By Olu Fasan
The strength of any country consists of its natural resources, human resources and capital assets, namely, the economic wealth that delivers higher living standards. The first two determine the third. If a country can successfully harness its natural resources, using its human talent, it will prosper; if it can’t, it will fail.
Now, Nigeria is known worldwide for its abundant human and natural resources, so why is it one of the world’s poorest countries? Why is Nigeria run so badly that it’s utterly dysfunctional, verging on state failure? The commonest answer people give is “leadership”. But Nigerians run world bodies and lead major Western political parties, so why can’t Nigerians run their own country well? How can Nigerians provide leadership abroad, but not at home?
Well, the problem is systemic and structural: Nigeria is systemically wired to fail, and structurally conditioned to produce bad leaders. It is a corrupt, morally bankrupt nation. If values, not self-interest, guide your action, Nigeria is not your natural habitat: you must, if you are public-spirited, look for opportunities abroad. Nigeria’s brightest and best are crowded out by a political system, a political structure and a culture, that reward self-dealing knavery over meritocracy, honesty and integrity. Thus, Nigerians who will never succeed at home go abroad and succeed there. Consequently, Nigeria is brain-drained and utterly denuded, thereby lacking state capacity and true statehood.
Recently, two Nigerians hit the
headlines worldwide for their outstanding feats. One, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
was re-elected unanimously, unopposed, for a second term as Director-General of
the World Trade Organisation, WTO. When she was first elected in 2020, she was
the first African and the first woman to hold the position. So outstandingly
did she perform that no one attempted to deny her a second term by running
against her. The second, Kemi Badenoch, was elected as the first Black leader
of Britain’s Conservative Party, which has produced more prime ministers than
any other party in the UK since the country had its first prime minister in
1721. Given the Conservative Party’s track record of producing prime ministers,
Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, née Adegoke, could become the UK’s first
British-Nigerian prime minister!
Of course, Nigerians and,
indeed, the Nigerian government are quick to celebrate and “claim” any Nigerian
abroad who achieves great feats. But what chances would such achievers have had
at home. For instance, how far would Dr Okonjo-Iweala have gone had she decided
to run for president? How far would Badenoch have gone? Badenoch answered that
question herself in one interview she gave about her childhood: she was born in
the UK but brought to Nigeria by her parents, Femi Adegoke, a doctor, and Feyi,
an academic, for her early education; she later returned to Britain at 16 for
her A levels.
Now 44, Badenoch said she toyed
with the idea of returning to Nigeria at 25 to begin a political career.
However, according to her, a Nigerian political figure “belittled” her, “saying
something about her being a woman and how she would never make it.” Hardly
anyone Nigerian would consider that account outlandish given that there is not
a single female state governor in Nigeria, let alone the remote possibility of
a female president. Yet, if Badenoch became the British prime minister, Nigeria
might declare a public holiday to celebrate her achievement, never mind that
she couldn’t even become a governor in Nigeria!
What about Dr Okonjo-Iweala?
Well, at least she was twice Finance Minister, first under President Olusegun
Obasanjo and then under President Goodluck Jonathan. Even so, Dr Okonjo-Iweala
is a prophet without honour in her own country. In 2018, she launched her book
Fighting Corruption Is Dangerous at the London School of Economics. I attended
the event and wrote about it for the Africa@LSE blog, describing her as
“popular abroad but under-appreciated at home”.
After President Jonathan lost
power in 2015, Okonjo-Iweala became a hate figure in Nigeria. She narrated at
the LSE event how the Buhari administration hounded her and her family, sending
police officers to search her house for “illegal currency holdings” only to
find “bags full of old newspapers.” But when she became the Director-General of
the WTO, Buhari gave her the GCON, Nigeria’s second-highest national award. As
the old saying goes, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan!
That was precisely why Abike
Dabiri, the CEO of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, NiDCOM, tried to reach out
to Kemi Badenoch after her election as the Tory leader and was miffed that
Badenoch snubbed the overture. “It depends on whether she embraces her Nigerian
identity. We reached out to her once or twice, but there was no response. We
don’t force anyone to acknowledge being Nigerian,” Dabiri said peevishly.
But here’s the truth: Badenoch
certainly does not deny her Nigerian lineage, but she’s not proud of the
country, of how the patronage and corruption of Nigeria’s political class have
held the country hostage for years and stunted its development. She said one of
the books that shaped her worldview was Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and
James Robinson, the economics Nobel laureates, and she sees Nigeria’s through
the prism of that book. Whenever any British politician did something that she
considered unacceptable, she would say it’s a “Nigerian thing.” Give her
credit, she ran on the values of truth, honesty and responsibility, and won
over the overwhelmingly White Conservative Party membership. By contrast, such
a commitment to personal ethics is utterly lacking in Nigeria’s self-serving
political class.
Which brings us back to the broader point. Okonjo-Iweala, Kemi Badenoch
and other Nigerians who have achieved great feats abroad have shown that Nigeria’s
problem is not the absence of talent. And those who say it is the absence of
leadership are only half right. Of course, Nigeria has always produced leaders
who put their own self-interest above the common good. But it is a country’s
political system that determines which kind of leaders emerge. Sadly, Nigeria’s
broken political system cannot produce public-spirited leaders because the
system favours the highest bidder and makes it easy for state institutions,
notably the electoral body, judiciary and security agencies, to be captured and
manipulated, resulting in fraudulent elections that produce dubious leaders.
But think about it: Even if an
Okonjo-Iweala or an Akinwumi Adesina, the successful president of the African
Development Bank, AfDB, emerged as Nigeria’s president, would they succeed?
Well, not under the overcentralised political and governance structure that
lacks effective checks and balances and that’s riven by ethnic polarisation and
zero-sum politics. Look no further: the North-South divide and entrenched
vested interests over the tax reform bills expose Nigeria’s systemic and
structural problem.
Yet, the fact that
Okonjo-Iweala, Badenoch, Adesina and other Nigerians succeed abroad is an
astonishing indictment of the Nigerian state. For if Nigeria is so
dysfunctional while its citizens rule the world, what kind of statehood is
that? It’s a failed state!
*Dr.
Fasan is a commentator on public issues
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