Why Nigeria Is Worsening Under President Tinubu?

 By Mike Ikhariale

Nigeria has arrived at a very sorry pass, far worse than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. The title of our discussion today is a rehash of our earlier evaluation of the pitiable condition of Nigeria which was itself an adaptation of the title of the seminar work by the intellectual duo of Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, which they aptly entitled Why Nations Fail.

*Tinubu

The economic quagmire which the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has stampeded Nigerians into is the classical definition of a failing state, where the gov­ernment and its organs become ethically and conceptually handicapped and become incapable of performing the hallowed du­ties of government with patriotic, pruden­tial and analytical dispositions.

Everything which the administration has attempted so far in their misguided avowal to stem the prevailing tide of na­tional collapse, especially in the economic and social cohesion fronts, has only wors­ened the status quo. In other words, the na­tion has slipped into a free fall where each succeeding day is worse than the previous one and where common sense seems to have taken flight of the governing process.

Consider the fact that this administra­tion’s media/propaganda team is the largest that this country has ever assembled, even during the bitter Civil War. Yet, the regime still suffers from the lowest public reputa­tional standing compared to all the previous post-independent governments, military or civil, combined. The country has fallen to the ground floor as the people are harsh­ly immiserated by the negative economic effects of the two visible policy initiatives of the government, namely fuel subsidies removal and the devaluation of the Naira.

The emphasis of our theme today is that no leader, including Tinubu, who comes to power in Nigeria, no matter how deter­mined under the prevailing political sys­tem that undergirds the polity and its flawed constitutional foundations, can go beyond the ceiling set by the fundamentally flawed system; by now, all the arrogance and bra­vado that heralded the Tinubu presidency must have fizzled out and replaced by very sneaky humiliation. We could have seen this coming when he refused to debate his manifesto but rather fanned out serious di­rect policy questions to his equally bemused aides. Those were clearly unmistakable signs of looming disasters that we ignored.

The central thesis of Why Nations Fail (2012) is that “economic growth and prosper­ity are associated with ‘inclusive’ economic and political institutions, while ‘extractive’ institutions typically lead to stagnation and poverty”. Nations can, through deliberate reversal of policies, actually steer them­selves out of the path of disaster by adopt­ing inclusive and socially justifiable policies which the larger population can readily key into. That sense of openness and verifiable accountability (constitutionalism, free press and the rule of law) may well be the antidote for this national terminal ailment.

The authors clearly identify two glaring patterns that determine whether or not a nation shall fail: There is the “extractive conditions” which set in motion a degen­erative vicious circle in which, through a combination of institutional and deliber­ative human factors, nations stumble from one failure to the other until the national substratum is completely destroyed and the sovereign edifice crumbles into widespread insecurity and uncontrollable chaos. Here, the leadership exceptionally gets richer while the general population miserably grow poorer; more billionaires even if the nation itself becomes the World’s Poverty Capital.

There is yet the other positive pattern which they identified as the “inclusive con­ditions” in which a ‘virtuous circle’ is in­stituted which then generates incremental increases in the overall wellbeing of the na­tion, where material satisfaction, security and progress are institutionalized and any aberrational developments are promptly and fairly rectified. In the former setting, government is generally undemocratic, non-inclusive and arbitrary while in the lat­ter, government is basically inclusive, plu­ralistic and determined to enthrone a level playing field with little or no restrictions.

The only way we can understand and be­gin to explain the kind of demonic pensions that kleptocratic Nigerian politicians award to themselves at great costs to the overall wellbeing of the commonwealth and the huge salaries and “allowances” that they shamelessly appropriate to themselves through the national “budgets”. This un­bridled gluttony was bound to bankrupt the nation sooner or later. This economic vandalism was erected on extractive and degenerative principles, namely a nation programmed to be corruptly eaten up, first by the colonialists and later by the indige­nous politicians, until fully exhausted and then falls into national failure which is where we are today.

The Nigerian State was not built on an integrative platform and, like most other colonial possessions, it was made to be exactly what Acemoglu and Robinson call the ‘Extractive State’ in contradistinction with the “Inclusive State.” Whereas the ex­tractive state operates an extractive econ­omy facilitated by extractive institutions, the inclusive State uses inclusive state in­stitutions to facilitate the evolution of an inclusive economy. For example, devaluing the Naira in order to enrich the government and impoverish the citizens in the process is simply “extractive.”

What we are dealing with is a situation in which the elite casually sit down, like buc­caneers, to fashion out insidious “kill and divide” exploitative policies even if they know that such would certainly wreck the economy, a wicked policy connivance to loot and go.

Ask any Nigerian about the condition of governance today. He will unhesitating­ly tell you that all previous governments were better than the recent ones in a clearly discernible degenerative order. He will tell you that the colonial government was bet­ter than the independent governments; that civilian governments are worse than mili­tary juntas; that the Obasanjo government in the second republic was worse than the Abacha military regime, that the Jonathan regime was worse than both the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua concluding with assertion that Tinubu is far worse than Buhari! When such a degenerative ranking logic is what defines a nation’s path to governance, it should be no rocket science to see that it is heading for failure.

Last week, the venerable Bishop Mat­thew Kukah of the Sokoto Catholic dioceses in his characteristic manner made a state­ment that is very true but which somehow astounded many Nigerians when he de­clared that the problem of Nigeria is that of “accidental” leadership counting from Obasanjo, through Yar’Adua, Jonathan, Bu­hari and finally Tinubu. He implied that they were all not conceptually prepared for productive national leadership.

Tinubu’s “Emilokan” claim suggests that he has been waiting for a while for his turn but on the very first day on that same job, he bungled any immediate prospects of success and since that day has been on an unending task of damage control. Whatever was his plans, he certainly did not reckon with the fact that he was only coming into a system that had been programmed to fail.

Today, Tinubu has made the business of governance so unenviable that it has be­come doubtful if he can ever leave behind a truly viable country. That is why we should start rethinking the prevailing institutional arrangement that was imposed on us and begin to think of rebuilding Nigeria on a systemic clean slate. What we have now can only perpetuate State Capture under which political buccaneers corruptly ac­quire power while strenuously avoiding the responsibilities of governance in pursuit of individual pleasure and hedonism because the system inherently avoids leadership ac­countability to the People.

Otherwise, you would expect a man who assumed office when the scepter of hun­ger was already starring the nation in the face to now be telling us how many millions of acres he has opened up for the massive food production and the expected harvest. Instead, they are shamelessly borrowing foreign money to import food for local con­sumption. If that does not sound like an “extractive” governance, nothing else will.

*Ikhariale, a professor of Law, is a commentator on public issues