59 years after independence, many Nigerians complain that the country is not where it is. In this interview with SANYA ADEJOKUN, economist, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) deputy governor and presidential candidate in the last election, Dr. Obadiah Mailafia, looks at Nigeria’s growth trajectory since 1960.
NIGERIA is 59 years as an independent country. Do you believe it is a nation yet?
Unfortunately, I cannot answer in the affirmative. I wish I could proudly say that our country is a nation. Unfortunately, it isn’t. We are far from being a nation, like the Swedes, Germans, the French, or the Swazis. And it is not only because we are an ethnically heterogeneous country. There are multiethnic nations across the world. Singapore, for example, is a multiethnic and multi-religious country. But thanks to the nation building vision of their founding-father Lee Kuan Yew, Singaporeans enjoy a common national identity despite their heterogeneity. The same may be said for Ghanaians, Russians and Chinese. A nation is defined as a political community in which the people feel a deep organic and spiritual bond; with a shared feeling of belonging and a sense of a common destiny. The great sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo famously described Nigeria as “a mere geographical expression.” A lot of people criticised him for that statement. After 59 years of independence, we are farther away from being a nation than ever before.
Why is that so?
Several factors account for this unhappy state of affairs. The first is quite simply that throughout our decades of independence, we never really had true nation builders among our leaders. The closest we ever came to having nation builders was a figure such as General Yakubu Gowon. He believed – and still believes – in the concept of Nigerian nationhood. In a manner of speaking, he lives it and dreams it and prays it. If ever someone could ever be described as “the Abraham Lincoln of modern Nigeria”, that person would be General Yakubu Gowon. The idea of the NYSC was his. And so was the original proposal to move the capital from Lagos to the geographical centre of the federation. In all his infrastructure and economic planning policies, he had a national vision for our country. In his own cunning way, Olusegun Obasanjo was to some extent also a nation builder. As for most of our other leaders, they neither understood nation building nor did they ever care about it really.
Second, the removal of history from the school curriculum is one of the greatest follies we have ever committed in our country. The study of history right from elementary school is one of the biggest and most effective instruments for imbuing our young people with a national consciousness. Whoever took that decision ought to be tried for high treason. Teaching history is a means of socialisation and enculturation of the young into the myths that make up a nation. All nations to some extent live by myths. We owe it a duty to our children to teach them the kind of myths that reinforce their confidence about our country and its high and noble destiny. Related to this factor is the third element. We are yet to have a truly great national reconciliation exercise. Our history since 1966 is nothing but a hodgepodge of lies and make-belief. Many of our leaders were part of the so-called “Class of ‘66”. They were among the direct actors and dramatis personae in that sordid, macabre drama of violence, blood and death. There are wounds that only truth, justice, recompense and genuine reconciliation will heal. So long as we prefer to bury reality in a dung heap of historical lies, so will nationhood, solidarity and genuine amity continue to elude us. The fourth element is what I call the decade-long civil war that wrecked such untold havoc on our mental psyche. Boko Haram was invented as a weapon of political destabilisation by some of our political elites. Those same elites have also cultivated the murderous herdsmen militias that a committing genocide throughout the Middle Belt and beyond. They have killed men, women, children, the elderly and infirm in a hideous and indiscriminate manner. Some of these people are barbarous aliens from our poverty-stricken neighbours. Our political elites have imported them as armed militias in a bid to re-order our country and to change its demographic geomorphology in line with their own wicked and evil plans. Our leaders fail to realise that man is a moral being. Once you destroy the moral fabric of society there is no end to the evil that takes over. As a consequence, Nigerians feel that they cannot trust their leaders and they cannot feel a sense of loyalty or belonging to a so-called federal entity that behaves like a rapacious beast rather than an instrument of the servant state that caters for their welfare and security.
On October 1, 1960, Nigeria was almost at par with India, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Singapore and a few others that now appear far ahead. Why was this?
That one is a long story. You are not quite accurate. Nigeria was in fact ahead of some of those countries you mentioned. According to the accounts of the great Austrian-American economist Wolfgang Stolper, who was an adviser during our first National Development during the years 1959-62, our country was well ahead of Malaysia, Singapore and India. Stolper met everybody who mattered in the government and economic planning. He rated such people as Simeon Adebo, Ojetunji Aboyade, Ali Akilu, Abdul Aziz Atta, Sam Aluko, Jerome Udoji and Pius Okigbo as world-class technocrats.
Unfortunately, today, we are nowhere compared to those countries. They have made such giant strides in economic and social development while we have, as a matter of fact, regressed. As of today, our GDP stands at about US$500 billion while our per capita income is US$2,049. Our average life-expectancy is 53 years while our human development index (HDI) is a low 0.532 (157th out of 198 countries). Contrast our position with that of tiny Singapore with a population of 5.6 million. They have a GDP of US$372 billion and a per capita income of US$65,627 and a very high HDI of 0.932 (9th position out of 198 countries). Singapore has an average life-expectancy of 84.8 years. Its physical infrastructures are world-class while ours are relatively primitive. As you probably heard, in 2018 we overtook India as the world capital of poverty. India’s poor are now about 70 million out of a population of 1.3 billion (about 18 per cent of the population) while our poor number some staggering 87 million, representing 45 per cent of our population of 198 million. There is no magic about these development outcomes. The emerging economic powers invested in human capital, skills, infrastructures and agriculture. They built an eco-system that allowed their people to flourish in atmosphere of peace and harmony. They were also relatively stable politically.
Brazil, for example, initiated an ambitious poverty-alleviation programme first under President Hernando Cardoso and then under the more radical socialist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Corruption exists in all countries, but countries such as Indonesia ensured that the money stayed at home. My friend Peter Lewis, Dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC did a brilliant study of Nigeria and Indonesia. Our two countries started with similar initial conditions but diverged widely apart because of the bad policy choices we made. Like us, Indonesia underwent the tragedy of civil war. We similarly experienced corrupt military tyrannies. What made all the difference, according to Lewis, is that the corrupt military tyrants in Indonesia invested in their people and ploughed back their stolen wealth into the economy. By contrast, we created a petro-dollar rentier state where the bulk of the money was squirreled abroad. We simply had no mind to build an inner-directed and inner-propelled developmental state that could bring hope to the teeming millions of our benighted people. To echo William Shakespeare, the fault is not in our star but in ourselves. We are a failed country.
At the beginning there was development plans. Would you regard jettisoning of this as a reason the country is still at this low stage of development?
Yes, indeed, you are correct. But I wouldn’t go so as to say that development planning has been the sole determinant of economic progress among the more advanced emerging economies. But it has been a very critical factor. I don’t where we got the ideas that development planning is bad and that all we need are so-called “rolling plans” and mid-term expenditure frameworks. The history of planning in Nigeria goes back to colonial times. Before independence, the departing British brought in economists from the World Bank and the United States to assist in designing Nigeria’s first five-year economic development covering the years 1962 to 68. We’ve had altogether four national plans since independence, the other three being the Second National Development Plan 1970 to 74, the Third National Development Plan 1975 to 1980 and the Fourth National Development Plan 1981 to 85.
In addition, there has been the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), which, strictosensu, is not an economic plan, but a general overview of economic goals and principles. Experts will continue to debate which, if any, among those plans was successful. It is generally agreed that the Second National Development Plan was among the most successful. It was successful because it was masterminded and implemented by great men such as Obafemi Awolowo and Professor Adebayo Adedeji, with help of technocrats such as Allison Ayida and Phillip Asiodu who were eminent economists in their own right. In 1985 the Ibrahim Babangida military administration were persuaded by the Bretton Woods institutions to jettison planning altogether.
Many of our so-called economists who bought into the fraud were in no position to know that works such as those by Naomi Caiden and Aaron Wildavsky, Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries, were really sponsored stratagems to ultimately ridicule planning in developing countries and to discourage it. Those were also the years of the Cold War. This is not to by any means idealise planning. 
Economic development planning cannot be a panacea to solve all economic ills. But I see it as a discipline and tool for resource and political mobilisation that enabled leaders and the nation’s economic managers to focus on their long-term policy choices. Economic planning also helps to minimise the rampant policy inconsistencies and instability that accompanies regime changes. Contrary to what many suppose, the emerging countries that have enjoyed accelerated growth and structural transformation have precisely those countries that never jettisoned economic development plans. These include: China, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Those countries have persisted with economic development in disregard to pressure from foreign powers. And the results have been salutary. India recently modified its national planning framework. But they are still very much committed to long-term planning. I heard some noises recently that Minister of Finance, Planning of Budget is thinking of developing a long-term perspective plan for the next 30 years. I warmly welcome that development.
Is it proper to refer to Nigeria as a federal state?
Well, I think we are a sort of a federal state, at least according to the letter of our constitution, if not its spirit. We have an over-centralised federation, which in many ways defeats the real desire and objective of our ethnic nationalities. We have inherited this over-centralised structure from the military era. However, I must point out that those who badger about “true federalism” don’t know what they are talking about. There are forms of federalism. They vary in structure and constitutional forms and practises, from USA to Canada, Russia, Ethiopia Australia, India and Switzerland. My point of departure is that every federal structure should reflect the deepest desires of its constituent ethnic communities, their historical experience, temperament and unique national conditions. We need a federal system that accords with the deepest yearnings of our people. I believe that Nigerians want to continue to live together. But they also desire autonomy and relative self-determination, devoid of an overbearing centre. The constitution that we inherited from the military in 1999 is a 419 contraption. It was prepared by a few jurists from one part of the country. They implanted into the document all sorts of inequities, egregious nonsense and patent jurisprudential mischief. To the extent that it was not the outcome of “We, the people”, it is an illegitimate document. One thing we Nigerians don’t understand is that the best constitutions are written not by lawyers but by political philosophers. We need a new constitution written by our best political-philosophical minds. Leave it to lawyers, and they will inject all sorts of inconsistencies and ambiguities, all for the purpose of buttering their own bread. Those who know the law and nothing else can be very dangerous people!
How should we properly restructure the country to function properly?
Please, allow me to say that I am not among those who are using the idea of “restructuring” merely to bludgeon one party of the country against another. The condition of our country today makes it clear that we have no future as a people unless we face squarely the arduous task of re-engineering our federation. We must be transparent and honest about the process of political reform. We must agree on basic principles: the rights of nationalities, the principle of self-determination and a referendum process that ensures that ethnic nationalities can join whichever region they so wish. We must dust-up several documents that we have buried under the carpet for our selfish and narrow-minded interests, prominently the report of the last political confab and the recommendations of the Willinks Commission on Minorities. In principle, we cannot go back to the tripodal structure we had in 1960. The great doyen of colonial administration at Oxford, Dame Margery Perham, described our federation at the time of independence as an “unstable tripod” which was doomed to collapse. The North, as you know, comprised two-thirds of the landmass of federation, thereby defeating one of the principles of federalism, which asserts that no one region should be so dominant as to threaten the others. For my part, I’m in favour of no more than 5 regions: West, North, Middle Belt, East and Delta. I am also in favour of unicameral legislature together with a modified parliamentary system.
What lessons do you think we have refused to learn as a country; how and why?
It was the German philosopher, Hegel, who opined that the only lesson history teaches is that people never learn from history. There are, in my opinion, five lessons that we have failed to learn: (i) bad policies will simply produce bad outcomes; (ii) No society can ever transcend the level and mindset of its ruling elites, and if you are ruled by monkeys you will sooner or later become a land of monkeys and even the best among you will begin to mimic the behaviour of monkeys for the sake of self-preservation; (iii) our federation, as currently constituted, is programmed to fail, while the secular process of decline will continue until we take steps to re-engineer our system; (iv) without peace and security, nothing good can be achieved; (v) the whole world knows that our country in its current trajectory will eventually disintegrate if we continue on this self-same path of folly. We have refused to learn because we do not have righteous and enlightened leaders who are God-fearing and who are competent enough to do the right thing. As a society we also lack the institutional mechanism to internalise and promote collective learning in all we do.
Why is the leadership question intractable?
Economists and social scientists have described a phenomenon that we term “path-dependence”. It is in the nature of human societies that once they set upon a path they tend to continue along those paths. It seems to confirm one of Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion in physics that a body continues in a state of motion until an opposite force either brings it to a halt or forces it to change course. The same is true of leadership traditions. Once countries tend to settle for certain social groups from which leadership recruitment is made, they would tend to perpetuate that system. This is true of democracies old and new: Britain, Germany, France and so on. It’s even true of Russia, where they have never known anything like a liberal leader from Ivan the Terrible to Tsar Alexander and Vladimir Putin. Liberalism in Russian political culture is interpreted as weakness, which is why they quickly got rid of the hapless but well-meaning Mikhail Gorbachev. Nigeria has never had a first-rate leader. We’ve had, at best very mediocre people. The kingmakers and godfathers always prefer low-grade people because they believe they are more malleable. They are suspicious of anyone that seems to have a mind of his own. It has been our greatest undoing. The most outstanding leader who was denied the high magistracy was the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo. What we don’t realise is that the most advanced countries are also unashamedly elitist. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was a beautiful mind himself and did not feel threatened by equally gifted people. In fact, he surrounded himself with brilliant minds. Another thing we fail to realise is that no society can grow above the level and mentality of its leaders. The godfathers and self-appointed kingmakers have also ensured that politics remains a prohibitively expensive business. To run for the presidency, you would need a minimum of N10 billion. You would either have to be a thief or a robber baron or a friend of both. And even when they finance you, it goes without saying that you become forever beholden to them. The price you have to pay is to open up the treasury and NNPC for them to loot. You will also have to bend the arc of the commanding heights of the economy to feed their parasitical proclivities. And if I may quote the great Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore: “A nation is great not by its size alone. It is the will, the cohesion, the stamina, the discipline of its people and the quality of their leaders which ensure it an honourable place in history.”
Is there any synergy between the political class and economic elite? How and why?
Yes, there is an apparent synergy between the political class and the economic elites. But as you know, there is good synergy and bad synergy. Most of what goes for synergy between them has been of the negative variety. The biggest industrial and oil moguls work through a system of political patronage. Businesspeople support politicians financially during elections and in exchange regulatory monopolies are designed to satisfy them. They also receive unfair concessions, including oil blocks and the likes. Some of the privatisation programmes that were implemented achieved unsatisfactory results because of such game-theoretic realities. Another thing we have failed to understand is that you need to shield the higher civil service from external commercial pressure if they are to perform their task in the overall common good. In countries such as South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, they started off with a highly merit-based civil based on competitive examination. Japan set the pattern for that; having copied the system the Chinese that had operated a highly advanced bureaucratic mandarinate since medieval times. To this day, competition into the Chinese civil service is extremely fierce. Only the very best make it into the civil service. India maintains the same tradition. The higher civil service in those countries enjoy prestige, tenure and good emoluments. They are also shielded from undue political pressures and from baneful influences of corrupt businesspeople. This allows them to operate as a technocracy that designs and implement public policies with purely technical considerations in mind. They also have the leeway to give sound professional advice to the politicians.
The citizenship issue in the past and now?
The concept of citizenship since Aristotle has been a binary one. You cannot have citizens without the rulers. It is essentially about rulers and the ruled. It is also about the social contract. In modern political theory the state is essentially a contract that communities enter into with each other to surrender their sovereignty in exchange for protection from the vagaries of nature and man. It is a two-way street. Citizens and rulers have duties as well as obligations. As citizens, we have a duty to pay our taxes, to rise to the defence of our country in the event of war and to perform other civic obligations as are expected of us. The rulers, on their part, have a duty to govern with fairness and justice and to be accountable to the people for whatever they do. A government that fails to protect its citizens and to secure the common peace has ipso facto failed in its most elementary duties. A government that perverts the course of law and public administration can no longer earn the loyalty of its citizens. Citizenship in Nigeria today is under severe threat. Through the excuse of our so-called “porous borders”, millions of illegal immigrants have been allowed into a country, a good number of them bearing arms. They have killed and maimed and committed rapine. We do not even know who is a citizen anymore. Anybody can walk across the border and they can lay claim to rights more than you and me. And unfortunately, some of the policies government is pushing through – Ruga and the bill to take-over all our rivers, waterways and lakes are rightly or wrong perceived as dispossessing indigenous populations of their ancestral patrimony. Those of us who speak the Hausa language know that some of these people are not Nigerians. It happens also that our national passport is the easiest to obtain in the world. Many people committing crimes abroad claim to be “Nigerians” but most are only operating with passports illegally acquired from our interior ministry. The genuine Nigerian citizen has become an alien in his own fatherland.
Why the leadership inertia to the critical issues that trigger threats of dismemberment of the country.
This is a rather difficult one. Somehow one would have to perform the psychic exercise of entering into the minds of those who are ruling us to understand how their mind works. It is absolutely true that our beloved country is hanging on a dangerous precipice. The anger and bitterness is unprecedented. But I think the people concerned don’t give a damn. They reason that because they have monopoly of the use of violence and have absolute control over the institutions and machinery of government, they can do as they please. The alarming interference with the independence of the judiciary is perhaps the most dangerous of these trends. We also watch with dismay as National Broadcasting Commission is bullying people and destroying the foundations of free speech that are so central to our democratic norms. The kind of atmosphere of sheer lunacy that we are seeing is unimaginable. Channels TV, for example, prides itself in being “the best TV station in Nigeria” for the better part of a decade. But they are actually among the worst. They operate by pretending to be “neutral” when what they are in fact projecting is a kind of amoral complicity with murder and genocide in our country. To assert professional neutrality in the face of the killing of innocent, defenceless people is not only unconscionable, it is evil. This phenomenon arises from the very unhealthy atmosphere that has overshadowed political existence in our country today.
Is it because of class interest or hegemony?
I would say more hegemony than class. A section of our elites have taken it upon themselves to re-imagine our country in the image of a backward ideology. People who do such things actually deliberately encourage economic stagnation like they did in Sudan until recently. The logic is simple. People can only rebel when things are looking up, not when they have been reduced to Point Zero. So they deliberately kill the economy, allow illegal aliens infiltrate our country, turn a blind eye to rural bandits, and allow chaos to prevail. It is either they allow it or the unable to do anything about it. This is why they describe horrendous murders in the anodyne terms of “farmers-herders clashes”. Where are the clashes when well-armed bandits descend on a poor defenceless peasant with his wife and children in Zamfara or Adara land? The truth is that they continue to rule through fear and intimidation. Anybody who dares to criticise them becomes an “enemy” of the state. Blinded by power, they do not know that our country is bleeding to death.
Which among the gains and losses for Nigeria as a federation in 59 years, surpasses the other so far; and why?
We lost almost three million people during the tragic civil war. It was an unnecessary. If the highly overrated Dim Emeka Odimegwu-Ojukwu had not been such an arrogant fool; and if General Gowon had exercised more restraint and more forbearance we would not have had to go to war. They were relatively young men. Gowon was barely 32 and Ojukwu was barely a year older. They were mere kids playing with big dangerous toys. We lost so much treasure by way of capital and blood. The wounds continue to rankle. According to some estimates, out of the US$1 trillion made in the last 40 years, some US$400 million has either been stolen our expended in questionable projects. We have robbed future generation of infrastructures, world-class high speed trains, good highways and outstanding universities that could compete with the best in the world. We also lost the Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon out of our greed and incompetence. Bakassi has been our biggest foreign policy debacle since independence. We have lost the chance to make ours a great nation. We have become a beggarly nation – a byword for mediocrity, folly and collective failure. Our national image stands among the lowest of all the countries of the earth, right next to Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti. How are the mighty fallen!
