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.
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
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