors, ministers, legislators and other high office holders as their
overlords and conquerors, rather than public servants working assiduously for
the common good and societal upliftment.
The love of education and an impressive sense of
proportion in the style and conduct of political leaders, among others, are the
values widely recognized as being at the heart of the phenomenal progress which
Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and others, have made. The other values are hard
work, a high level of patriotism, an infectious sense of the common good,
loyalty, transparency and trust. These values form what social scientists now
call social capital. In Nigeria, conversely, the absence of these values, which
are universal and not encumbered by geographical and cultural boundaries, is
largely responsible for our development crisis.
At a time it seems there is no light at the end of
the tunnel, there are exemplars in Akunyili, Okonjo-Iweala and Egwu to give
Nigerians a glimmer of hope. These people are all, interestingly, from the
Eastern part of Nigeria. Are they the legendary three wise men from the East
(though the Bible doesn’t state the actual number of Magi who visited Jesus
Christ at his birth with three gifts)? Is it not amazing that despite the
presence of these first class achievers and a critical mass of others like
Festus Odimegwu, Bart Nnaji, Philip Emeagwali, etc, ill-informed elements like
Oladapo Fafowora pontificate there is no presidential material from the East?
Maybe, Fafowora’s presidential materials are intellectual cripples,
squander maniacs, swindlers, moral maggots, polluters of values, buccaneers,
etc. Are these the characters Nigeria will rely on to take it into the 21st
century when our citizens can produce computers, manufacture cars, build ships,
aircraft and provide jobs and dramatically enhance our standards of living so
that Nigeria will not remain a quintessential Third World nation plagued by the
ancient sorrows of history?
• Adinuba, head of Discovery Public
Affairs Consulting, wrote in from Lagos.
