Nigeria and the World
How to Live for Nigeria (2)
ike okonta
It would also be foolish to die for a Nigeria whose fundamental economic institutions, and the ideas that inform them, are dominated by outside players whose sole interest is plunder.
It has become fashionable, since Obasanjo seized power in 1999, for his economic advisers to harangue Nigerians with all sorts of 'new' concepts, theories, and slogans, claiming for them the magical power of transforming the national economy overnight into a roaring ocean of prosperity, Africa's version of the Asian Tigers. The NEEDs document was unfurled with much ado, and strenuous effort was made to present the 'ideas' it claims to be enunciating as 'home-grown.
And yet Babangida made exactly the same claims for SAP. He assured us all that it was a one hundred percent made-in-Nigeria document, that his regime had bowed to the wishes of Nigerians and distanced itself from the much criticised IMF and its sister, the World Bank, and that eminent academics, tuned to the sounds and strains of the local economy, had been pressed into service to craft the SAP document for the benefit of us all.
It eventually turned out that not only was the SAP strategy paper written by the resident World Bank representative in Nigeria at the time, the document was no where tuned to the realities of a local economy still struggling to overcome the dark legacies of five hundred years of slavery and colonialism and the needs of local people shackled by an authoritarian political structure that functioned to reduce them to penurious subjects.
The key props of SAP that, following its forced imposition through the barrel of the gun in 1986, began to reduce the Nigerian economy to a basket case, are unthinking currency devaluation, removal of trade barriers, and massive reduction of subsidies on such strategic social services as education, health care, and sundry amenities. But a far more significant factor in the wrecking of the national economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the political authoritarianism with which Babangida pursued his pet project, and also coerced nation and people to accede to his every whim and caprice.
Babangida was a military dictator without the slightest shred of legitimate claim to power. Internally, his power base was a small band of ambitious Army officers and an assortment of 'cash and carry' academics only too eager to flatter his pretensions to statesmanship. In order to maintain his grip on power, Babangida had to necessarily make common cause with neoliberal western governments and rightwing elements in the international financial institutions that for their part were anxious to force African states, following the radical decolonizing politics and economics of the 1960s and 1970s, back into the Western market system.
While Babangida preached liberalism in the market place, he was imposing dictatorship in the political arena. This vicious commandist politics, alongside the corruption and wanton profligacy that usually attends it, were, in truth, at the heart of SAP's failure. For whenever and wherever people are excluded from the decision and policy-making arena in which their lives can be turned around for the better, disaster is always the result.
I am still studying Professor Charles Soludo's NEEDS document and so shall save detailed and substantive comments on it for later. Still, the process that birthed the document is similar to Babangida's SAP shenanigans in two important respects. One, its key instruments and proposals were not open to debate, and had no input from ordinary Nigerians. Secondly, senior World Bank and IMF officials were conveniently on hand in Abuja the period the document was made public, affording them an opportunity to commend it to Nigerians as an 'intelligent, courageous, and visionary' economic plan.
And yet, in matters economic, I often find myself quoting a line from the immortal Fela: 'food, water, light.' In other words, the challenge facing the Obasanjo government, mindful of the fact that our President is not a particularly bright leader, is to provide the basic infrastructure enterprising Nigerians can then rely on to power a new wave of economic prosperity in the country.
Obasanjo's economic team routinely make reference to Singapore and Malaysia in their policy speeches, slyly linking their project and Obasanjo to the outstanding leaders of those two countries that transformed their countries to world class players. Obasanjo is now going into his sixth year as President, and yet power supply in all parts of the country is epileptic, the road network is a disgrace, the rail lines are still were Frederick Lugard left them before he departed, and pipe borne water remain a pipe dream. The simple matter of mustering the political will necessary to get the refineries working again has eluded him.
To live for Nigeria is to insist that economics, like charity, must begin at home and that it is no use making grand speeches about a grand economic strategy when the fundament on which modern economies turn, ie an efficient tax system on which government relies to fund such public goods as a generous healthcare policy, free and qualitative education for all, and public housing and income support for the disadvantaged, is no where in sight.
Stripped of all cant and sophistry, the Obasanjo economic system as presently constituted amount to this: send in troops to murder young men and rape women in the Niger delta, steal their oil in collaboration with Shell, and realize some twelve billions from the international oil market annually.
One would have thought it would be the easiest of tasks to commit a portion of these billions to repairing our roads, restructuring NEPA into autonomous and efficient regional public-private franchises, and deploying our incredibly talented, educated, and energetic youth into public work programmes to give the nation water, food, and 21st century railway networks. Even in this, our President and his economic 'reformers' have failed the nation. To live for Nigeria is, therefore, to insist that our nation deserve more intelligent and more public-spirited economic managers, and to work to bring them to power.
The cultural and intellectual outlook on Obasanjo's watch is just as dispiriting. It is said that our President is a noted author (I, for my part, confess to finding these books, including 'My Command' unreadable). It is also said that he established a governance and leadership institute in Otta. (I can only wonder what good can come out of an outfit whose founder is linked to a political party that routinely rigs elections).
It has also been reported in the press that my good friend Ad' Obe Obe, our President's special assistant, is working to establish an Obasanjo Presidential Library after the former leaves office in 2007, in the American tradition. I am curious as to where the librarian in charge of this important project will find the books to stock the august shelves of the presidential library.
Between them Babangida, the World Bank, and SAP destroyed Nigeria's thriving book industry in the late 1980s. Two of Africa's greatest cultural icons, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, found working conditions so uncongenial in their native Nigeria that they now reside and work in the United States.
Younger stars such as Ben Okri, Harry Garuba, Olu Oguibe and Ogaga Ifowodo among others, ply their trade outside our shores. The Obasanjo system work to ensure that they remain where they are, to our cultural impoverishment.
To live for Nigeria is to insist that we don't need an Obasanjo Presidential Library for the simple reason that we don't want to immortalize mediocrity, political corruption, and subservience to foreign interests. The Nigeria I know does not want us to die for her. No, she wants us to live to make her beautiful.
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