You can be forgiven for thinking that poor governance is a Nigerian. Take a walk down any Nigerian street in any town of your choice, and the disregard with which want and degradation traipse around is at odds with the many possibilities that these places speak of. This tension is not helped by the local preference for mental whataboutery and opaque processes. Still, at the intersection of all of these, lies a far bigger problem. Since the start of our current democratic experiment in 1999, corrupt incumbent governments have nearly always been advertised as the economy’s bugbear. Inevitably, large parts of the voting public imagine that the claims, while on the hustings, of incoming parties to fix the economy include recourse to some public accounting once elected.
That this accounting never happens or does so at doses eventually considered ineffective by the electorate, is arguably one reason behind the trust deficits that show up in dwindling voter participation in subsequent elections. If the “deep state” is so ingrained that an incoming government cannot probe malfeasance perpetrated by its predecessor, what is the use of democracy as an aggregator of the popular will?
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“Why make an exception of ‘corrupt practices’?” was one response I got to the former question in a conversation on the state of the nation, last week. “Corruption” cannot be Nigeria’s bane in a way that noticeably shifts our development trajectory off the beaten path unless it is the only “corrupt” country in the world – or the most corrupt of such countries. And we all know that neither of these is not true. So what is the problem with Nigeria?
“A failure to design and implement processes that, anticipating the future direction of the economy, builds and strengthens supply responses in advance.” That was how my interlocutor put it. The loss of efficiency that this failure results in is evident in the United States of America today. As new technologies enabled the U.S. to shift the production possibility curve outwards, an emergent China mopped up manufacturing jobs at the lower end of the manufacturing ladder. Put differently, America became less competitive in those industries, as China already is in industries where cheaper labour costs and improved infrastructure in Southeast Asia have begun to matter.
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Absent intentional management of the process by which economies’ output become more technology-intensive, and economies across the world will simply breed an underclass in the nascent rustbelts that previously hosted much of the traditional manufacturing sector. If the economic confusion that is the MAGA movement in the U.S. today is America’s penance, then the worries about China ageing before it gets rich is the world second largest economy’s moment before its father confessor.
The dilemma for Nigeria is far subtler. Is the state corrupt because it is inefficient? Or is it inefficient because it is corrupt? Whatever the answer to these questions, the outcomes that our economy needs are simple: an educated workforce and infrastructure – social, cultural, and physical – that while guaranteeing optimal political, social, and economic outcomes for the vast majority of the people, boosts the economy’s resilience to both internal and external disruptions.
Corruption will of course impinge on the making of optimal choices along these axes. But the fact that we are not making these choices is the result of two other failures. Arthur C. Clarke identifies these as failures of nerve – the courage to look into the future and prepare the economy for it – and imagination: the ability to think of new ideas from fresh principles.
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Our political elite and the featureless political vehicles that they lead may presently be unwilling to cleanse the local version of King Augeas’s stable, because the processes by which the filth was amassed is one that just about every Nigerian politician is complicit in. Conversely, we will not overcome the failures that we have come to associate with this cohort of the national elite by the expedient of ordering a new political class off Amazon – were this even possible.
But it cannot be that difficult for our politicians and the policymaking cadres that support them to dream big on the economy.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
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