Daily Independent Online.
*
Wednesday, July 21, 2004.
Nigeria’s low rating on un human development
index
By
Mike Ikhariale
[email protected]
The United Nations’ annual publication
of the Human Development Index, HDI, is the most scientific method available,
till date, for the measuring of the totality of the developmental strides of
all the countries of the world by ranking them from the most successful to the
least successful. The betterment of the quality of life of the individual is
its primary goal. It is a gamut of statistical data collected and processed on
purely scientific bases that show the relative strengths and weaknesses of the
efforts that each government is making, taking into account the resources and
opportunities available, to improve on the overall wellbeing of their citizens.
And because they are not seriously influenced by subjective criteria like
ideology, religion and race, they have come to be accepted as the most reliable
means of assessing the quality of governance everywhere.
The bad news is that Nigeria, in spite of the
enormity of her material and human resources and the boastful claims by the
government, has repeatedly performed very poorly in its human development.
Because of the vicissitudes of the governmental
problems that have besotted the country, namely, the prolonged imposition of
incompetent and thieving military governments, which in turn led to a series of
debilitating social problems like the frightening level of personal and
material insecurity, the mismanagement of the national economy by national
leaders couple with the resulting collapse of the nation’s social
infrastructure and the dominance of a rogue economy over the legitimate economy,
the quality of life has plummeted.
President Obasanjo ought to be very disappointed
that even under his watch and with all his efforts, the nation continues to
perform so poorly in spite of the fact that it has enjoyed the goodwill of
people who are determined to see to it that Nigeria is safely reinstated into
the comity of forward looking nations, especially with the petro-dollars that
have poured into the national coffers since he assumed office. The woeful
showing by Nigeria on the HDI scale is a reminder that you can take a horse to
the river but you cannot force it to drink; Nigeria has become a huge source of
disappointment to all those who had trusted in her capacity to get up and make
progress due to all that she has going for her - abundant resources. It
is shameful that she is the only oil-exporting nation that has remained glued
to the bottom of the HDI classification as “wretchedly
underdeveloped”.
In 2003, out of about 170 countries assessed by UNDP,
Nigeria came out at the bottom 152. This year, 2004, it came wretchedly out at
151. It must be pointed out that even though it appears to have moved up by one
point, after the ranking is weighted against the fact that some nations dropped
out, the best that could be said is that she stagnated but the truth really is
that she lost some appreciable grounds, relatively. It is like saying that an
aircraft that took eight hours to travel from Lagos to Abuja is faster than a
lorry that took ten hours to make the same distance when it is a fact that
other aircrafts take less than an hour to cover the same distance. It is also
instructive that all the countries ranked below Nigeria are all in African and
most of them have just emerged from destructive wars, like Sierra Leone, the
DRC, Rwanda and Burundi.
Well, given the reality of present day Nigeria, it
could also be argued that she too is just emerging from a war of sorts, if not
still engaged in it, what with the all-pervading instability in the country,
the endless crisis of legitimacy that has dogged the administration, the
dominance of the black market economy and the fact that many citizens are daily
fleeing the intolerable conditions within the country just the same way that
refugees are fleeing countries that are involved in actual war.
So, from this perspective, it is possible to make
some excuses for the country but that however does not extend to exonerate the
government that has the responsibility to turn things around but appears to be
compounding the already bad situation by the style it has adopted which
continues to draw operational inspiration from the defunct military philosophy
of yore. That has led to the
general complaints about its preference for dictatorial tactics over constitutional
procedures. The government has put forward several economic and social reform
agendas but most of them do not sufficiently advance on the wellbeing of the
people. Other idiosyncratic tendencies have also undermined the moral
foundations of some of the reforms. Examples of these tendencies are legion
- from the well-establish disdain of the government for the Rule of Law
through the absence of transparency in policies formulation and implementation
to the strong arm tactics routinely deployed by the authorities in conflicted
arenas like Odi or Warri and elsewhere. The latest of these tendencies is the
Plateau incident where it declared a controversial state of emergency.
The sum total of all aberrational these developments
is that Nigeria remains a country with very low human development records. The
people seem to be mired in the sorry Hobbessian world in which life remains
nasty, brutish and poor. What is far more tragic in all of these is the seemly
obsession by the government to want to deny or obfuscate what are obvious: she
would not agree with TI that corruption is still rampant; would not agree with
labour that the price of petroleum products in the country is not suppose to be
that high given the low wage regime in the country and the fact that unless
deliberately made impossible, the price of oil should be less in Nigeria than
in other countries that do not produce it; would not accept that ASUU, for
example, knows what the universities really need better than the government,
etc.
The result is that despite our enormous resources, we
have become irredeemably poorer, worse off than Ghana, Togo, Cameroon and
several tiny African countries where it matters most - on the human development
index. Going through the current HDI is quite humiliating. That reality ought
to keep our leaders awake all nights. For a nation that is so well endowed to
now be languishing at the bottom of the world’s development ranking
should be a basis for a true national emergency. The challenge that we face is
not that of the government alone but that of every citizen who stands to lose
by the progressive regression of the nation into failed statehood. The
bottomline is that the people must take the lead in ridding itself of all
governments that do not accept the challenge to economically liberate the
nation through the ballot box.
From the look of things, we are not about getting out
of the woods yet. Instead, there are signs that we have not realised that what
we suffer today is the aggregate outcome of the several years of misrule by
past leaders who do not understand the challenge of nation building. They
mistook the nation and her resources for war booty that must be plundered fast.
For example, General Babaginda for eight years did his own shift on this nation
ruination business. During that period all the values of the nation were
unmitigatedly truncated and we were forcibly set on the downhill spiral that
has refused to stop even today. But guess what? Some people are still
clamouring that such a vandal be returned to power, this time through the party
system. That such an evil thought could cross the minds of some Nigerians is a
clear sign that “this house has already fallen” and that what we
are holding on to now are just the empty shell of a long demised entity.
From the UN HDI for the year 2004, it is evident that
Nigeria continues to be one of the mostly unliveable nations on earth. Is that
the nation that is currently embarking on an image refurbishing project? Give
me a break, please; we aren’t going anywhere good yet!
